1. life
Born : William Henry Gates III
October 28, 1955
Seattle, Washington, U.S.
Residence : Medina, Washington, U.S.
Nationality : American
Alma mater : Harvard University (no degree)
Occupation : Technology Advisor of Microsoft
Co-Chair of the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation
CEO of Cascade Investment
Chair of Corbis
Years active : 1975–present
Board member of : Microsoft Berkshire Hathaway
Spouse(s) : Melinda Gates (m. 1994)
Children : 3
Parent(s) : • William H. Gates, Sr.
• Mary Maxwell Gates
William Henry “Bill” Gates III was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington in a fairly wealthy family of William Henry “Bill” Gates, Sr. – a successful attorney and Mary Maxwell Gates – a former school teacher, who later became a member of the Board of Directors of the First Interstate Bank.
Being a child, Bill Gates already possessed a prospective businessman talent, especially in mathematics. It is not accidental that at school he scored 800 points in the mathematical part of the intelligence test, showing the best result. However, the family expected Bill Gates to follow his father’s steps and enter Harvard Law School.
In 1968, when Bill and his high school friend Paul Allen went to middle school, the school administration decided to buy a computer time from the General Electric Company. At that time, the system based on DEC PDP-10 micro-architecture was a basis on the market. Later, he said: “When I was thirteen, my school (Lakeside School) installed a teletype machine. From that point on, my friends and I spent most of our free time writing programs and figuring out how to make the computer to do interesting things.” The school administration had underestimated its students – the whole year of the computer time was used in a few weeks. Fortunately, a new student arrived in Lakeside, whose father worked as a senior programmer in Computer Center Corporation (CCC). The new contract allowed Gates and his friends to continue their experiments.
2. Early life
Young hackers quickly figured out the intricacies of the machine, found the weaknesses and started causing trouble – they broke the defense, which on several occasions led to a system failure and changed the files that contained records of computer time. CCC noticed that breach, and set them aside from working with computers for a few weeks.
Meanwhile, the company’s business began to suffer from constant failures and poor protection. Remembering the destructive activities of computer users from Lakeside, CCC invited Bill Gates and his friends to identify flaws and security holes. As a payment, the company offered endless computer time for young hackers. Sure thing, Bill and his friends could not refuse. Since that day boys couldn’t say if it was a day or night outside – they were hanging out in the lab all the time. For instance, one project of Gates was a program for scheduling classes. ‘Somehow’, it constantly redefined Bill to the classes with the prettiest girls. In addition to troubleshooting, they studied each material on automated calculations and improved their skills.
In 1969, at the Computer Center Corporation experienced difficulties once again, and in 1970, it declared itself a bankrupt. The Lakeside’s students lost their job and access to computer time. Paul Allen’s father was working at the University of Washington and had an access to the computer center. Young programmers got down to business looking for an area where to apply their knowledge. In 1971, the Information Sciences hired Bill Gates and Paul Allen to create software that would be make-up payroll sheet. In addition to unlimited computer time employers have agreed to pay the developers every time their software will bring the company profit.
The young programmers regularly received orders. Bill Gates was the initiator who said: “Let’s call the real world, and sell it something.” And the most interesting thing that he did find clients and sold them his software. For example, once he developed software to optimize road traffic and sold it for $20,000 dollars. He was only 15 years old!
Bill Gates’ parents were extremely frightened of the enthusiasm of their son and by a willful decision they banned him from computer projects. For a year, Bill did not approach the object of his passion, reading the biographies of famous people from Napoleon to Roosevelt. By the age of seventeen Gates received a proposal for writing a software package for Bonneville Dam, which his parents didn’t reject. For a one-year work on this project Gates received $30,000 dollars.
3. Personal life
After being named one of Good Housekeeping's 50 Most Eligible Bachelors in 1985, Gates married Melinda French in Hawaii on January 1, 1994. They have three children: Jennifer Katharine (born 1996), Rory John (born 1999), and Phoebe Adele (born 2002). The family resides in the Gates' home, an earth-sheltered house in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina. According to 2007 King County public records, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is $991,000. The 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.
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.
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.
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. 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. He also enjoys playing bridge, tennis, and golf.
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. Despite his wealth and extensive business travel Gates usually flew coach until 1997, when he bought a private jet. 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. 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. Carlos Slim retook the position again in June 2014 (but then lost the top position back to Gates).
Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of $616,667 and $350,000 bonus totalling $966,667. 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. In 2016 he revealed that he was color blind when discussing his gaming habits.
4. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Bill Gates is not a greedy person. In fact, he is quite giving person when it comes to computers, internet and any kind of funding. Some years back, he visited Chicago’s Einstein Elementary School and announced grants benefiting Chicago’s schools and museums where he donated a total of $110,000, a bunch of computers, and provided internet connectivity to number of schools. Secondly, Bill Gates donated 38 million dollars for the building of a computer institute at Stanford University.
'such as the meaning of his name is Bill Gates, which means the gate of the money...'
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 to create the charitable Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which was identified by the Funds for NGOs company in 2013, as the world's wealthiest charitable foundation, with assets reportedly valued at more than $34.6 billion. The Foundation allows benefactors to access information that shows how its money is being spent, unlike other major charitable organizations such as the Wellcome Trust.
The foundation is organized into four program areas: Global Development Division, Global Health Division, United States Division, and Global Policy and Advocacy Division.
