Bill Gates
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For other people named Bill
Gates, see Bill Gates
(disambiguation).
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Bill Gates
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Born
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William Henry Gates III
October 28, 1955 (age 56) Seattle, Washington, U.S. |
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Residence
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Medina,
Washington, U.S.
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Nationality
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Occupation
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Co-founder and Chairman ofMicrosoft
Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation CEO of Cascade Investment Chairman of Corbis |
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Years active
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1975–present
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Net worth
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Board member of
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Religion
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William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28,
1955)[4] is an American business magnate and philanthropist. Gates is the former chief
executive and current chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest
personal-computer software company,
which he co-founded with Paul Allen. He is
consistently ranked among the world's
wealthiest people[5] and was the wealthiest overall
from 1995 to 2009, excluding 2008, when he was ranked third;[6] in 2011 he was the wealthiest
American and the second wealthiest person.[7][8] During his career at Microsoft,
Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect,
and remains the largest individual shareholder, with 6.4 percent of the common stock.[9] He has also authored or
co-authored several books.
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs
of the personal
computer revolution. Gates has been criticized for his
business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive, an
opinion which has in some cases been upheld by the courts.[10][11] In the later stages of his
career, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large
amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research
programs through the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.[12]
Gates stepped down as chief executive officer
of Microsoft in January 2000. He remained as chairman and created the position
of chief software architect. 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. He gradually transferred his
duties to Ray Ozzie, chief
software architect, and Craig Mundie, chief
research and strategy officer. Gates's last full-time day at Microsoft was June
27, 2008. He remains at Microsoft as non-executive chairman.
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Contents
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Early
life
Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates.
His parents are of English, German, and Scots-Irish
descent.[13][14] 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 J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president.
Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby.
He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III
or "Trey" because his father had the
"II" suffix.[15] Early on in his life, Gates's
parents had a law career in mind for him.[16] When Gates was young, his
family regularly attended a Congregational church.[17][18][19]
At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory
school.[20] When he was in the eighth
grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School'srummage 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.[21] 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."[22] After the Mothers Club
donation was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDPminicomputers.
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.[23]
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 mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to
tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate
success."[22] At age 17, Gates formed a
venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.[24] In early 1973, Bill Gates
served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives.[25]
Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973.
He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT[26] and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973.[27] While at Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer, who later succeeded Gates as
CEO of Microsoft.
The Poker Room in Currier
House atHarvard University,
where Gates and Allen formed Microsoft.
In his sophomore year, Gates devised an
algorithm for pancake sorting as
a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems[28] 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;[28][29] its successor is faster by
only one percent.[28] His solution was later
formalized in a published paper in collaboration with Harvard computer
scientist Christos
Papadimitriou.[30]
Gates did not have a definite study plan
while a student at Harvard[31] and spent a lot of time using
the school's computers. Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen, and he
joined him atHoneywell during the summer of 1974.[32] 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.[33] Gates dropped out of Harvard
at this time.[34] He had talked this decision
over with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates
wanted to start a company.[31]
Microsoft
Main articles: History of Microsoft and Microsoft
BASIC
MITS Altair 8800 Computer
with 8-inch (200 mm) floppy disk system
After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that
demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates
contacted Micro
Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of
the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter
for the platform.[35] In reality, Gates and Allen
did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to
gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed
to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an
Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and
then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque was
a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into MITS,[36] and Gates took a leave of
absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque in November
1975. They named their partnership "Micro-Soft" and had their first
office located in Albuquerque.[36] Within a year, the hyphen was
dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was
registered with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico.[36] Gates never returned to
Harvard to complete his studies.
Microsoft's BASIC was popular with computer
hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the
community and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, Gates
wrote an Open Letter to
Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter saying that MITS could not
continue to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without
payment.[37] This letter was unpopular with
many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software
developers should be able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of
MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software
for various systems.[36] The company moved from
Albuquerque to its new home in Bellevue,
Washington on January 1, 1979, after the former rejected his loan application.[35]
During Microsoft's early years, all employees
had broad responsibility for the company's business. Gates oversaw the business
details, but continued to write code as well. In the first five years, Gates
personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, and often rewrote
parts of it as he saw fit.[38]
IBM
partnership
IBM approached Microsoft
in July 1980 regarding its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC.[39] The computer company first
proposed that Microsoft write the BASIC interpreter. When IBM's representatives
mentioned that they needed an operating system, Gates referred them to Digital Research (DRI), makers of the
widely used CP/M operating system.[40] IBM's discussions with Digital
Research went poorly, and they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM
representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing difficulties during a
subsequent meeting with Gates and told him to get an acceptable operating
system. A few weeks later Gates proposed using 86-DOS (QDOS), an operating system similar to CP/M
that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer
Products (SCP) had made for hardware similar to the PC.
