William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American
business magnate, investor, author, philanthropist, humanitarian, and
principal founder of the
Microsoft Corporation.
[3] During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of
chairman,
CEO and
chief software architect, while also being the largest individual
shareholder until May 2014.
In 1975, Gates and
Paul Allen launched Microsoft, which became the world's largest
PC software company.
[4][a]
Gates led the company as chief executive officer until stepping down in
January 2000, but he remained as chairman and created the position of
chief software architect for himself.
[7]
In June 2006, Gates announced that he would be transitioning from
full-time work at Microsoft to part-time work and full-time work at the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which was established in 2000.[8] He gradually transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie.[9]
He stepped down as chairman of Microsoft in February 2014 and assumed a
new post as technology adviser to support the newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella.[10]
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the
personal computer revolution. He has been criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive. This opinion has been upheld by numerous court rulings.
Later in his career, Gates pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors.
He donated large amounts of money to various charitable organizations
and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation.[citation needed]
Since 1987, Gates has been included in the
Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people,
an index of the wealthiest documented individuals, excluding and
ranking against those with wealth that is not able to be completely
ascertained.[12][13]
From 1995 to 2017, he held the
Forbes
title of the richest person in the world all but four of those years,
and held it consistently from March 2014–July 2017, with an estimated
net worth of US$89.9 billion as of October 2017.
[1] However, on July 27, 2017, and since October 27, 2017, he has been surpassed by
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who had an estimated net worth of US$90.6 billion at the time.[14]
In 2009, Gates and
Warren Buffett founded The Giving Pledge, whereby they and other billionaires pledge to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropy.[15] The foundation works to save lives and improve global health, and is working with Rotary International to eliminate polio.[16]
As of February 17, 2018, Gates had a net worth of $91.7 billion, making
him the second richest person in the world, behind Bezos.
Early life
Gates was born in
Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955. He is the son of
William H. Gates Sr.[b] (b. 1925) and
Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994). His ancestry includes
English,
German,
Irish, and
Scots-Irish.
[17][18] His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for
First Interstate BancSystem and the
United Way. Gates's maternal grandfather was JW Maxwell, a
national bank
president. Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one
younger sister, Libby. He is the fourth of his name in his family, but
is known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had the "II"
suffix. Early on in his life, Gates's parents had a law career in mind for him. When Gates was young, his family regularly attended a church of the
Congregational Christian Churches, a
Protestant Reformed denomination.
[21][22][23] The family encouraged competition; one visitor reported that "it didn't matter whether it was
hearts or
pickleball or swimming to the dock ... there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing".
[24]
At 13, he enrolled in the
Lakeside School, a private preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers' Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's
rummage sale to buy a
Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a
General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in
BASIC,
and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his
first computer program on this machine: an implementation of
tic-tac-toe
that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was
fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code
perfectly. When he reflected back on that moment, he said, "There was
just something neat about the machine." After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including
DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a
PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC), which banned four Lakeside students – Gates,
Paul Allen,
Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans – for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.
[29]
At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in
CCC's software in exchange for extra computer time. Rather than use the system via
Teletype. Subsequently, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied
source code for various programs that ran on the system, including programs in
Fortran,
Lisp, and
machine language.
The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when the company went
out of business. The following year, Information Sciences, Inc. hired
the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in
COBOL,
providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators
became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's
computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code
so that he was placed in classes with "a disproportionate number of
interesting girls."
[30] He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success." At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called
Traf-O-Data, to make
traffic counters based on the
Intel 8008 processor. In early 1973, Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the
U.S. House of Representatives.
[32]
Gates was a
National Merit Scholar when he graduated from Lakeside School in 1973.
[33] He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the
Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) and enrolled at
Harvard College in the autumn of 1973.
[34] He chose a pre-law major but took mathematics and graduate level computer science courses.
[36] While at Harvard, he met fellow student
Steve Ballmer. Gates left Harvard after two years while Ballmer would stay and graduate
magna cum laude.
Years later, Ballmer succeeded Gates as Microsoft's CEO. He maintained
that position from 2000 until his resignation from the company in 2014.
