Bill Gates offers $5000 for Facebook sharing? It’s just not that funny

Bill Gates may be a billionaire, but if he’s going to splash his cash around he’s got better things to do with it than give it to people who simply share a photo of him on Facebook.

That hasn’t, however, stopped almost 400,000 people on Facebook from sharing an image of the Microsoft founder, holding an (obviously Photoshopped) message:

Hey Facebook,

As some of you may know, I’m Bill Gates. If you click that share link, I will give you $5,000. I always deliver, I mean, I brought you Windows XP, right?

Clearly, no-one is going to receive any money for sharing the image. And chances are that the picture was meant as a joke (although it would have been funnier if the message hadn said Windows Vista rather than Windows XP, or referenced Microsoft Bob, or reminded people of Bill Gates’s claim that spam would be killed off by 2006)…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.