After 27 years of marriage and more than two decades of philanthropy, the announced divorce of Bill and Melinda Gates has come as a surprise to most of us. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest in the United States and the second largest in the world, with an endowment approaching $50 billion. Only Denmark’s Novo Nordisk Foundation is larger, with an endowment of around $73 billion.
The Gates Foundation was launched in 2000 with the merger of the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation. The former had been established by Bill Gates’s father and the latter was created by Bill and Melinda Gates in 1997. The foundation’s website notes that since 2000 it has spent $53.8 billion.
About half of the Gates Foundation’s endowment is invested in stocks. According to a federal filing made in February, the foundation’s largest holding is about $9.8 billion in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate founded and still managed by Warren Buffet.
Here’s a list of all the foundation’s equity holdings as of December 2020.
| Name | Ticker | Value ($ Millions) | Shares |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alphabet | GOOGL | 37.8 | 21,554 |
| Alphabet | GOOG | 37.7 | 21,491 |
| Amazon | AMZN | 98.5 | 30,230 |
| Apple | AAPL | 133.0 | 1,002,088 |
| Berkshire Hathaway | BRK-B | 9,762.7 | 42,104,399 |
| Canadian National | CNI | 1,865.2 | 16,979,268 |
| Caterpillar | CAT | 2,049.7 | 11,260,857 |
| Coca-Cola FEMSA | KOF | 286.5 | 6,214,719 |
| Crown Castle | CCI | 848.9 | 5,332,900 |
| Ecolab | ECL | 944.7 | 4,366,426 |
| FedEx | FDX | 785.4 | 3,024,999 |
| Grupo Televisa | TV | 139.1 | 16,879,104 |
| Liberty Global A | LBTYA | 51.3 | 2,119,515 |
| Liberty Global C | LBTYK | 86.1 | 3,639,349 |
| Liberty Latin America C | LILAK | 7.5 | 676,979 |
| Liberty Latin America A | LILA | 3.1 | 276,443 |
| Schrodinger | SDGR | 552.8 | 6,981,664 |
| TWTR | 14.8 | 272,420 | |
| UPS | UPS | 762.1 | 4,525,329 |
| Walmart | WMT | 1,672.6 | 11,603,000 |
| Wasste Management | WM | 2,197.5 | 18,633,672 |
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