Ever Wonder How Much Spam Bill Gates Gets?   11/19/2004 - 1,484 views, 1 Comment

Well, imagine how Bill Gates feels. It was recently revealed that he gets nearly 4 million pieces of spam a day.

Yes, that’s right. 4 million.

Now, that’s a lot by any measure.

According to Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, “Bill literally receives 4 million pieces of e-mail per day, most of it spam.”

Of course, unlike most of us, Mr. Gates has people on his payroll whose job it is to sift through all of his email, to make sure that no spam makes it into his inbox. Says Ballmer of that “”Literally there’s a whole department almost that takes care of it.”

There are a few things we can learn from this:

1. It’s good to be king.

2. If Bill Gates didn’t have an email address the world’s daily spam total would drop by several percentage points.

3. Steve Ballmer likes the word “literally”.

But beyond that, it puts things into perspective. The next time you get a piece of spam from a Nigerian, or a pharmaceutical company, or even, heck, Microsoft, just remember, it could be worse. You could be Bill Gates.

You can read more about this in the Washington Post.