[37]
In his second year, Gates devised an
algorithm for
pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems
[38] presented in a
combinatorics class by
Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates's solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years;
[38][39] its successor is faster by only one percent.
[38] His solution was later formalized in a published paper in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist
Christos Papadimitriou.
[40]
Gates did not have a definite study plan while he was a student at Harvard, and he spent a lot of time using the school's computers. Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen, and he joined him at
Honeywell during the summer of 1974. The
MITS Altair 8800 was released the following year. The new computer was based on the
Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw this as the opportunity to start their own computer software company.
Gates dropped out of Harvard at this time. He had talked over this
decision with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how
much their son wanted to start his own company.
Gates explained his decision to leave Harvard, saying "...if things
[Microsoft] hadn't worked out, I could always go back to school. I was
officially on [a]
leave [of absence]."
[44]
Gates married
Melinda French on a golf course on the Hawaiian island of
Lanai
on January 1, 1994; he was 38 and she was 29. They have three children:
Jennifer Katharine (b. 1996), Rory John (b. 1999), and Phoebe Adele (b.
2002). The family resides in a
modern design mansion, which is an
earth-sheltered house in the side of a hill overlooking
Lake Washington in Medina near
Seattle in
Washington state,
United States. According to 2007
King County
public records, the total assessed value of the property (land and
house) is $125 million, and the annual property taxes are $991,000. The
66,000 sq ft (6,100 m
2) estate has a 60-foot (18 m) swimming pool with an underwater music system, as well as a 2,500 sq ft (230 m
2) gym and a 1,000 sq ft (93 m
2) dining room.
[82]
In an interview with
Rolling Stone, Gates stated in regard to his faith:
The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important. We've
raised our kids in a religious way; they've gone to the Catholic church
that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very lucky, and
therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And
that's kind of a religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.[83]
In the same interview, Gates said:
I agree with people like Richard Dawkins
that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began
to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought
false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the
realm – not all – that religion used to fill. But the mystery and the
beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there's no scientific
explanation of how it came about. To say that it was generated by
random numbers, that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view
[laughs]. I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what
decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know."[83]
The
Codex Leicester is one of Gates's private acquisitions. He purchased the collection of famous scientific writings by
Leonardo da Vinci for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994.
[84] Gates is also known for being an avid reader, and the ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation from
The Great Gatsby.
[85] He also enjoys playing bridge, tennis, and golf.
[86][87]
In 1999, his wealth briefly surpassed $101 billion.
[88] Despite his wealth and extensive business travel, Gates usually flew
coach in
commercial aircraft until 1997, when he bought a private jet.
[89] Since 2000, the nominal value of his Microsoft holdings has declined due to a fall in Microsoft's stock price after the
dot-com bubble
burst and the multibillion-dollar donations he has made to his
charitable foundations. In a May 2006 interview, Gates commented that he
wished that he were not the richest man in the world because he
disliked the attention it brought.
[90] In March 2010, Gates was the second wealthiest person behind
Carlos Slim, but regained the top position in 2013, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires List.
[91][92] Carlos Slim retook the position again in June 2014
[93][94] (but then lost the top position back to Gates). Between 2009 and 2014, his wealth doubled from
US$40 billion to more than
US$82 billion.
[95] Since October 2017, Gates was surpassed by
Amazon.com founder
Jeff Bezos as the richest person in the world.
[14]
Bill Gates has held the top spot on the list of
The World's Billionaires for 18 out of the past 23 years.
[96]
Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid
him a salary of $616,667 and $350,000 bonus totalling $966,667.
[97] In 1989, he founded
Corbis, a digital imaging company. In 2004, he became a director of
Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by long-time friend
Warren Buffett.
[98] In 2016, he was discussing his gaming habits when he revealed that he was color-blind.
[99]
In a
BBC interview, Gates claimed "I've paid more tax than any individual ever, and gladly so... I've paid over $6 billion in taxes."
[100] He is a proponent of higher taxes, particularly for the rich.
[101]
SOURCE WIKPEDIA.COM
