‘If I had Bill Gates’s money’

The $3.35 billion dividend payout Bill Gates will receive this year did more than just add to the Microsoft chairman’s already deep pockets. It boosted a national pastime: telling him how to spend it.

Thanks to the Internet that Gates helped proliferate, what in earlier eras might have been small talk at the office, or fantasizing at the family dinner table, became an interactive dialogue around the country. Do a Google search (or OK, an Internet Explorer search) like “if I had Bill Gates’s money,” and advice pops up from all corners.

Gates quickly solved the debate, announcing that he plans to give all of it to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which already has $26.5 billion in assets, and funds projects to improve health and education worldwide.

But that won’t stop an army of newly created armchair billionaires from offering their two cents. People read an inspirational book or hear a great CD and create online postings: “If I were Bill Gates, I’d buy this for everyone in the world.” They’d buy foreign countries or find a cure for old age. Others picture his money in their accounts and offer up plans to buy Wyoming and give it to Native Americans, or to build tent cities for the homeless, or to pay spammers to stop sending spam e-mails to the world’s inboxes.

Dreaming about being Bill Gates, or even about having a joint checking account with him, is hardly a new pursuit of course. But the chatter picked up following Tuesday’s announcement that the company will pay a special $3 per share dividend later this year.

Gates, who has an estimated net worth of $46 billion, is in his own league because his is the name we use to define wealth that is almost beyond imagination, just as the Rockefellers were for previous generations.

It was Gates’s vast riches that led Michael Buffington, a 28-year-old Web designer in Portland, to feel compelled to issue a statement on his personal blog earlier this year. If he had Gates’s money, he’d buy his own island nation. He’d create a think tank where people could play air hockey to get their ideas flowing. He’d build a house where the walls changed colors depending on his moods.

“I think everybody sits around thinking about Bill Gates’s money,” he says.