Bill Gates is a household name known to all and sundry as a wealthy billionaire and one of the pioneers of Microsoft but beyond that what do we really know about him?
Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955. He is the son of William H. Gates, Sr and Mary Maxwell Gates. Gates’ ancestral origin includes English, German, and Irish. Scots-Irish William Henry “Bill” Gates is an American business magnate, philanthropist, investor, computer programmer, and inventor.
He dropped out of Harvard to pursue his programming dreams with the support of his parents. 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.
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 home, an earth-sheltered house in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina.
Starting in 1987, Gates was included in the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people and was the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2014 excluding a few years after the financial crisis of 2007–08. 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 man in the world.
A passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. Now he’s doing it again with his own style of philanthropy and passion for innovation. A geek icon, tech visionary and business trailblazer, Gates’ leadership,fuelled by his long-held dream that millions might realize their potential through great software made Microsoft a personal computing powerhouse and a trendsetter in the Internet dawn. Whether you’re a suit, chef, quaint, artist, media maven, nurse or gamer, you’ve probably used a Microsoft product today.
In summer of 2008, Gates left his day-to-day role with Microsoft to focus on philanthropy. Holding that all lives have equal value (no matter where they live), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has now donated staggering sums to HIV/AIDS programs, libraries, agriculture research and disaster relief — and offered vital guidance and creative funding to programs in global health and education. Gates believes his tech-centric strategy for giving will prove the killer app of planet Earth’s next big upgrade.
Someone once said about him “When Gates looks at the world, a world in which millions of preventable deaths occur each year, he sees an irrational, inefficient, broken system, an application that needs to be debugged. It shocks him in his wordsthat people don’t see this, the same way it shocked him that nobody but he and Paul Allen saw the microchip for what it was”.
Bill Gates is a living legend having contributed to sustainable development and brought about innovations that has shapened the world and the lives in the world and we are happy that he isn’t just rich in the bank but he is also rich in the heart, we appreciate this generic icon who has contributed in making the world a better place.