Bill Gates
Net worth: 7.5% to US$50.0 billion (2006)
Bill Gates married Melinda French of Dallas, Texas on January 1st, 94. Melinda. They have three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). 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, in 2006, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is US$125 million, and the annual property tax is US$1 million. Also among Gates' private acquisitions are the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci which Gates bought for USA$30.8 million at an auction in 1994, and a rare Gutenberg Bible.
William (Bill) H. Gates is chairman of Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions helping people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft had revenues of US$39.79 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2005, and employs 61,000 people in 102 nations and regions.
On the
June 15th 2006, Microsoft announced effective July 2008 Gates will transition
out of a day to day role in the company to spend more time on global health and
education work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He will keep the role
of chairman and senior technical adviser and has pledged to maintain his position
as Microsoft's biggest shareholder
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 the UK in 2005, in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor.
Microsoft 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 a day in 2004, most of which were junk. Gates has
almost an entire department devoted to filtering out junk emails. In an article,
Gates himself has said that most of this junk mail "offers to help get out
of debt or get rich quick", which "would be funny if it weren't so irritating"
William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is the co-founder, chairman, former chief software architect, and former CEO of Microsoft Corporation. He is also the founder of Corbis, a digital image archiving company. The Forbes international rich list ranked him the world's richest person for the last 12 years . In 1999, Gates' wealth briefly surpassed USA$100 billion making him America's first centibillionaire. According to the Forbes 2004 magazine, Bill Gates's net worth was USA$46.6 billion. When family wealth is considered, his family ranks second behind the Walton family.
Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington state North West USA, to William H. Gates, Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. Born on Oct. 28, 1955, Gates grew up in Seattle with his two sisters older sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. Their father, William H. Gates II, is a Seattle attorney. Their late mother, Mary Gates, was a school teacher, University of Washington regent, and chairwoman of United Way International.
Gates attended public elementary school and the private Lakeside School. There, he discovered his interest in software and began programming computers at age 13.
Gates excelled in elementary school, particularly in maths and sciences. Bill Gates went to Lakeside School, Seattle's exclusive preparatory school where tuition in 1967 was USA$5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was USA$1,760). Lakeside rented time on a DEC PDP-10, which Gates was 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 selling traffic flow data systems to state governments. He also helped to create a payroll system in COBOL, for a company in Portland, Oregon.
He was able to enroll at Harvard University in the fall of 73, pursuing a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science, 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, 77, Gates was briefly jailed in Albuquerque for racing his Porsche 911 in the New Mexico desert.
After reading the January 75 issue of Popular Electronics demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates called MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them he and others 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 code for it. Within a period of eight weeks they developed an Altair emulator running 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 to found Micro-Soft, which later became Microsoft Corporation, with Allen.
Since Microsoft's founding and as of 2006, Gates has had primary responsibility for Microsoft's product strategy. He has broadened the company's range of products, and wherever Microsoft has achieved a dominant position he vigorously defended it. Many decisions have led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices have had Gates' approval. In the 1998 USA v. Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued over definitions of words such as "compete", "concerned", "ask", and "we." BusinessWeek reported, "early rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying 'I don't recall' so many times 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."
At Live 8, Gates appeared and made a speech before introducing Dido. Gates also made an appearance on the 200th episode of USA classic comedy Frasier, where he played himself.
Gates recently appeared opposite Jon Heder in a skit shown at a conference presenting Windows Vista. The skit is just 5 minutes of Napoleon Dynamite if he was head of Microsoft.
In addition to his love of computers and software, Gates founded Corbis, which is developing one of the world's largest resources of visual information - a comprehensive digital archive of art & photography from public and private collections around the globe. He is also a member of the board of directors of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which invests in companies engaged in diverse business activities.
Bill Gates, the world's richest man and boss of software
giant Microsoft, has admitted that his computer crashes and he's mostly looking
forward to getting books for Christmas.
He also revealed that he thinks Microsoft
is a great place to work - and he's fed up with his long-running battle with the
US government.
Other interests listed on his official website are reading,
playing golf and bridge.
http://www.gatesfoundation.org
Bill and Melinda Gates believe every life has equal value. In 2000, they created the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help reduce inequities in the USA and around the world.
HQ in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by co-chairs Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and William H. Gates Sr., and by CEO Patty Stonesifer.
In 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 USA$210 million for a Gates Cambridge Scholarships. The Foundation pledged over USA$7 billion to its various causes, including USA$1 billion to the United Negro College Fund; and as of 2005, had an estimated endowment of USA$29.0 billion. He has spent about a third of his lifetime income on charity. However, some suggest that these donations have self-serving motives.
Over
the past decade Mr Gates has made a name as one of the world's top philanthropists,
with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledging $7bn to good causes. Back
in July 2004, Microsoft decided to return $75bn (£40.5bn) in cash to the
software giant's shareholders.
Mr Gates, Microsoft's billionaire co-founder
and the company's biggest shareholder, said he intended to give his estimated
$3bn share of the payout to his charitable foundation. Set up in 2000 by Mr Gates
and his wife Melinda from the merger of two family charitable trusts, the foundation
has a $27bn endowment and is dedicated to promoting greater equality in global
health and learning.
In 2005 the foundation run by Microsoft magnate Bill Gates has announced it is dedicating $750m (£400m) to a worldwide infant vaccination programme.
In 2003 the world's richest man Bill Gates donated $168m to fund research into malaria, the mosquito borne disease which kills around one million people a year.
Microsoft Corporation is an international computer technology corporation with 2005 global annual sales of US$42.64 billion and 63,564 employees in 102 nations and regions developing, manufacturing, licensing, and supporting a wide range of software products for computing. HQ in Redmond, Washington state, USA, its most popular products are the Microsoft Windows operating system and Microsoft Office suite of productivity software, each of which has achieved near ubiquity in the desktop computer market. Microsoft possesses footholds in other markets, with assets such as the MSNBC cable television network, the MSN Internet portal, and the Microsoft Encarta multimedia encyclopedia. The company also markets both computer hardware products such as the Microsoft mouse as well as home entertainment products such as the Xbox, Xbox 360 and MSN TV.
The Republic of Ireland became home to Microsoft's first international production facility in 1985, and on November 20 Microsoft released its first retail version of Microsoft Windows, originally a graphical extension for its MS-DOS operating system.
In the mid 90s, Microsoft began to expand its product line into computer networking and the World Wide Web. On August 24, 1995, it launched a major online service, MSN (Microsoft Network), as a direct competitor to AOL. MSN became an umbrella service for Microsoft's online services, using Microsoft Passport as a universal login system for all of its websites.
In 2005, Microsoft received a 100% rating in the Corporate Equality Index from the Human Rights Campaign relating to its policies concerning LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual) employees.
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