Here's How Much Money Bill Gates Makes In A Day

Bill Gates, known foremost for his ability to vault over office chairs, also happens to have founded Microsoft, making him the second richest person in the world, according to Business Insider. While anyone can have a lot of money, and not everyone can jump over an office chair, Gates' $103 billion fortune, according to Forbes (as of 2019), could be stacked to heights that not even he could clear.

To get an idea of just how much money Gates has, Business Insider calculated that his salary per second would be $380, pointing out that it wouldn't be worth his time to pick up a $100 bill lying on the ground. 

Using that number, which was calculated based on how much his wealth increased between 2018 and 2019, Gates' hourly salary would come out to about $1.37 million an hour, and about $32.8 million a day.

For further perspective, the article states that the average American spending one dollar would be the equivalent of Gates spending $1.06 million. If he wrote you a million-dollar check it would feel like a collect phone call to him, and he could write million-dollar checks every day for the next 285 years before running out of money, according to BI calculations. He could also give everyone in the world $10 and still have over $30 billion left over. 

Don't get the wrong idea about Gates, though, because as far as mega-rich people go, he's about as charitable as they come. He's donated over 27 percent of his net worth to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which comes out to about $35.8 billion, according to Forbes. That's more than anyone else, ever in history.

The organization focuses on "improving people's health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty" across the globe, according to its website. So, while it would be nice to have that extra $10, it's good to know that as a gatekeeper of bills, Bill Gates is about as good as it gets.

So how exactly is Gates working to improve health and decrease poverty around the world? Toilets... Here's why he might not be full of crap.

According to the World Health Organization, around 2.3 billion people lack access to basic sanitation and plumbing. That's a lot of human waste that isn't being properly disposed of, and it causes very serious issues — contaminating soil and bodies of water which might be used for drinking or bathing and spreading all sorts of lethal diseases like dysentery and cholera. It's a huge logistical problem, and obviously, it's not very glamorous. 

In steps Gates. So far he's invested $200 million and pledged another $200 million to help solve the problem, but he's not just writing checks. Weather.com reports that in 2018 he attended the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing, China, where he delivered a strong message. Holding up a jar of human feces, he ticked off all the nasty things inside. Within the jar were as many as "200 trillion rotavirus... 20 billion Shigella bacteria, and 100,000 parasitic worm eggs." Point taken. 

Among the toilet contenders was the Nano Membrane Toilet, made possible by a $700,000 grant from the Gates Foundation, which is currently being tested in Ghana. In truly futuristic fashion, it is able to treat human waste without external energy or water. Solid waste is separated, diced and incinerated (just clean out the ashtray weekly), and liquid waste is purified into water than can be used for crops. You can't drink the water, but if you're reading this that probably was never a huge concern.

Of course, Gates spends his money on more than just toilets. Business Insider says they've spent more than $2 billion on eradicating malaria, and around another $100 million on getting rid of polio and Ebola. Then there's the $2.5 billion he and wife Melinda have given to the GAVI Alliance, which works to improve access to vaccinations in the world's poorest countries. 

The Gates also have their own scholarship program which has given away more than $1.6 billion since 1999, thrown another $100 million at malnutrition in Nigeria, and have worked to improve "time poverty", the idea that unpaid work robs people — especially women — of higher potential. 

Last but not least, they launched The Giving Pledge in 2010, encouraging billionaires to give away the majority of their fortunes. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and over 150 others have signed on, promising to pledge over half a trillion dollars in donations by 2022.

Nobody's perfect, and neither is Gates, but given his insane fortune, he is on track to leave a truly meaningful legacy that won't soon be forgotten.