William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate, investor, author, and philanthropist. In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, which became the world's largest PC software company. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, and was the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. Gates has authored and co-authored several books.
Since 1987, Gates Has Been Included in the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people and was the wealthiest from 1995 to 2007, again in 2009, and has been since 2014. Between 2009 and 2014, his wealth doubled from US $ 40 billion to more than US $ 82 billion. Between 2013 and 2014, his wealth increased by US $ 15 billion. Gates is currently the richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US $ 85.6 billion as of February 2017.
Gates is one of the best-known entcreators of the personal computer refilled. He has been cried for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive, an option that has in some cases been upheld by numerous rules. Later in his career, Gates Pursued a number of philanthropic endevors, donating large amounts of money to various materials and scientific research programs through the Bill
Gates stepped down as chief executive officer of Microsoft in January 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect for himself 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.
Early life,
Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955. He is the son of William H. Gates Sr.(born 1925) and Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994). His ancestry includes English, German, Irish, and Scots-Irish. His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates' 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' 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. 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".
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.
At the end of the ban, the four students offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for computer time. Rather than use the system via Teletype, 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." 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.
Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973, and was a National Merit Scholar.He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973. He chose a pre-law major but took rigorous mathematics and graduate level computer science courses. 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 CEO of Microsoft before resigning from the company in 2014.
In his second year, Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by Harry Lewis, one of his professors. Gates' solution held the record as the fastest version for over thirty years; its successor is faster by only one percent. His solution was later formalized in a published paper in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.
Gates did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard. and 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 following year saw the release of the MITS Altair 8800 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 this decision over with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates wanted to start his own company. Gates explained his official status with Harvard that, "...if things [Microsoft] hadn't worked out, I could always go back to school. I was officially on [a] leave [of absence]."
Bill Gates turned his fortune from software firm Microsoft into diversified holdings including investments zero-carbon energy.
In May 2021, Bill and Melinda each announced on Twitter they were ending their marriage after 27 years. They still co-chair the charitable Gates Foundation.
Gates, who cofounded Microsoft with Paul Allen (d. 2018) in 1975, has transferred at least $5.7 billion worth of shares in public companies to Melinda.
As of March 2020, when Gates stepped down from the Microsoft board, he owned about 1% of the software and computing company's shares.
He has invested in dozens of companies including Canadian National Railway and AutoNation, and is one of the largest owners of farmland in the U.S.
To date, Gates has donated nearly $57 billion to the Gates Foundation, including a $20 billion gift announced in July 2022. Most of his early donations were gifts of Microsoft stock.
Bill Gates
The digital demagogue earned billions by anticipating the market's needs. Now, his philanthropic foundation is helping countless others across the globe.
Bill Gates
Co-founder of Microsoft Corp.
Founded: 1975
Francois Lenoir | REUTERS"Ultimately, the PC will be a window to everything people are interested in-and everything we need to know."-Bill Gates
Some see him as an innovative visionary who sparked a computer revolution. Others see him as a modern-day robber baron whose predatory practices have stifled competition in the software industry. Regardless of what his supporters and detractors may think, few can argue that Bill Gates is one of, if not the most successful entrepreneur of the 20th century. In just 25 years, he built a two-man operation into a multibillion-dollar colossus and made himself the richest man in the world. Yet he accomplished this feat not by inventing new technology, but by taking existing technology, adapting it to a specific market, and then dominating that market through innovative promotion and cunning business savvy.
Gates' first exposure to computers came while he was attending the prestigious Lakeside School in Seattle. A local company offered the use of its computer to the school through a Teletype link, and young Gates became entranced by the possibilities of the primitive machine. Along with fellow student Paul Allen, he began ditching class to work in the school's computer room. Their work would soon pay off. When Gates was 16, he and Allen went into business together. The two teens netted $20,000 with Traf-O-Data, a program they developed to measure traffic flow in the Seattle area.
Despite his love and obvious aptitude for computer programming, and perhaps because of his father's influence, Gates entered Harvard in the fall of 1973. By his own admission, he was there in body but not in spirit, preferring to spend his time playing poker and video games rather than attending class.
All that changed in December 1974, when Allen showed Gates a magazine article about the world's first microcomputer, the Altair 8800. Seeing an opportunity, Gates and Allen called the manufacturer, MITS, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and told the president they had written a version of the popular computer language BASIC for the Altair. When he said he'd like to see it, Gates and Allen, who actually hadn't written anything, starting working day and night in Harvard's computer lab. Because they did not have an Altair to work on, they were forced to simulate it on other computers. When Allen flew to Albuquerque to test the program on the Altair, neither he nor Gates was sure it would run. But run it did. Gates dropped out of Harvard and moved with Allen to Albuquerque, where they officially established Microsoft. MITS collapsed shortly thereafter, but Gates and Allen were already writing software for other computer start-ups including Commodore, Apple and Tandy Corp.
