Hans Wilsdorf, the late founder of Rolex, and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, can be described as two very similar men in respects to their business instincts and their philanthropic visions. Although they respectively started two of the most influential and powerful companies of the modern age, their charitable works just might come to define the true legacies of these revolutionary entrepreneurs. The Hans Wilsdorf Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation both help to confront and solve the world’s most challenging and persistent problems. A great visionary as an entrepreneur, Hans Wilsdorf foresaw the shift away from pocket watches so he developed the first quality wristwatch, registering the name Rolex in 1908. The incredible innovative history of Rolex is well known. What is not as well known is that at the time of his death in 1960, Hans Wilsdorf owned all of Rolex. When it comes to giving back in the form of charity and cultural support, philanthropy became an intrinsic part of the Rolex culture and philosophy. Upon the death of his wife in 1944, Wilsdorf established the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation in which he left all of his Rolex shares, making sure that a large percentage of the company’s income would go to charity. The company is still owned by a private trust, and shares are not traded on any stock exchange. The foundations funnels much of the profits generated by Rolex into charitable endeavors. These proceeds discretely go to children’s charities around the world (Hans Wilsdorf was an orphan) and to innovative entrepreneurial and cultural endeavors.

Following in the footsteps of Hans Wilsdorf, Bill Gates is a visionary businessman who revolutionized the personal computer business. Recently, Bill Gates has embraced a new vision through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Established by the chairman of Microsoft and his wife, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works in developing countries to improve health and reduce poverty and in the US to support education and libraries nationwide and children and families in the Pacific Northwest. With an endowment of about $30 billion in 2009, the foundation is the largest transparently operated private foundation in the world. To maintain its status as a charitable foundation, it must donate at least 5% of its assets each year. As a result, the donations from the foundation each year amount to over $1.5 billion at a minimum. The scale of the foundation and the way it seeks to apply business techniques to giving makes it one of the leaders in the philanthrocapitalism revolution in global philanthropy. Investor Warren Buffett has announced plans to give the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation about $30 billion worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock in installments, the first of which was received in 2006.
In a statement letter on the foundation’s website, Bill and Melinda Gates write, “We created the Gates Foundation in 2000 because we believe in the principle that every human life has equal worth. The life of an impoverished child in a developing country is as precious as the life of a middle-class kid in a developed one. A family struggling to make ends meet in an American inner city matters as much as a family thriving in a safe, suburban neighborhood. Today, billions of people never even have the chance to live a healthy, productive life. We want to help all people get that opportunity. We know it can be done because this is a unique moment in history: Scientific and technological advances are making it possible to solve big, complicated problems like never before. If these advances are focused on the problems of the people with the most urgent needs and the fewest champions, then within this century billions of people will grow up healthier, get a better education, and gain the power to lift themselves out of poverty.� Like the creation of the Hans Wilsdorf foundation by the founder of Rolex, Bill Gates realized that his incredible wealth could be used to help fulfill the basic promise that all lives have equal value. By applying the principles that made both Rolex and Microsoft such successful enterprises, both Hans Wilsdorf in his lifetime and Bill Gates today have added a new and lasting dimension to global philanthropy.

Tags: bill and melinda gates foundation, bill gates, hans wilsdorf, Rolex, wilsdorf foundation

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Rolex Culture, Rolex Watches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.