William Henry Gates III, known as Bill Gates, born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur and billionaire. He is known for being the co-founder of Microsoft in 1975 and its main shareholder until 2014.
| Function | |
|---|---|
| Microsoft General Manager | |
| April 1975 – January 2000 |
| Biography | |
|---|---|
| Birth date | October 28, 1955 |
| Birthplace | Seattle, Washington |
| Birth name | William Henry Gates III |
| Short name | Bill Gates |
| Nationality | American |
| Home | House of Bill and Melinda Gates |
| Training | Lakeside School (1968-1973) Harvard College (-) (1973-1975) Harvard University (1973-1975) |
| Activities | Entrepreneur, programmer, philanthropist |
| Period of activity | Since 1975 |
| Father | William Henry Gates II |
| Mother | Mary Maxwell Gates |
| Siblings | Kristianne Gates, Libby Gates MacPhee |
| Spouse | Melinda Gates (1994–2021) |
| Children | Jennifer Katherine Gates, Rory John Gates, Phoebe Adele Gates |
| More information | |
|---|---|
| Worked for | Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation |
| Owner of | Microsoft, Corbis, Bill Gates’s house, Berkshire Hathaway, Leicester Codex |
| Member of the | American Academy of Arts and Sciences U.S. National Academy of Engineering |
| Size | 1.77 m |
| Sport | Bridge |
| Website | thegatesnotes.com |
| Signature |  |
Thanks to Microsoft’s commercial success, he has been one of the richest men in the world since 1996. In 2021, Forbes magazine ranks Bill Gates 4th fortune with $ 124 billion.
Since October 2007, Bill Gates is dedicated to his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Biography of Bill Gates
Formative years: 1955-1975
Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, USA, in a wealthy family.
His father, William Henry Gates II (1925–2020), was a business lawyer. His mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, was a professor and chairman of several United Way of America companies and banks and the First Interstate Bank
He discovered computer science at the very selective Lakeside School in Seattle, which then had a rented PDP-10. He made with his childhood friend Paul Allen his first computer program: a game of tic-tac-toe (morpion).
In 1968, at the age of 13, he founded with Allen and some other friends the Lakeside Programmers Group. A few companies will use their talents, mainly to improve existing systems and applications written in assembly language.
In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University at the age of 18. There he met Steve Ballmer, future CEO of Microsoft. He soon abandoned his studies to devote himself solely to computer programming.
On December 13, 1977, he was arrested by police in Albuquerque, New Mexico for driving without a license. From this arrest will remain a famous forensic ID photograph where we see the boss of Microsoft smiling on the pictures, despite the circumstances.
The Microsoft Company
First successes of Bill Gates: Altair BASIC
Bill Gates co-created with Allen a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800. This achievement is both a tour de force and a stroke of luck: the development is done entirely on PDP-10 and the Altair BASIC is only tested on a real Altair 8800 on the day of the demonstration, which succeeds perfectly. Altair BASIC marks a milestone in the history of microcomputing: it will be the first programming language to have run on a commercial microcomputer. It will also be the first software published by the company Microcomputer Software, founded for the occasion, in 1975, when Bill Gates is 20 years old, and whose contraction Micro-Soft then Microsoft is now more familiar.
On January 31, 1976Bill Gates wrote a letter entitled “An Open Letter to Hobbyists”, in which he condemned for the first time the illegal sharing of one of his software, Altair’s BASIC: “We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.(“We wrote the 6800 BASIC and we write the 8080 and 6800 APL, but we don’t want to provide this software to hobbyists. To be clear, what you’re doing is theft”).
The partnership with IBM: MS-DOS, Windows
In 1980, Microsoft signed an agreement with IBM to develop an operating system to be marketed with every IBM PC personal computer. MS-DOS is marketed in the United States from August 12, 1981. This is a modified version of another product: Microsoft has, on January 6, 1981, acquired the rights to exploit 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products (SCP), then on July 22, 1981, has entered into a commercialization agreement with SCP allowing Microsoft to present the product as its own and SCP to receive royalties on sales volume, each company being able to evolve the product independently. The agreement already included a multi-user version.
His fortune is made, and will not stop growing to record levels. Bill Gates is convinced that one day every home and the professional world will be equipped with personal computers. IBM is far from being the first on the market: Apple, among others, has already launched this market four years ago with overwhelming success. IBM’s weight was of paramount importance for MS-DOS to take off.
From Windows 95 to operational resignation
Microsoft is evolving its operating system and its range of Microsoft Office office software, word processors, spreadsheets, databases, utilities, games, etc. at the breakneck pace of microcomputers. In 1985, Windows was then, and for another 10 years, a simple graphical interface, the operating system remaining MS-DOS. Success takes a very long time to come for the first versions of Windows, the interface being graphically very unsuccessful and of a use far from intuitive.
