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Comment by WithinReason | Hacker News Reader

You invest $100, now you have $110. You give away $10, you have $100 again.

Then your net worth is $110 and when you give away $10 your net worth goes down $10.

Gates pledged to give his wealth away before he dies, not immediately. And that's good - the world will be getting much more money than it'd get if Gates just gave away all his money the moment he announced it.

> Then your net worth is $110 and when you give away $10 your net worth goes down $10.

Gates' wealth fluctuates all the time. There was a time when he was rather low due to his donations - multiple 10s of billions down. He got back over $100B from cca $50B - that's $50B more for charity than if he just donated everything he had left.

I'm not saying it's bad to do what you're describing, I'm just saying when you actually donate money, not pledge, it decreases your net worth.

It does, but that doesn't mean your net worth will decrease by that amount that year. There are other effects - e.g. the rest of his investment portfolio.

if you give away $10 then your net worth at that moment goes down...it may easily recover that price, but if you count it like that then you can surely count that the money you donated would have been worth more too

Yeah but nobody has that granular logs of Gates' net worth and donations. At best, it's calendar months, sometimes you can try to assume weeks, with a big maybe.

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