Bill Gates the philanthropist, Microsoft founder and the world’s richest man, has a lot more money than you, but you knew that. What you probably didn’t know is exactly how much more, since numbers like “a billion” can be hard to picture.
In our infographic, the $79.2 billion dollar man’s fortune is represented by 90 stacked gold coins. The typical American’s net worth?$44,900. That’s represented as .0005 of a coin, or five hundred-thousandths. We represented it by the tiny gold speck in the lower right-hand corner of the image. You can see the relative size of your fortune, assuming you’re average, by clicking on the infographic to expand it, but in reality your pile would be so small you’d need a microscope to see it, even with your browser zoomed all the way in.
Income Inequality
There are 1,645 billionaires in the world who aren’t as rich as Bill Gates, but are probably managing to scrape by anyway. There are plenty of others whose net worth is, say, in the $900 millions. In fact there are over 16 million millionaire households in the world today. It’s estimated that by 2016 the richest 1% will control more than half the world’s wealth, growing their net worth by almost 50% in the past four years.
And Still Growing…
Bill Gates had given away $30 billion to charity by May of 2014. Through his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he plans to eradicate polio. Why then does his fortune continue to grow if he’s doing so much charity work? Chalk it up to his wise investment strategy. In 2013 alone, his private investment firm added almost $16 billion to his net worth.
Sources
- The World’s Billionaire’s – Forbes.com
- America’s middle class: Poorer than you think – CNN.com
- The 1% will own most of world’s wealth by 2016 – CBSNews.com
- Millionaire population soars to 16 million households – CNBC.com