Bill Gates, the former chief
executive and chairman of Microsoft Corp, will have no direct ownership in the
company he co-founded by mid-2018 if he keeps up his recent share sales
Gates, who started the company that
revolutionized personal computing with school-friend Paul Allen in 1975, has
sold 20 million shares each quarter for most of the last dozen years under a
pre-set trading plan
Assuming no change to that pattern,
Gates will have no direct ownership of Microsoft shares at all four years from
now.
With his latest sales this week, Gates was
finally eclipsed as Microsoft's largest individual shareholder by the company's
other former CEO, Steve Ballmer, who retired in February, but has held on to
his stock.
According to documents filed with
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, Gates now owns just over
330 million Microsoft shares after the sales this week. Ballmer owns just over
333 million, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Gates handed the CEO role to Ballmer
in 2000, and stood down as chairman in February. He remains on the board and
spends about a third of his time as technology adviser to new Microsoft CEO
Satya Nadella.
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