Gates dispersed asset management and continuously reduced his stake in Microsoft Corp Company.

Bill Gates, co-founder and former chief executive of Microsoft Corp, announced on May 3 that he and his wife, Melinda Gates, would end their 27-year marriage and start a new life.

In addition to the divorce itself, Gates' enormous wealth has attracted renewed attention.

According to the 2021 Global Rich list compiled by Forbes, Gates, 65, is worth $124 billion, or about 804.5 billion yuan, behind Amazon.Com Inc founder Bezos, Tesla, Inc. founder Musk and LVMH boss Bernard Arnault and his family.

But Gates might have had more wealth.

According to public data, when Microsoft Corp landed on the Nasdaq market in 1986, Bill Gates held 45% of the shares, which would be worth more than 5.4 trillion yuan if he got it now. As of the latest close, Microsoft Corp shares closed at US $247.79, with a total market capitalization of US $1.87 trillion, or about 12 trillion yuan.

The main reason for "passing by" with great wealth lies in diversified investment strategies. In 1994, Gates hired Michael Larson, a master investor, as the head of the family trust and managed his asset wealth through the family office, Cascade Investment.

In order to prevent Gates' wealth from being over-concentrated in Microsoft Corp, Larson scattered his wealth in assets outside the technology industry, and most of the cash obtained from the quarterly reduction of Microsoft Corp's shares was transferred to waterfall investment for management. avoid excessive exposure to the family's main business, the technology industry.

Waterfall's portfolio includes US short-term Treasury bonds, inflation protected bonds (TIPS), US conventional corporate bonds, a small number of junk bonds, foreign treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities (MBS), emerging country bonds, PE funds, stocks that have nothing to do with Microsoft Corp, and even technology stocks that are counter-cyclical (energy, food, etc.) and physical assets (oil, real estate, etc.).

In addition, Larson allocates money to a number of external funds.

At present, from the shareholding ratio, Microsoft Corp is no longer Gates' Microsoft Corp. Gates' stake in Microsoft Corp has fallen to 1.37%, worth more than $26 billion, according to CNBC.

Gates invests in real estate, energy and hotels through waterfalls, with stakes in dozens of listed companies, including Canadian National Railway Co and Deere & Co., according to Bloomberg.

Tencent's major shareholder persisted, but generated ten thousand times the income.

The diversification strategy reduced Gates' wealth from 540 million yuan to 804.5 billion yuan. This can not help but sigh, long-term holding is indeed a huge return, is it really right to diversify?

In fact, the drama of the investment market has been interpreted many times. Take China's Internet leader Tencent as an example, its largest shareholder is Naspers, a large multinational technology media group based in Cape Town, South Africa.

In 2001, Naspers invested $32 million in Tencent and acquired a 46.5 per cent stake. When Tencent went public in 2004, the total market capitalization soared from 7.4 billion yuan on the first day of listing to nearly 5 trillion yuan now, bringing nearly ten thousand times the income for Naspers.

During this period, Naspers rarely reduced its holdings of Tencent shares. The first reduction occurred in March 2018, Naspers Ltd. After Tencent's share price reached a high, it reduced its stake in Tencent by 190 million shares, or about 2% of the issued shares, at HK $405 per share, cashing out 76.94 billion Hong Kong dollars, or about 67.3 billion yuan.

Naspers then packaged and listed Prosus, a subsidiary that holds the assets of Internet companies such as Tencent. Prosus reduced its stake in Tencent by up to 2 per cent for the second time on April 7, with a total consideration of HK $114.2 billion for 192 million shares.

At the same time, the process of Richard Li, chairman of Pacific Century Group, investing in Tencent is regrettable. In 1999 PCCW bought a 20 per cent stake in Tencent for $2.2 million.

Less than two years later, Richard Li sold Tencent shares to South Africa's MIH holding Group for $12.6 million. As a result, Richard Li made hundreds of billions less and missed the opportunity to overtake his father Li Ka-shing to become the richest man in Hong Kong.

However, these are to replay history from the current perspective! But the very successful investment in history has its inevitability, but it is also accidental, and many times investors can only move forward cautiously in the fog of the market.