Well, the 2004 Forbes billionaire list is out, so its time for a pick-on-Bill-Gates article. I actually admire Bill; far from focusing on the fact that he has an obcene amount of wealth (which he does – Dennis Miller correctly points out that Gates is only a monocle and a Persian cat away from being a Bond baddie) I like to think of Gates as a poster child of the possible. Hopefully for me. From Reuters: Chairman Bill Gates said on Thursday that the world’s largest software maker would craft a plan to deal with its growing cash balance, which now stands at nearly $53 billion.
“There will come a point … where we probably will change the balance sheet of the company, and make it more pure,” Gates told a student audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggesting that Microsoft would increase its buybacks or dividends.
Microsoft’s dividend had been modest at first and had been doubled, but was “still fairly modest,” Gates said.
Amid increasing investor and analyst scrutiny over Microsoft’s growing cash position, Chief Financial Officer John Connors told a Goldman Sachs technology conference in Phoenix on Wednesday that Microsoft would provide more answers on a plan to deal with its cash by its annual analysts meeting in July.
Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft’s cash and short-term investments climbed to $52.8 billion at the end of 2003 from $43.4 billion a year earlier, amid increasing calls by investors to return more of that money to them.
Asked by a student about Microsoft’s cash pile, Gates, the world’s richest man, quipped: “Well, I sleep well at night.”