Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington to William H. Gates, Sr. and teacher Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was wealthy; his father was a prominent lawyer and his maternal grandfather, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank vice president.
According to a widely repeated story, Maxwell set up a million (or multi-million) dollar trust fund for Gates the year he was born. [3] Gates commented on the story in a 1994 interview with Playboy:
PLAYBOY: Did you have a million-dollar trust fund while you were at Harvard?
GATES: . . . . My parents are very successful, and I went to the nicest private school in the Seattle area. I was lucky. But I never had any trust funds of any kind, though my dad did pay my tuition at Harvard, which was quite expensive.
A 1993 biography by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews calls the trust fund story one of the "fictions" surrounding Gates' fortune. [4]
Exceptionally intelligent, Gates excelled in elementary school, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. Bill Gates went to Lakeside, Seattle's most exclusive preparatory school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1760). Lakeside rented time on a DEC PDP-10, which Bill was able to use to pursue an interest in computers, a rare opportunity at the time.
Gates was a member of the Boy Scouts of America and attained the rank of Life Scout. While in high school, he and Paul Allen founded Traf-O-Data, a company which sold traffic flow data systems to state governments. He also helped to create a payroll system in COBOL, for a company in Portland, Oregon.
According to a press inquiry he scored 1590 on his SATs[5], which allowed Gates to enroll in Harvard University pursuing a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science in 1973, where he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer. During his second year at Harvard, Gates (along with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff) co-wrote Altair BASIC for the Altair 8800. Gates dropped out of Harvard during his third year to pursue a career in software development. On December 13, 1977, Gates was briefly jailed in Albuquerque for racing his Porsche 911 in the New Mexico desert. [6]
After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Science that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others had developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the platform. This was untrue, as Gates and Allen had never used an Altair previously nor developed any code for it. Within a period of eight weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. Allen and Gates flew to MITS to unveil the new BASIC system. The demonstration was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to buy the rights to Allen and Gates's BASIC for the Altair platform. It was at this point that Gates left Harvard along with Allen to found Micro-Soft, which was later renamed the Microsoft Corporation.
In February 1976, Gates published his often-quoted "Open Letter to Hobbyists", that claimed that most users of his software had stolen it and that this would prevent the development of good software, and that no hobbyist could afford to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment. This letter was deeply unpopular with many programmers who were doing just that, but was to gain significant support from Gates' business partners and allies and became part of the movement which led to closed-source becoming the dominant model of software production. [7]
Despite Microsoft's reliance on closed source, Gates has said that he collected discarded program listings at Harvard and learned programming techniques from them. Some people have accused him of being inconsistent in this regard. It has also been pointed out that Microsoft often produces products that incorporate ideas developed outside Microsoft, such as GUIs, the BASIC programming language, or compressed file systems, without paying royalties to the companies that developed them. Some of these matters have gone to court. Apple v. Microsoft concluded that Microsoft had not infringed Apple's intellectual property (partly because Apple had, apparently, licensed parts of the Macintosh user interface to Microsoft); Stac Electronics prevailed in its claim against the DoubleSpace file system. The BASIC question has not been litigated, but the trend in US law, supported by Lotus v. Borland, is that intellectual property applies to program implementations, not interfaces.
Gates with Steve Jurvetson of DFJ, Stratton Sclavos of Verisign and Greg Papadopoulos of Sun Microsystems, October 1, 2004When IBM decided to build the hardware for a desktop personal computer in 1980, it needed to find an operating system. Microsoft did not have any operating system at this point. The most popular microcomputer operating system at the time was CP/M developed by Digital Research in Monterey. The CP/M BIOS allowed software written for the Intel 8080/Zilog Z80 family of microprocessors to run on many different models of computer from many different manufacturers. This device-independence feature was essential for the formation of the consumer software industry, as without it software had to be re-written for each different model of computer. Bill Gates referred IBM to Gary Kildall, the founder of Digital Research, but when they did not reach immediate agreement with him they went back to Gates who offered to fill their need himself. He did it by buying a CP/M clone called QDOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System") from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products for $56,000, which Microsoft renamed PC-DOS.
Later, after Compaq licensed Phoenix Technologies' clone of the IBM BIOS, the market saw a flood of IBM PC clones. Microsoft was quick to use its position to dominate the home computer operating system market. Microsoft began licensing its OS for use on non-IBM PC clones, and called that version MS-DOS (for Microsoft Disk Operating System). By marketing MS-DOS aggressively to manufacturers of IBM-PC clones, Microsoft went from a small player to one of the major software vendors in the home computer industry. Microsoft continued to develop operating systems as well as software applications. In the early 1980's they created Microsoft Windows which was similar to Apple Computer's Macintosh OS graphical user interface (GUI), both based on the human interface work at Xerox PARC. The first versions of the Windows OS did not sell well as stand-alone applications but started to be shipped pre-installed on many systems. Because of this, by the late-1980s Microsoft Windows had begun to make serious headway into the IBM-compatible PC software market. The release of Windows 3.0 in 1990 was a tremendous success, selling around 10 million copies in the first two years and cementing Microsoft's dominance in operating systems. (See History of Microsoft Windows for more details)
Microsoft eventually went on to become the largest software company in the world, earning Gates enough money that Forbes Magazine named him the wealthiest person in the world for several years. Gates served as the CEO of the company until 2000 when Steve Ballmer took the position. Gates continues to serve as a chairman of the board at the company and also as a position he created for himself entitled "Chief Software Architect". Microsoft has thousands of patents, and Gates has nine patents to his name.