Microsoft made a deal with SCP to become the exclusive licensing agent, and
later the full owner, of 86-DOS. After adapting the operating system for the
PC, Microsoft delivered it to IBM as PC-DOS in exchange for a one-time fee of
$50,000.[41]
Gates did not offer to transfer the copyright on the operating system,
because he believed that other hardware vendors would clone IBM's system.[41] They did, and the sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major player in the industry.[42]Despite IBM's name on the operating
system the press quickly identified Microsoft as being very influential on the
new computer, with PC Magazine asking if Gates were "The
Man Behind The Machine?"[39] He oversaw Microsoft's company
restructuring on June 25, 1981, which re-incorporated the company in Washington
state and made Gates President of Microsoft and the Chairman of the Board.[35]
Windows
Microsoft launched its first retail version
of Microsoft Windows on
November 20, 1985, and in August, the company struck a deal with IBM to
develop a separate operating system called OS/2.
Although the two companies successfully developed the first version of the new
system, mounting creative differences caused the partnership to deteriorate. It
ended in 1991, when Gates led Microsoft to develop a version of OS/2
independently from IBM.[43]
Management
style
Bill Gates in January 2008
From Microsoft's founding in 1975 until 2006,
Gates had primary responsibility for the company's product strategy. He
aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft
achieved a dominant position he vigorously defended it. He gained a reputation
for being distant to others; as early as 1981 an industry executive complained
in public that "Gates is notorious for not being reachable by phone and
for not returning phone calls."[44]
As an executive, Gates met regularly with
Microsoft's senior managers and program managers. Firsthand accounts of these
meetings describe him as verbally combative, berating managers for perceived
holes in their business strategies or proposals that placed the company's
long-term interests at risk.[45][46]
He often interrupted presentations with such
comments as, "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!"[47] and, "Why don't you just
give up your options and
join the Peace Corps?"[48] The target of his outburst
then had to defend the proposal in detail until, hopefully, Gates was fully
convinced.[47] When subordinates appeared to
be procrastinating, he was known to remark sarcastically, "I'll do it over
the weekend."[49][50][51]
Gates's role at Microsoft for most of its
history was primarily a management and executive role. However, he was an
active software developer in the early years, particularly on the company'sprogramming language products.
He has not officially been on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100,[52] but wrote code as late as 1989
that shipped in the company's products.[50] On June 15, 2006, Gates
announced that he would transition out of his day-to-day role over the next two
years to dedicate more time to philanthropy. He divided his responsibilities
between two successors, placing Ray Ozzie in charge of day-to-day
management and Craig Mundie in
charge of long-term product strategy.[53]
Antitrust
litigation
Further information: United
States Microsoft antitrust case and European
Union Microsoft competition case
Gates giving his deposition
at Microsoft on August 27, 1998
Many decisions that led to antitrust litigation
over Microsoft's business practices have had Gates's approval. In the 1998 United States v.
Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony that
several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued with examiner David Boies over the contextual meaning
of words such as, "compete", "concerned", and
"we".[54] BusinessWeekreported:
Early
rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying 'I
don't recall,' so many times that even the presiding judge had to chuckle.
Worse, many of the technology chief's denials and pleas of ignorance were
directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of e-mail that Gates both sent
and received.[55]
Gates later said he had simply resisted
attempts by Boies to mischaracterize his words and actions. As to his demeanor
during the deposition, he said, "Did I fence with Boies? ... I plead
guilty. Whatever that penalty is should be levied against me: rudeness to Boies
in the first degree."[56] Despite Gates's denials, the
judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization andtying, and blocking competition, both in
violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.[56]
Appearance
in ads
Gates Mugshot of his 1977
arrest in New Mexico
Gates appeared in a series of ads to promote
Microsoft in 2008. The first commercial, co-starring Jerry Seinfeld, is a 90-second talk between
strangers as Seinfeld walks up on a discount shoe store (Shoe Circus) in a mall
and notices Gates buying shoes inside. The salesman is trying to sell Mr. Gates
shoes that are a size too big. As Gates is buying the shoes, he holds up his
discount card, which uses a slightly altered version of his own mugshot of his
arrest in New Mexico in
1977 for a traffic violation.[57] As they are walking out of the
mall, Seinfeld asks Gates if he has melded his mind to other developers, after
getting a yes, he then asks if they are working on a way to make computers
edible, again getting a yes. Some say that this is an homage to Seinfeld's own
show about "nothing" (Seinfeld).[58] In a second commercial in the
series, Gates and Seinfeld are at the home of an average family trying to fit
in with normal people.
