Billionaire Bill Gates Has 69% of His Foundation’s $49 Billion Portfolio Invested in 3 Phenomenal Stocks

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Bill Gates has sat near the top of the list of the wealthiest people in the world for decades. The Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) co-founder became the first-ever centibillionaire in 1999, 18 years before anyone else would reach that level of wealth. Around that time, he and then-wife Melinda established a non-profit aimed at improving healthcare and reducing poverty around the world.

Over the last 25 years, Bill Gates has donated much of his wealth to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and he plans to donate almost the entirety of his assets to charity over the course of his life.

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He isn’t alone in that pledge to give away much of his wealth. His friend Warren Buffett is also a major contributor to non-profits, including the Gates Foundation. Buffett even served as a trustee for the foundation until 2021, likely influencing how the trust invests its assets.

The trust’s equity portfolio is currently valued at around $49 billion. Over two-thirds of that amount, about 69%, is invested in just three stocks. Let’s take a closer look at them.

Gates himself is one of the biggest donors to the foundation, so it’s probably not a surprise that one of the trust’s biggest holdings are the Microsoft shares he regularly transfers to the non-profit. Gates’ last major donation was in 2022 and worth about $20 billion. It appears that a large chunk of that donation came in the form of Microsoft shares, because the trust added about 38 million shares to its portfolio in 2022, worth about $8.9 billion at the time.

The trust still had around 35 million shares as of the end of the 2024 second quarter. Those shares are worth about $15 billion today. Microsoft’s stock has been on a tear since that donation in July 2022. Shares are up roughly 65% since the start of that month, and there’s a clear reason why. Microsoft has been able to capitalize on the growing amount of spending on artificial intelligence.

It was an early investor in OpenAI, a pioneer in generative artificial intelligence. That made Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure, the top choice for developers looking to use new large language models to create applications. Microsoft’s also been able to incorporate OpenAI’s model into its own AI agent, dubbed Copilot, which has proven popular across its portfolio of enterprise software solutions.

As a result, Microsoft has seen Azure revenue accelerate over the last two years, and its enterprise software business continues to produce more and more cash. The future looks bright, too. Management expects Azure revenue to accelerate in 2025 as more of its capital investments in new data center capacity come online.

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