Bill Gates being questioned in court on August 27, 1998Since Microsoft's founding and as of 2006, Gates has had primary responsibility for Microsoft's product strategy. He has aggressively broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft has achieved a dominant position he has vigorously defended it. Many decisions that have 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 over the definitions of words such as "compete", "concerned", "ask", and "we." [8] BusinessWeek reported, "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 Gates both sent and received." [9]
Bill Gates married Melinda French of Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. Melinda gave birth to three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). He has two younger sisters, one named Kristanne and one named Libby. Bill Gates' house is one of the most expensive houses in the world, and is a modern 21st century earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. 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 just under $1 million. 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 and a rare Gutenberg Bible.
Gates and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at the WEF in Davos, January 26, 2003In 2000, Gates founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization, with his wife. The foundation's grants have provided funds for college scholarships for under-represented minorities, AIDS prevention, diseases prevalent in third world countries, and other causes. In 2000, the Gates Foundation endowed the University of Cambridge with $210 million for the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. The Foundation has also pledged over $7 billion to its various causes, including $1 billion to the United Negro College Fund; and as of 2005, had an estimated endowment of $29.0 billion. He has spent about a third of his lifetime income on charity, although some question his intentions. [10]
Gates has received two honorary doctorates, from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002 and Waseda University in 2005. Gates was also given an honorary KBE (Knighthood) from Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in 2005 [11], in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor. [12]
Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has stated that Gates is probably the most "spammed" person in the world, receiving as many as 4,000,000 e-mails per day in 2004, most of which were junk. Gates has almost an entire department devoted to filtering out junk emails. [13] In an article, Gates himself has said that most of this junk mail "offers to help [him] get out of debt or get rich quick", which "would be funny [given his financial state] if it weren't so irritating". [14]
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Influence and wealth
Gates in Poland, 2006Gates is widely considered one of the world's most influential people. He 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. Gates has been number one on the "Forbes 400" list through 1993-2006 and number one on Forbes list of "The World's Richest People" in 1996-2006, except for 1997 when the Sultan of Brunei was included despite Forbes' usual policy of excluding heads of state. In 2004, he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by Warren Buffett, the second wealthiest person in the world according to Forbes and a longtime friend of Gates.[15]
Since 2000, Gates's wealth has declined due to a fall in Microsoft's share price and the multi-billion dollar donations he has made to his charitable foundations. According to a 2004 Forbes magazine article, Gates gave away over $28.4 billion to charities from 2000 onwards. Additionally, Gates has not engaged in conspicuous consumption beyond his lavish home, with its gardens and art collection. In contrast, his former associate Paul Allen has used his wealth in perhaps a more typical manner—owning sports teams, vintage airplanes, and multiple residences. Gates also claimed, in 2005, that he has gone to work every day since 1975, which in recent years includes both his role at Microsoft, and his leadership position at the Gates Foundation.
Gates' large well-publicized charitable donations are usually cited as sparking a substantial change in attitudes towards philanthropy among the very rich. Philanthropy has become the norm for the very rich. [16]
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Popular culture
Bill and Melinda Gates on the cover of TIME, with U2 lead singer Bono, as Persons of the Year 2005.Main article: List of portrayals and references of Bill Gates
Bill Gates has been the subject of numerous parodies in film, television, and video games, often serving as an archetype for fictional megalomaniacal leaders of powerful corporations. Examples include The Simpsons episode "Das Bus", Family Guy episode "Screwed the Pooch", and the film Antitrust. Alternatively, but less frequently, these references portray a hacker genius. Gates is often characterized as the quintessential example of a super-intelligent "nerd" with immense power. This has in turn led to pop culture stereotypes of Gates as a tyrant or evil genius, often resorting to ruthless business techniques. Gates has been caricatured several times on Saturday Night Live by Chris Kattan and Mark McKinney. He was also shown on South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, and was shot in the forehead in the movie. In an episode of Pinky and the Brain, Gates was apparently a robotic body controlled by the Brain's rival Snowball, who used the profits of Microsoft to take over the world. He returned later in the South Park episode "The Entity", complete with a bullet hole in his forehead. Several films and television shows have portrayed either the real Bill Gates or a fictionalized version of him, often according to these clichés, including an episode in the first season of the X-Files involving a man who lived inside a house that was operated by a computer (which, as it turned out, had a mind of its own)
Jack Welch is a business legend. Some consider him an American treasure of sorts as he's not only helped General Electric (GE) become the world's most admired corporation, but has also helped other companies improve through his management ideas.
The man is a business genius. GE ranked as America's Most Admired Company 4 years running until Mr. Welch's retirement. He turned GE into such a powerhouse that it will likely stay in the top 10 for years to come.
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