Irony: Apple vs Microsoft profits vs Steve Jobs Wealth vs Bill Gates Wealth

Hi,

Mac has a puny market share (approx 8%) of computers sold in the world, yet dominate over 99.9% of all companies in the world in terms of income. It far exceeds the revenue of Microsoft. The irony is both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook's net worth combined comes nowhere near that of Bill Gates. That's two cycles of irony I just explained. Mind you, Bill Gates net worth back in 1996 was close to $100 billion before he donated $36 billion of it to charity. Can somebody explain this so that it's no longer an irony to me. Namely, why Apple earns so much money while the CEO of Apple (Jobs, Cook) earn nowhere near Gates.

Ps. I should make a Facebook post with a picture of Apple laughing at Microsoft saying 'Who cares about market share, it's the company profit that matters'. Then below is a picture of Bill Gates with his cheeky grin saying 'Who cares about company profits, it's personal profits that matters!'

Revenue of a company has nothing to do with the wealth of executives - those two categories are not necessarily linked. It's as simple as that.

Profit more so than revenue. You can go around and look at the cars in the lots of small businesses and see one or two luxury cars and a few old rusted out beaters that barely run. At least you can in the U.S.

vansmith said:

Revenue of a company has nothing to do with the wealth of executives - those two categories are not necessarily linked. It's as simple as that.

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Why aren't they they linked? Moreover, why is there such a divergence in this case?

Revenue is a measure of corporate sales and is exclusive of salaries. How a company rewards its employees is not, by necessity, tied to its economic performance. Beyond that, the wealth of executives depend on a whole host of other outside factors other than the ways in which their companies pay them. For example, everyone invests their money differently, some better than others.

So why does Apple choose to pay Jobs so little compared to Microsoft choosing to pay Gates?

You'd have to ask those companies.

And it's not all about pay. Gates made most of his money in ownership of MS. Jobs owned shares, too, but not at the volume/value of Gates.

MacInWin said:

And it's not all about pay. Gates made most of his money in ownership of MS. Jobs owned shares, too, but not at the volume/value of Gates.

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I was going to point this out. Bill for example not only is one of the people that started the company, but also had huge shares in the companies stock. Heck even the Janitor that worked for Microsoft at start up is now a millionaire from investing his money into MS stock.

Now keep in mind Steve Jobs left Apple(or got fired, I forget which) and returned some years later, what he did with his stock is between him and god. Tim came to Apple in 1998 as senior VP of world wide sales and just took over a CEO a few short years ago.

So basically your comparing apples (joke) to lemons..

What would be a more fair assessment would be to compare the corporate salary of the new MS CEO to that of what Tim makes, but not their total worth. A person can be valued at a lot of money, but get paid very little.. Like me.. I really don't get paid enough..

Steve's corporate salary is $1. Obviously there are perks in that. I can only speculate but I don't know why. E.g. minimize tax, paid with shares instead of money, fringe benefits

In case anyone is interested....

Just yesterday, the Gates Foundation donated $50 Million to help the victims of Ebola in Africa. His foundation is the world's leading charitable organization. Not bad for a guy who dropped out of Harvard and purchased DOS from Seattle Computing and then sold it to IBM.
$$$$$$$

Exitus resurrected a five-year-old thread. The Gates foundation does wonderful work. Bill should be very proud of it. Steve Jobs started the program at Apple that has donated $75 million or more to Product (RED), which works on many of the same causes.

Both men have given a lot to the world, each in their own way.