I know he has an investment vehicle of some kind to manage his wealth (I think it's called Cascade?) but does anybody know what it has stakes in? And his quoted wealth figure doesn't include what he's given to his foundation, right? I just think it's pretty amazing that he's still #1 or 2 on the richest list given how little he owns of Microsoft and how much he's given away.
Cascade is in Kirkland. I've heard they have around 100 employees. In addition to managing Bill Gates' portfolio, they also manage the portfolio of the Gates Foundation. They intentionally keep a very low profile.
It most likely consists of shares in far too many things to list. The amount of his money in MSFT doesn't matter unless MSFT outperforms the rest of his investments, no?
the depiction of "wall street jobs" isn't very accurate...most people are not wearing many "hats", and quantitative modelers certainly aren't getting coffee for execs. outside of a small trading firm, you're likely to have a specific role as a programmer, quant, or trader. making 500k after a few years is very unlikely, and probably involves as much luck and being in the right place at the right time with the right people as startup options paying off.
things are definitely changing in the post-2008 world. Much of what I wrote is colored by my own experience at Goldman 1998-2008. I must say that even today, on the Goldman/Morgan trading desks, people do wear multiple hats and junior traders still get coffee. And the talented ones still ramp up to $1M+ pretty quickly.
There's a huge spectrum of what a "workout" can be depending on your goals. The original title of the post said it was "amazing" and "beautifully designed", which is a bit of an overstatement. It's a fine low-impact beginner's workout, and if you just want to sweat a bit each day it's fine. If you're looking to become a competitive athlete or get totally jacked, this isn't worth anything to you. There's no one-size-fits-all.
Working out isn't hard. Figure out what your goals are, pick a selection of exercises that fit that goal, and do them. Forget gimmicks, train yourself to want to work out and it's much easier. And don't forget to pay attention to what you eat, that can make or break your workout.
Anybody want to venture a guess as to what those 350 million daily messages are worth as far as advertising goes? I feel like they would be relatively "low quality" ad impressions but could they be worth a 0.1 cents per? I'm also wondering how much better and more targeted an ad platform it could be by figuring out users' interests based on the social graph data.
In my spare time I like to generate some organic search traffic for "lung cancer" and "asbestos" and "mesothelioma" and click the AdWords. My Google stock has been going up as long as I've been doing this. /s
US Cellular has a program where you can bring your phone to any retail store and swap out your battery for a charged one. No need to return to pick up your original. Granted, that's for a $10 battery, but why wouldn't this work for Tesla? Charging an extra fee is fine too - it's the price for convenience, vs waiting for a full charge of your own battery pack.
Because its a $10 battery and people don't often take advantage of the deal, US Cellular is able to easily eat the degradation cost. But on a $40k battery pack, where swapping happens potentially far more often, that cost is too significant to ignore. Hence they're charging a reasonable amount for it.
While I agree with you, if the author believed the entire method is invalid in all situations, he could make a strong argument that it wasn't worth the space to put it in at all. It would be a long book if it was filled with all the methods currently in production that did _not_ work!
Pretty fascinating reading the comments here about how big WhatsApp is outside of the US. I've never encountered anybody using it here, never would have guessed it's so popular elsewhere that it's been turned into a verb.
I think this is a great example of why you should never be afraid to try and reinvent something. Even a concept as simple as messaging apparently still had a (potential) billion dollar opportunity.
So we can't discuss for-profit startups on HN either, since they're walled-gardens that try to make money off their apps and services, without open sourcing their entire codebase?
Wouldn't this cause spreads on stocks to get very wide? Liquid stocks are a penny wide now, I could see that going up to five or ten cents with such a tax. While the average investor isn't going to get hit much, in aggregate it seems like it could cost average investors billions. I'm not saying that's worse than what HFT allegedly costs, but just a point of comparison. Not that I'd expect this tax to get enacted anyway.
