Bill Gates recently sold 4.6 million Microsoft shares, an SEC filing released today shows. This action reduced his holdings to 330,141,164 shares of the company. Former CEO Steve Ballmer owns 333,252,990 shares.
The sale therefore plunges Gates’ holdings under those of Ballmer, the company’s second CEO. It is not a surprise. As ComputerWorld’s Gregg Keizer wrote in January:
At the pace of its 10 years of stock selling, Gates will hand over the stock ownership crown to Ballmer before mid-2014. Gates will have exhausted its holdings by September 2018 unless it stops or slows sales.
The handover is therefore taking place on time.
What will be interesting to watch is how quickly Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, can accumulate shares in the company. Various performance chunks that make up a large part of his compensation could earn him nearly nine-figure equity in his first half-decade at the helm, in addition to his nearly $20 million annual salary, including a largely in shares.
As for one of these three, as I wrote before, they “will buy all the beers for the next few years.”
IMAGE BY FLICKR USER Microsoft Sweden UNDER LICENSE CC BY 2.0 (IMAGE HAS BEEN CROPTED)
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