Investors Lobby to Oust Bill Gates

Three of Microsoft’s 20 top investors are pushing for Bill Gates to step down as chairman of the board, 38 years after he co-founded the company. The as-for-now anonymous shareholders—who hold over 5 percent of the $277 billion company’s stock—worry that Gates’s position could limit the ability to take Microsoft in a new direction. Gates currently owns about 4.5 percent of Microsoft’s stock, but sells around 80 million shares a year and will be all sold out by 2018. In the last half-decade, he has increased his philanthropic role with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, vaccinating children, lifting people out of poverty, etc. Not a bad way to retire.