Post-Microsoft
Since leaving day-to-day operations at
Microsoft (where he remains Chairman[59]), Gates continues his philanthropy
and, among other projects, purchased the video rights to the Messenger Lecturesseries
called The Character
of Physical Law, given at Cornell University by Richard Feynman in 1964 and recorded by
the BBC. The videos are available online to the public at Microsoft's Project Tuva.[60][61]
In April 2010, Gates was invited to visit and
speak at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology where he asked the students to take on
the hard problems of the world in their futures.[62][63]
Personal
life
.JPG)
Bill and Melinda Gates, June 2009
Gates married Melinda French on January 1,
1994. They have three children: daughters Jennifer Katharine (b.
1996) and Phoebe Adele (b. 2002) and son Rory John (b. 1999).
The family resides in The Gates's home,
an earth-sheltered house in
the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina. According to King County public
records, as of 2006 the total assessed value of the property (land and house)
is $125 million, and the annual property tax is $991,000.
His 66,000 sq ft (6,100 m2)
estate has a 60-foot (18 m) swimming pool with an underwater music system,
as well as a 2,500 sq ft (230 m2) gym and a
1,000 sq ft (93 m2) dining room.[64]
Also among Gates's private acquisitions is
the Codex Leicester,
a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci, which Gates bought for
$30.8 million at an auction in 1994.[65] Gates is also known as an avid
reader, and the ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation
from The Great Gatsby.[66] He also enjoys playing bridge,
tennis, and golf.[67][68]
Gates was number one on the Forbes 400 list from 1993 through to 2007
and number one on Forbes list of The World's Richest
People from 1995 to 2007 and 2009. In 1999, his wealth briefly
surpassed $101 billion, causing the media to call Gates a
"centibillionaire".[69] Despite his wealth and
extensive business travel Gates usually flew coach until 1997, when he bought a
private jet.[70] 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 multi-billion 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.[71]Gates has several investments
outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of $616,667 and $350,000
bonus totalling $966,667.[72] He founded Corbis, a digital imaging company, in 1989. In 2004 he
became a director of Berkshire Hathaway,
the investment company headed by long-time friend Warren Buffett.[73] In March 2010 Bill Gates was
bumped down to the second wealthiest man behind Carlos Slim.
Philanthropy
Gates with Bono, Queen Rania of Jordan,
former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, President Umaru Yar'Adua of
Nigeria and others during the Annual Meeting 2008 of the World Economic Forum in Switzerland
Further information: Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation
Gates began to appreciate the expectations
others had of him when public opinion mounted suggesting that he could give
more of his wealth to charity. Gates studied the work of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller,
and in 1994 sold some of his Microsoft stock to create the William H. Gates
Foundation. In 2000, Gates and his wife combined three family foundations into
one to create the charitable Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the largest transparently
operated charitable foundation in the world.[74] The foundation allows
benefactors access to information regarding how its money is being spent,
unlike other major charitable organizations such as the Wellcome Trust.[75][76] The generosity and extensive
philanthropy of David Rockefeller has
been credited as a major influence. Gates and his father met with Rockefeller
several times, and modeled their giving in part on the Rockefeller family's
philanthropic focus, namely those global problems that are ignored by
governments and other organizations.[77] As of 2007, Bill and Melinda
Gates were the second-most generous philanthropists in America, having given
over $28 billion to charity.[78] They plan to eventually give
95% of their wealth to charity.[79]
The foundation was at the same time
criticized because it invests assets that it has not yet distributed with the
exclusive goal of maximizing return on investment.