Gates has credited the generosity and extensive philanthropy of David Rockefeller as a major influence. Gates and his father met with Rockefeller several times, and their charity work is partly modeled on the Rockefeller family's philanthropic focus, whereby they are interested in tackling the global problems that are ignored by governments and other organizations. As of 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates were the second-most generous philanthropists in America, having given over $28 billion to charity the couple plan to eventually donate 95 percent of their wealth to charity.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation supports the use of genetically modified organisms in agricultural development. Specifically, the foundation is supporting the International Rice Research Institute in developing Golden Rice, a genetically modified rice variant used to combat Vitamin A deficiency.
5. Personal
Gates's wife suggested people should emulate 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. 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 Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg signed a commitment they called the Gates-Buffet Giving Pledge. The pledge is a commitment by all three to donate at least half of their wealth over the course of time to charity.
Gates has recently expressed concern about the existential threats of Superintelligence; in a Reddit ask me anything, he stated that
First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned.
In a March 2015 interview, with Baidu's CEO, Robin Li, Gates claimed he would highly recommend Nick Bostrom's recent work, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
Gates has also provided personal donations to educational institutions. In 1999, Gates donated $20 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for the construction of a computer laboratory named the William H. Gates Building that was designed by architect Frank O. Gehry. While Microsoft had previously given financial support to the institution, this was the first personal donation received from Gates.
The Maxwell Dworkin Laboratory of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is named after the mothers of both Gates and Microsoft President Steven A. Ballmer, both of whom were students (Ballmer was a member of the School's graduating class of 1977, while Gates left his studies for Microsoft), and donated funds for the laboratory's construction. Gates also donated $6 million to the construction of the Gates Computer Science Building, completed in January 1996, on the campus of Stanford University. The building contains the Computer Science Department (CSD) and the Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL) of Stanford's Engineering department.
On August 15, 2014, Bill Gates posted a video of himself dumping a bucket of ice water on his head, after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg challenged him to do so, in order to raise awareness for the disease ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).
Bill Gates and his foundation are taking an interest in solving global sanitation problems since about 2005, for example by announcing the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge which has received considerable media interest. To raise awareness for the topic of sanitation and possible solutions, Bill Gates drank water which was produced from human feces in 2014 – in fact it was produced from a sewage sludge treatment process called the Omni-processor. In early 2015, he also appeared with Jimmy Fallon on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and challenged him to see if he could taste the difference between this reclaimed water or bottled water.
6. Microsoft BASIC
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. 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, 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. 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. Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his studies.
Microsoft's Altair 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 in which he asserted that more than 90% of the users of Microsoft Altair BASIC had not paid Microsoft for it and by doing so the Altair hobby market was in danger of eliminating the incentive for any professional developers to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software. 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. The company moved from Albuquerque to its new home in Bellevue, Washington, on January 1, 1979.
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.
7. IBM partnership
IBM approached Microsoft in July 1980, regarding its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC. 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. 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.
Gates did not offer to transfer the copyright on the operating system, because he believed that other hardware vendors would clone IBM's system. They did, and the sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major player in the industry. Despite IBM's name on the operating system the press quickly identified Microsoft as being very influential on the new computer. PC Magazine asked if Gates were the man behind the machine?, and InfoWorld quoted an expert as stating it's Gates' computer. Gates oversaw Microsoft's company restructuring on June 25, 1981, which re-incorporated the company in Washington state and made Gates, the president of Microsoft and its board chairman.
8. 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.
9. Management style
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. Another executive recalled that after he showed Gates a game and defeated him 35 of 37 times, when they met again a month later Gates won or tied every game. He had studied the game until he solved it. That is a competitor.
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. He interrupted presentations with such comments That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard! and Why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps? The target of his outburst then had to defend the proposal in detail until, hopefully, Gates was fully convinced. When subordinates appeared to be procrastinating, he was known to remark sarcastically, I'll do it over the weekend.
Gates was an active software developer in Microsoft's early history, particularly on the company's programming language products, but his role most of its history was primarily as management and executive. Gates has not officially been on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100, but wrote code as late as 1989 that shipped in the company's products. He remained interested in technical details; Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1985 that when watching Gates announcing Microsoft Excel, Something else impressed me. Bill Gates likes the program, not because it's going to make him a lot of money (although I'm sure it will do that), but because it's a neat hack. 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.
10. Antitrust litigation
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'. The judge and other observers in the court room were seen laughing at various points during the deposition. 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 that Gates both sent and received.
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. Despite Gates' denials, the judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization and tying, and blocking competition, both in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
11. Post-Microsoft
Since leaving day-to-day operations at Microsoft, Gates continues his philanthropy and works on other projects.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Gates was the world's highest-earning billionaire in 2013, as his fortune increased by US$15.8 billion to US$78.5 billion. As of January 2014, most of Gates's assets are held in Cascade Investment LLC, an entity through which he owns stakes in numerous businesses, including Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, and Corbis Corp. On February 4, 2014, Gates stepped down as chairman of Microsoft to become Technology Advisor alongside Satya Nadella.
In a substantial interview with Rolling Stone magazine, published in the March 27, 2014 issue, Gates provided his perspective on a range of issues, such as climate change, his charitable activities, various tech companies and people involved in them, and the state of America. In response to a question about his greatest fear when he looks 50 years into the future, Gates stated: There'll be some really bad things that'll happen in the next 50 or 100 years, but hopefully none of them on the scale of, say, a million people that you didn't expect to die from a pandemic, or nuclear or bioterrorism. Gates also identified innovation as the real driver of progress and pronounced that America's way better today than it's ever been.
Bill and Melinda Gates have said that they intend to leave their three children $10 million each as their inheritance. With only $30 million kept in the family, they appear to be on a course to give away about 99.96 percent of their wealth.
0 Comments
If you have any doubts, please let me know