Effectively, not Invoice Gates per se, however his household workplace, Cascade. And never trash within the metaphorical sense of very speculative property however precise, honest-to-God trash. Or trash administration at the very least.

Oxford College’s Martin Schmaltz has drawn our consideration to the considerably bizarre allocations of Gates’s personal funding agency, which, relying in your supply, appears to handle both $70bn, $120bn or $170bn.

Right here’s what Refinitiv lists as Cascade’s 10 largest place in greenback phrases.

The mixed $16bn holdings of Republic Companies and Waste Administration — the 2 largest waste disposal corporations within the US — make up nearly half of Cascade’s disclosed fairness portfolio.

Should you embody water purification and pest management big Ecolab as kinda in the identical enterprise (eliminating undesirable stuff, whether or not germs, rubbish or bedbugs) then the sector accounts for 52.5 per cent of Cascade’s public ebook, or $21.1bn in whole.

That’s not all! The precise Invoice & Melinda Gates Basis Belief — which owns Gates’s remaining Microsoft shares — owns one other $5.6bn stake in Waste Administration, $703mn in Ecolab and $290mn in Waste Connections, a special trash disposal firm. In order that’s $27.69bn in whole for the sector.

Some caveats are so as. All these holdings are largely from filings made in 2021-22, so there could also be some modifications (however neither Cascade nor the belief are excessive turnover buyers). There can be different stuff that doesn’t have to be disclosed, so this can by no means be greater than a partial snapshot. Cascade additionally owns many of the 4 Seasons Motels and Resorts, for instance.

Nonetheless, it’s an attention-grabbing portfolio. It principally seems like an enormous near-$28bn wager on a dirty future the place sanitation would be the in-demand service. Mad Max, however with much more rubbish.

Cascade has been managed by Michael Larson since 1994. He’s stored remarkably beneath the radar, excluding a 1999 article in Fortune, and a much less flattering NYT piece in 2021 on the “tradition of worry on the agency that manages Invoice Gates’s fortune”.

The opposite high Cascade holdings are additionally a bit weird for a expertise billionaire’s household workplace. Agricultural equipment firm John Deere and Diageo make up the remainder of the highest 5, whereas additional down we discover Canada’s nationwide railway system; automotive vendor AutoNation; Spanish development firm FCC; Otter Tail, a Minnesota utility, and Ginkgo Bioworks, a biotech SPAC.

Final one excepted it’s all very old-economy, which seems to be the long-term technique. Gates’s largest UK investments, for instance, have been in retailer Carpetright, jet servicing group Signature Aviation and Bunzl, a distributor of disposable cutlery. Given the still-big chunk of Microsoft shares sitting within the belief’s books, maybe low-tech is the purpose?