Bill Gates Would Be Worth Over $1.4 Trillion if He Kept 45% of Microsoft
Bill Gates is worth 8 times less today than if he had kept his 45% stake in Microsoft from after the IPO in 1986. Bill Gates has $163 billion in net worth. If Bill Gates did not sell shares during the IPO he would have had 49% of Microsoft.
Bill Gates has been selling his shares since the late 1990s and this accelerated when he stepped down as CEO in 2000. Bill Gates diversified and had a lot of Railroads, Berkshire Hathaway and other stocks. Bill and Melinda also put about $75 billion in the Gates Foundation.
When Microsoft was incorporated in 1981, Steve Ballmer owned 8% of the company and Gates owned 49%. In 2003, Ballmer sold 39.3 million Microsoft shares for about $955 million, reducing his ownership to 4%.
This shows that for billionaires and future trillionaires the key is to own a lot of a supergrowth big tech company.
Larry Ellison owns 42.9% of Oracle and 1.4% of Tesla. Oracle is worth $460 Billion. Oracle has more than tripled in the last three to four years. Oracle is in fourth place in cloud computing. If Oracle continues to improve in Cloud computing then Oracle could get up to $2.2 trillion and Ellison could become a trillionaire.
Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX
SpaceX valuation at $210B (more than Airbus and Boeing). SpaceX will get Starship reusable working in 2025 despite FAA delays. Starship will enable 10x-1000X the flight capacity. There will be giant Version 3 Starlink satellites. The new Starlink dish factory is operational and will scale to millions of dishes per month. Direct to cellphone will be operational next year a hundred million cellphones and soon for a billion cellphones. Starshield will have 1 million secure comms with $20k/year-100k per year service. This year $6-8 billion per year in revenue with 3-4 million subscribers. SpaceX Starlink will rapidly go to 40 million subscribers and this is $80 billion per year in revenue and $70 billion per year in profit. If this is priced at a 30 PE (price earnings multiple) and that is $2.1 trillion in value. 50PE not impossible. Starlink at $2 Trillion would make Elon Musk a trillionaire just from his SpaceX shares.
Tesla has robotaxi day Oct 10, 4680 batteries are finally ramping. Existing Factories have capacity to make 3-4 million cars per year. Get new v2.5 car out and built with extra capacity. Second megapack factory near completion. 120 GWH of megapacks is $30B per year in revenue and $10B in profit. FSD version 13 should make FSD feature complete and near robotaxi quality. just increased FSD adoption 50% globally new and used cars is 5 million FSD subscriptions and purchases., $40-70 billion in net income in 2025-2026. $2-3 trillion in valuation. About $400B-500B for Elon.
XAI releases Grok 3 at the end of this year. It will be OpenAI GPT5 competitive and will generate revenue via X and Tesla products. XAI at OpenAI valuation is $150B. Elon net worth contribution $100B.
X has 38 states ready for payment processing. 12 more states to launch an improved version of Paypal for 600M-1B customers by 2025-2026. 10X bigger than Paypal and more financial services. Plus X has 25% of XAI. X also will leverage the billions of Starlink cellphone and other customers. X also $100B+total value. About $50B for Musk.
Late 2025-2026 seems likely for Musk to be a trillionaire.
If SpaceX eventually is making a trillion dollars in revenue from 20-30% of global communications and from dominating air cargo then it could become valued at $30 trillion. This would make Musk worth $15 trillion.
If Tesla with a future with robotaxi, robotruck and teslabot plays out then Tesla could be worth $40 trillion and Elon would have about $10 trillion of net worth from Tesla.