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Whatever happens in what will be a very closely watched divorce settlement, neither Bill nor Melinda Gates will ever go hungry.

There’s a good chance the settlement will rival, if not best, the at least $35 billion that MacKenzie Scott walked away with following her divorce from Jeff Bezos.

As of today, according to Forbes’ real-time billionaire tracker, Bill Gates is worth just shy of $128 billion, and some context is required to wrap one’s head around just how much money that really is.

Luckily, The New York Times is here to help:

The fortune of Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates exceeds the size of Morocco’s annual economy, combines the value of Ford, Twitter and Marriott International and is triple the endowment of Harvard…and includes assets as varied as trophy real estate, public company stocks and rare artifacts.

There’s a big stake in the luxury Four Seasons hotel chain. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland and ranch land, including Buffalo Bill’s historic Wyoming ranch. There are billions of dollars’ worth of shares in companies like AutoNation and Waste Management. There’s a beachfront mansion in Southern California. And one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks.

That’s just scraping the surface, really.

I guess that’s what happens when every time you think about buying something, you have the financial means to do so.

I would wreak absolute havoc.

David Aronson, a lawyer who often represents very wealthy clients in divorce cases, has said “that amount of money and the diversity of assets that are involved in this divorce boggles the imagination,” adding that only Bezos and Scott’s divorce has ever come close.

The difference between Bill and Bezos is that whilst the latter’s money was largely tied up in Amazon stocks, the former has been diversifying his portfolio for decades, which makes things trickier.

Divorce filings by Melinda show that the couple has a separation agreement in place, but the details are not yet known.

So, about that ‘secretive’ fortune:

At the center of both the Gates fortune and the Gates Foundation endowment is a little-known entity called Cascade Investment. Based in Kirkland, Wash., and run by Michael Larson, a former bond fund manager for Putnam Investments, Cascade has overseen both the endowment and most of the personal wealth of Mr. Gates and Ms. French Gates for decades…

Image: Getty Images

Mr. Larson operates Cascade with an obsessive level of secrecy, going to great lengths to cloak the firm’s transactions so that they can’t easily be traced back to the Gateses. In a 1999 interview with Fortune magazine, Mr. Larson said he chose the name “Cascade” because it was a generic-sounding name in the Pacific Northwest.

Larson, who is said to follow the Warren Buffett approach to investing (that will please Bill), has done very well over the years, “with absolute discretion”.

That’s according to Roger McNamee, a Silicon Valley investor who was worked with him in the past.

However much Melinda walks away with, she appears likely to follow the lead of MacKenzie Scott, and give much of it away via her various philanthropic interests.

Reports also suggest that each of the three Gates children will inherit ‘only’ $10 million each.

Thoughts and prayers.

[source:nytimes]