The duo moved the company to Seattle in 1979, and that's when Microsoft hit the big time. When Gates learned IBM was having trouble obtaining an operating system for its new PC, he bought an existing operating system from a small Seattle company for $50,000, developed it into MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System), then licensed it to IBM. The genius of the IBM deal, masterminded by Gates, was that while IBM got MS-DOS, Microsoft retained the right to license it to other computer makers.
Much as Gates had anticipated, after the first IBM PCs were released, cloners such as Compaq began producing compatible PCs, and the market was soon flooded with clones. Like IBM, rather than produce their own operating systems, the cloners decided it was cheaper to purchase MS-DOS off the shelf. As a result, MS-DOS became the standard operating system for the industry, and Microsoft's sales soared from $7.5 million in 1980 to $16 million in 1981.
Microsoft expanded into applications software and continued to grow unchecked until 1984, when Apple introduced the first Macintosh computer. The Macintosh's sleek graphical user interface (GUI) was far easier to use than MS-DOS and threatened to make the Microsoft program obsolete. In response to this threat, Gates announced that Microsoft was developing its own GUI-based operating system called Windows. Gates then took Microsoft public in 1986 to generate capital. The IPO was a roaring success, raising $61 million and making Gates one of the wealthiest people in the country overnight.
When Windows was finally released in 1985, it wasn't exactly the breakthrough Gates had predicted. Critics claimed it was slow and cumbersome. Apple wasn't exactly pleased either. They saw Windows as a rip-off of the Macintosh operating system and sued. The case would drag on until the mid-1990s, when the courts finally decided that Apple's suit had no merit.
Meanwhile, Gates worked on improving Windows. Subsequent versions of the program ran faster and froze less frequently. Third-party programmers began developing Windows-based programs, and Microsoft's own applications became hot sellers. By 1993, Windows was selling at a rate of 1 million copies per month and was estimated to be running on nearly 85 percent of the world's computers.
Microsoft solidified its industry dominance in the mid-1990s by combining Windows with its other applications into "suites" and persuading leading computer makers to preload their software on every computer they sold. The strategy worked so well that by 1999 Microsoft was posting sales of $19.7 billion, and Gates' personal wealth had grown to a phenomenal $90 billion.
But with success has come scrutiny. Microsoft's competitors have complained that the company uses its operating system monopoly to retard the development of new technology -- a claim Gates soundly refutes. Nevertheless, the U.S. Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company in 1998 over its practice of bundling software with Windows.
In November 1999, a U.S. District Court ruled that Microsoft indeed had a monopoly in the market for desktop-computer operating systems. The court also found that Microsoft engaged in tactics aimed at snuffing out any innovation that threatened its dominance of the multibillion-dollar computer industry. A court settlement was approved in 2002 with Microsoft consenting to curb some of its objectionable practices. Microsoft has since been the focus of antitrust actions from the European Commission and private litigants.
Attempting to explain his tremendous success, industry experts have pointed out that there are really two Bill Gateses. One is a consummate computer geek who can "hack code" with the best of them. The other is a hard-driven businessman who, unlike most of his fellow Silicon Valley superstars, took readily to commerce and has an innate instinct for the marketplace. This combination enabled Gates to see what his competitors could not. While they were focusing on selling software, Gates was focusing on setting standards, first with MS-DOS and later with Windows. The standards he helped set shaped the modern computer industry and will continue to influence its growth well into the next century.
Dead Giveaway
As a child, Bill Gates' two favorite games were "Risk" (where the object is world domination) and "Monopoly."
Microsoft's Other Billionaire Bill Gates has become the singular face of Microsoft, but the company wouldn't be what it is today without Paul Allen. It was Allen who primarily wrote Microsoft's first program, and according to Microsoft veterans, he championed the company's biggest successes, including MS-DOS, Windows and Microsoft Word. But Allen reached a turning point in 1983, when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease.
Forced to rethink his priorities, Allen resigned from his day-to-day duties at Microsoft and resolved to spend more time enjoying the luxuries his great wealth could afford. He pursued the good life for two or three years, during which time the cancer went into remission. Rather than return to Microsoft, however, he plunged into another start-up, founding Asymetrix in 1985. Allen, who would go on to become one of the country's most successful high-tech venture capitalists, also became a popular fixture in professional sports as the popular team owner of the NFL's Seattle Seahawks, the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers and Major League Soccer's Seattle Sounders before he passed away in October 2018.
In recent years, Gates has turned a good deal of his attention towards philanthropy by creating the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest private foundation in the world with over $46 billion in assets. The foundation, which has secured billions of dollars in contributions from other wealthy benefactors such as Warren Buffett, is primarly dedicated to enhancing healthcare and alleviating poverty around the world.
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