You might best remember Bill Gates for his
amazing chair leaping skills.
If not, maybe you know him as the founder
of Microsoft a position which happens to have
made him the second richest person in the
world.
And while some people have a lot of money,
Gates' fortune is something else, sitting
at $103 billion as of 2019.
To get an idea of just how much money Gates
has, Business Insider calculated that his
salary per second would be $380, pointing
out that it literally wouldn't be worth his
time to pick up a $100 bill lying on the ground.
Using that figure, which was calculated based
on how much his wealth increased between 2018
and 2019, Gates' salary would come out to
about $1.37 million an hour, and about $32.8
million a day.
For further perspective, the same article
states that the average American spending
one dollar would be the equivalent of Gates
spending $1.06 million.
If he wrote you a million-dollar check it
would feel like a collect phone call to him,
and he could write million-dollar checks every
day for the next 285 years before running
out of money.
He could also give everyone in the world $10
and still have over $30 billion left over.
Don't get the wrong idea about Gates, though,
because the guy is about as charitable as
the mega-rich can get.
He has donated over 27 percent of his net
worth to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
which comes out to a total of about $35.8
billion.
That's more money than any human has ever
donated to charity.
According to its website, the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation focuses on:
"...improving people's health and giving them
the chance to lift themselves out of hunger
and extreme poverty."
So how exactly is Gates working to improve
health and decrease poverty around the world?
Well… with toilets.
According to the World Health Organization,
around 2.3 billion people lack access to basic
sanitation and plumbing.
That's a lot of human waste that isn't being
properly disposed of, and it can cause some
very serious issues contaminating soil and
bodies of water which might be used for drinking
or bathing, which can spread all sorts of
lethal diseases like dysentery and cholera.
It's a huge logistical problem, and obviously
it's not very glamorous either.
"The waste here is not processed, it's still
going to get out into the community.
They smell… terrible."
That's where Gates' foundation comes in.
So far he's invested $200 million and pledged
another $200 million to help solve the problem,
while the charity has also worked to develop
technology that could deliver sanitary waste
disposal to impoverished communities around
the world.
Take the Nano Membrane Toilet for example,
which is made possible by a $700,000 grant
from the Gates Foundation, and is currently
being tested in Ghana.
In truly futuristic fashion, this toilet is
able to treat human waste without external
energy or water.
Solid waste is separated, diced and incinerated,
and liquid waste is purified into water than
can be used for crops.
Of course, Gates spends his money on more
than just toilets.
The foundation has spent more than $2 billion
on eradicating malaria, and around another
$100 million on attempting to get rid of polio
and Ebola.
Then there's the $2.5 billion he and wife
Melinda have given to the GAVI Alliance, which
works to improve access to vaccinations in
the world's poorest countries.
Gates also has his own scholarship program,
which has given away more than $1.6 billion
since 1999, has thrown another $100 million
at malnutrition in Nigeria, and has even worked
to improve "time poverty", the idea that unpaid
work robs people of their potential.
Last but not least, they launched The Giving
Pledge in 2010, encouraging billionaires to
give away the majority of their fortunes.
Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and over 150 others
have signed on, promising to pledge over half
a trillion dollars in donations by 2022.
Obviously nobody's perfect, and neither is
Gates.
But given his huge fortune, he is on track
to leave a truly meaningful legacy one that
won't soon be forgotten.
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