Bill Gates Gave Away $6 Billion This Week In Bid To Get Off World’s Richest People List

Bill Gates has given away $6 billion this week as part of his bid to get off the list of the world’s richest people. 

Gates recently vowed to give away ‘virtually all’ of his wealth in the future, having pledged to give a casual $20 billion to The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation this month. 

And it seems he's making fast work of his promise, with filings from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showing the Microsoft founder donated close to $5.2 billion worth of stock in Canadian National Railway Co to his charitable foundation this week.

Filings from Friday 22 July also show that Gates then gave away $995 million worth of shares in Deere & Co. to the foundation on Thursday. 

According to Bloomberg, he is now worth $112 billion – behind Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault and India's Gautam Adani. 

Gates recently revealed he wants to give his wealth away to knock himself off the infamous Forbes Rich List. 

In an interview with Forbes, he explained how he fully intends to follow the ‘give while you live’ principle popularised by businessman and philanthropist Chuck Feeney, who co-founded airport retailer Duty Free Shoppers with Robert Miller back in 1960.  

Determined to follow a similar path, Gates has vowed to relinquish his rich list spot, with Forbes noting earlier this month how, thanks to his most recent donation, he ‘drops one spot to number five in the world, with a net worth of some $102 billion sitting outside the foundation’. 

Gates said: “I'll get myself out of the highly visible part of the list with just say two more gifts of this magnitude. I would get myself off the top part of the list.  

“Getting all the way off the list, that's going to take me a while, but my direction of travel is clear.”  

According to Forbes, the $20bn donation brings Bill and Melinda Gates’ lifetime giving amount to $55 billion, which makes them the ‘biggest philanthropists of all time’ – moving ahead of Warren Buffet, who has given away $48 billion, most of it also to the foundation.  

The pair plan to up the foundation spending by 50 percent, to $9bn a year, by 2026, with a project spend between now and then of $41.4bn. 

“This is going to supercharge or accelerate, charge, turbocharge basically all the work that we do," Gates said.