So by now everyone has heard that Warren Buffet is giving 31 gigabucks, or thereabouts, to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. That's a lot of money. So, what if he hqad decided instead to give free wifi to everyone. Would $31.5 billion / 6 billion people = $5/person be enough?
How does one choose a charity for that size of a gift? This decision is not “guns or butter” but “the information superhighway or
malaria pills”…I think it is fine to choose the world emissary to malaria…(the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation).
But actually the problem is harder. How do you get rid of half a million shares of a stock that never splits and trades about 1,000 shares per day at $3k per share? This has the potential to really muck up the market- so what is a foundation to do? Probably, they will arrange, in advance, to sell the newly acquired shares to some institutional investor. I bet they already figured that out.
They'll have to execute the trades at the market rate, or risk both parties having to pay taxes on a sweetheart deal.
If you assume that the value of the stock goes up by say, 3% (I can;t live with modeling it as 6% growth (more or less historiecally maitained) because I think this whole business will curtail the growth of the stock with some really weird jolts every year for -by my calculations- 34 YEARS). Every year, the stock price goes up, the shares change hands, and Bill and Melinda have between $1.8bn and $475m. Not bad.