> Even heavy taxation is a joke if you steal enough money.
I know this won't make you feel any better, but Bill Gates is only that rich on paper; about $30B of his current fortune is the street value of his ~859M shares of MSFT. The average daily trading volume of MSFT is about 70M, so getting liquid on this would cost him a large part of it. He *does* have an active sell program that I believe aims to sell ~1% of his holdings each quarter, as a divestiture measure. So far he has lost nearly $90B by selling his stock "too soon" ...
So on the one hand, he's one of the richest guys around (his MSFT stock is about half his wealth); on the other hand, he's only got half as much as he could have -- he's lost half of it!
Is he a genius or an idiot?
/jordan