As a result, its investments include companies that have been charged with
worsening poverty in the same developing countries where the Foundation is
attempting to relieve poverty. These include companies that pollute heavily,
and pharmaceutical companies that do not sell into the developing world.[80] In response to press
criticism, the foundation announced in 2007 a review of its investments, to
assess social responsibility.[81] It subsequently canceled the
review and stood by its policy of investing for maximum return, while using
voting rights to influence company practices.[82] The Gates Millennium Scholars
program has been criticized for its exclusion of Caucasian students.[83][84]
Gates's wife urged people to learn a lesson
from the philanthropic efforts of the Salwen family, which had sold its home
and given away half of its value, as detailed in The Power of Half.[85] Gates and his wife invited
Joan Salwen to Seattle to speak about what the family had done, and on December
9, 2010, Gates, investor Warren Buffett, and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook's CEO) signed a
promise they called the "Gates-Buffet Giving Pledge", in which they promised to
donate to charity at least half of their wealth over the course of time.[86][87][88]
Recognition
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Gates and Steve Jobs at the 5thD: All Things
Digital conference (D5) in 2007
In 1987, Gates was listed as a billionaire in
the pages of Forbes' 400 Richest People in America issue, just days before his
32nd birthday. As the world's youngest self-made billionaire, he was worth
$1.25 billion, over $900 million more than he'd been worth the year
before, when he'd debuted on the list.[89]
Time magazine named Gates one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th
century, as well as one of the 100 most influential people of 2004, 2005, and
2006. Time also collectively named Gates, his wife
Melinda and U2's lead singer Bono as the 2005 Persons of
the Year for their humanitarian efforts.[90] In 2006, he was voted eighth
in the list of "Heroes of our time".[91]Gates was listed in the Sunday Times power
list in 1999, named CEO of the year by Chief Executive Officers
magazine in 1994, ranked number one in the "Top 50 Cyber
Elite" by Time in 1998, ranked number two in the Upside Elite 100 in 1999 and was
included in The Guardian as
one of the "Top 100 influential people in media" in 2001.[92]
In 1994, he was honoured as the twentieth Distinguished
Fellow of the British Computer
Society. Gates has received honorary doctorates from Nyenrode
Business Universiteit, Breukelen, The Netherlands, in 2000;[93] the Royal
Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, in 2002;[94] Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in 2005; Tsinghua University,
Beijing, China, in April 2007;[95]Harvard University in June 2007;[96] the Karolinska Institutet,
Stockholm, in January 2008,[97] and Cambridge University in
June 2009.[98] He was also made an honorary
trustee of Peking University in
2007.[99] Gates was also made an honorary Knight
Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen
Elizabeth II in 2005,[100] in addition to having entomologistsname the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi,
in his honor.[101]
In November 2006, he and his wife were
awarded the Order of the Aztec
Eagle for their philanthropic work around the world in the
areas of health and education, particularly in Mexico, and specifically in the
program "Un país de lectores".[102] In October 2009, it was
announced that Gates will be awarded the 2010 Bower
Award for Business Leadership of The Franklin
Institute for his achievements in business and for his
philanthropic work. In 2010 he was honored with the Silver Buffalo Award by
the Boy Scouts of America,
its highest award for adults, for his service to youth.[103]
In 2011, Bill Gates was ranked as the fifth
most powerful person in the world, according to rankings by Forbes magazine.[104]
Investments
§ Cascade Investments LLC,
a private investment and holding company, incorporated in United States, is
controlled by Bill Gates, and is headquartered in the city of Kirkland, Washington.
§ bgC3,
a new think-tank company founded by Bill Gates.
§ Corbis, a digital image licensing and rights services
company.
§ TerraPower, a nuclear reactor design company.
Books
and films
To date, Bill Gates has authored two books. The Road
Ahead, written with Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold and journalist Peter Rinearson, was published in November
1995, and it summarized the implications of the personal computing revolution
and described a future profoundly changed by the arrival of a global information
superhighway. Business @
the Speed of Thought was published in 1999, and discusses
how business and technology are integrated, and shows how digital infrastructures
and information networks can help getting an edge on the competition.
Gates has appeared in a number of
documentaries, including the 2010 documentary film Waiting
for "Superman",[105] and the BBC documentary
series The Virtual
Revolution.
Gates was prominently featured in Pirates of
Silicon Valley, a 1999 film which chronicles the rise of Apple and Microsoft from the early 1970s
to 1997. He was portrayed by Anthony Michael Hall.
See
also
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§ List of billionaires (also
see List
of college dropout billionaires and List of wealthiest non-inflated historical figures)
§ Paul Allen – Microsoft's co-founder,
friend, and fellow billionaire
§ Gary Kildall (October 25, 2004). "The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates". Bloomberg
BusinessWeek. Retrieved June 9, 2010.
Books
§ Fridson, Martin (2001). How
to Be a Billionaire: Proven Strategies from the Titans of Wealth. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-41617-7.
§ Gates, Bill (1996). The
Road Ahead. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-026040-4.
§ Lesinski, Jeanne M. (2006). Bill
Gates (Biography (a & E)). A&E
Television Networks. ISBN 0-8225-7027-0.
§ Manes, Stephen (1994). Gates:
How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself The Richest Man
in America. Touchstone Pictures. ISBN 0-671-88074-8.
§ Wallace, James (1993). Hard
Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire. New York:
HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0-471-56886-4.