However, Windows has already become the best-selling operating system in the world and is making the fortune of Microsoft and its shareholders, with a grip on the global market hovering around 90%, to the point of costing it a monopoly lawsuit and a serious threat of dissolution of its company in the 2000s.
In 1986, Microsoft went public. Investors greeted him enthusiastically: the same day, Bill Gates became a billionaire. He would become the richest man in the world ten years later in 1996. According to Forbes magazine, his personal fortune in 2007 was estimated at $56 billion (see list of the world’s billionaires). His shares in Microsoft, of which he held a little less than 10% of the capital in 2005, constitute about 50% of his fortune.
Very few companies have had an image so strongly linked to their founder, so much so that he has often been compared to Henry Ford and William Rockefeller, who, like him, were at the origin of new economic fields (private vehicles and the oil industry), and also of the excesses of the consumer society. It is as a great figure of the market that he undergoes his tarping by Noël Godin and his acolytes, in 1998 in Brussels.
In November 2004, Steve Ballmer says that Bill Gates is probably the most spammy person in the world, receiving 4 million emails a day. A whole Microsoft department was at that time devoted to sorting this mass, mainly composed of spam, and of which only ten messages a day finally arrived at Bill Gates.
On June 15, 2006, Bill Gates announces that as of July 2008, he will no longer deal with Microsoft’s day-to-day business. He will remain in his position and advise on some projects, but will focus on charitable works. He leaves all operational functions within Microsoft on June 27, 2008. On February 4, 2014, Bill Gates announced that he was also stepping down as chairman of Microsoft’s board of directors On March 14, 2020, the press announced that Bill Gates was leaving Microsoft’s Board of Directors and that he would only retain a position as technical advisor to the company’s executives.
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The Gates Foundation
In 2000, he and his wife created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which aims to bring innovations in health and knowledge to the world’s population. It has $102.8 billion.
In 2006, the Gates Foundation had already spent $25.26 billion, particularly to vaccinate 55 million children. Bill Gates has also announced that he wants to bequeath 95% of his fortune to his foundation.
These actions contributed to Time magazine naming Bill Gates “Person of the Year 2005”, alongside his wife Melinda and Bono (singer of the group U2), for their actions on the philanthropic front.
On 2 March 2005, Bill Gates is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom as a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his contributions to British business and his efforts to combat global poverty. However, not being a citizen of a Commonwealth country, he cannot prefix his name with the title Sir. He can, however, add the letters KBE (Knight of British Empire) after his name.
The majority of Bill Gates’ legacy is expected to go to his foundation, through which he became one of the largest donors against poverty in the world, with several billion dollars of his personal fortune. In 2006, he announced that he would bequeath 95% of his fortune to the fight against disease and illiteracy in the countries of the South.
On June 16, 2010, Bill and Melinda Gates launched a campaign, The Giving Pledge, or which billionaires were invited to make pledges exceeding 50% of their personal fortune. Warren Buffett writes the first letter in which he indicates his intention to bequeath more than 99% of his fortune. Bill Gates estimates that “only 15% of billionaires donate large parts of their wealth”. This move comes at a time when the wealthiest Americans are being singled out as being at the origin of the crisis and when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also the subject of controversy.
In November 2011, Bill Gates called on the G20 to increase its aid to poor countries.
As part of the education reform carried out by Barack Obama’s administration, Bill Gates is notably working on the implementation of the “Common Core” program, which he has massively subsidized. The foundation also contributes to the funding of lobbies in Europe aimed at exerting pressure on the European Commission to circumvent a decision of the European Court of Justice on certain GMOs.
On the other hand, the Bill Gates Foundation is criticized as being, under the guise of philanthropy and under the pretext of fighting inequality, a way of doing business through generosity by multiplying the wealth of its leaders, thus feeding a destructive system; a system of highly profitable investment funds and financial investments that the journalist Lionel Astruc analyzes and calls “the art of false generosity”, or “philanthrocapitalism”, in his essay on the Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates Interests
Geoengineering
Bill Gates has expressed an interest in geoengineering, focusing in particular on the capture of carbon dioxide in the air and the dispersion of sulfur aerosols. A Lund University study on superemitters showed that in 2017, Gates made 59 private jet flights, which he flew more than 200,000 air miles, corresponding to the emission of 1,600 tons of CO2. Gates, when asked about his air travel, called them “guilty pleasure“.
Since 2010, it has funded the Swedish Space Agency’s SCoPEx (Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment) program, led by Harvard physicist David Keith by dropping aerosols of sulfur dioxide or calcium carbonate dust into the atmosphere from high-altitude balloons or satellites, to block the sun and limit global warming. In April 2021, this program was stopped by strong opposition from Swedes, conservationists and scientists.
Bill Gates and meat substitutes
Gates has also shown an interest in meat alternatives, funding Beyond Meat in 2013 to create a plant-based product that mimics the look and taste of chicken meat. He reportedly stated that he “couldn’t tell the difference between Beyond Meat chicken and real chicken”.
Pandemics
Gates in 2015, in a TED talk and in interviews, expressed his fears of a devastating pandemic that would emerge in the coming years and whose preventive measures would be insufficient. Since the coronavirus pandemic, he has been designated as a “prophetic” whistleblower but is also the target of many conspiracy theories.
Computer Science Research
He published under his real name, in 1979, a research paper concerning the sorting of pancakes.
Bridge player
Bill Gates is an avid bridge player. His favorite partner is Warren Buffett.
He invested in Bridge Base Online (BBO). BBO founder Fred Gitelman had been introduced to him by Warren Buffett, and it was during a game of bridge where Gitelman was doing the fourth that Gates decided to invest in BBO. Gates owns 20% of BBO. He also regularly does high-level tournaments with champions on BBO.
Bill Gates Fortune
Thanks to Microsoft’s commercial success he was the richest man in the world from 1996 to 2007, as well as in 2009, and from 2014 to 2016. When he regains this position (according to the Bloomberg ranking) in January 2014, his fortune amounted to 78.5 billion US dollars.
In 2019, Forbes magazine ranked Bill Gates as the second richest man in the world with a fortune of 105 billion US dollars, just after the founder of the Amazon site Jeff Bezos (112 billion). In 2021, his fortune climbs to 124 billion but he regresses to 4th place.
Privacy
On January 1, 1994, he married Melinda French, Microsoft’s marketing manager, with whom he had two daughters, Jennifer Katharine (born 1996) and Phoebe Adele (born 2002), and a son, Rory John (born 1999).
He lived with his family on Lake Washington near Seattle in a house estimated at $131 million.
In 2019, Melinda Gates contacted divorce lawyers. This resolution is taken in particular because of the links between Bill Gates and the sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein from 2011 according to the Wall Street Journal. An article in the New York Times describes several meetings that Bill Gates would have attended, in the home of Jeffrey Epstein in New York, while the latter had already been the subject of a first conviction for sex crimes. These meetings would have focused on Epstein’s contribution to the activities of the Gates Foundation. Another article in the same newspaper also mentions inappropriate behavior within the Microsoft company as well as within their foundation.
The divorce, announced on social networks in early May 2021, was pronounced in August of the same year
Publications
- Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, The Road Ahead, Robert Laffont, 1997 (ISBN2-266-07515-2)
- Bill Gates and Collins Hemingway, Business @ the Speed of Thought, Robert Laffont, 1999 (ISBN978-2-2210-8949-1)
- Daniel Ichbiah, “Biography of Bill Gates” Bill Gates and the Microsoft Saga, Pocket Publishing, 1995, various digital editions 2013 (ISBN9781291278705)
- Bill Gates, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Flammarion Editions, 2021 (ISBN9782081516427).
Filmography
- 1999: Pirates of Silicon Valley, directed by Martyn Burke, played by Anthony Michael Hall (TV movie)
- 2010: The Social Network, by David Fincher, role played by Steve Sires
- 2013: iSteve, by Ryan Perez, role played by James Urbaniak (webcast)
- 2018: series The Big Bang Theory: season 11, episode 18 “The Gates Excitation”: his own role
- 2019: Silicon Valley series: season 6, episode 7: his own role
- 2019: Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, Netflix miniseries, director: Davis Guggenheim.
Distinctions
Bill Gates Decorations
- Presidential Medal of Freedom (United States, November 22, 2016) — decorated alongside his wife Melinda by Barack Obama
- Commander of the Legion of Honour (France, April 21, 2017) — decorated alongside his wife by François Hollande
- Padma Bhushan Medal (India, 2015)
- Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun (Japan, 2022)
- First Class of the Cross of Recognition (Latvia, 2009)
- Commander of the Order of the Star of Romania (Romania, 2007)
- Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (United Kingdom, 2005)
- Star of the Order of the Aztec Eagle (Mexico, 2006)
- Hilal-e-Pakistan (Pakistan, 2022)
- Grand Cross of the Order of Infante Dom Henri (Portugal, 2006)
Honorary Doctorate
- Royal Polytechnic School (2002)
- Waseda University (2005)
- HEC Paris (2007)
- Harvard University (2007)
- Karolinska Institute (2008)
- University of Cambridge (2009)
References (sources)
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