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(born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington) is an American entreprenuer and the co-founder, chairman, former chief software architect, and former chief executive officer of Microsoft, the world's leading software company. Forbes magazine's The World's Billionaires list has ranked him as the richest person on earth for the last thirteen consecutive years, with a current net worth of approximately $53 billion. When family wealth is considered, his family ranks second behind the Walton family.[3][4]

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. He is widely respected for his foresight and ambition.[5][6] He is also frequently criticized as having built Microsoft through unfair or unlawful business practices. Since amassing his fortune, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founded in 2000.

Contents

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* 1 Early life

* 2 Microsoft

o 2.1 BASIC

o 2.2 IBM partnership

o 2.3 Windows

o 2.4 Bill Gates' role

* 3 Personal life

o 3.1 Wealth and investments

o 3.2 Philanthropy

* 4 Publicity

o 4.1 Awards and recognition

o 4.2 Popular portrayals

* 5 Works

* 6 References and footnotes

* 7 Further reading

* 8 External links

Early life

William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington to William H. Gates, Jr. (now Sr.) and Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was wealthy; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate Bank and the United Way, and her father, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. Gates has one older sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had dropped his own "III" suffix.[7] Several sources have claim that Maxwell set up a million-dollar trust fund for Gates.[8] A 1993 biographer who interviewed both Gates and his parents (among other sources) found no evidence of this and dismissed it as one of the "fictions" surrounding Gates's fortune.[7] Gates vehemently denied the trust fund story in a 1994 interview with Playboy,[9]

Gates excelled in elementary school, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. At thirteen he enrolled in the Lakeside School, Seattle's most exclusive preparatory school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1,760). When he was in the eighth grade, Lakeside obtained an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a donation of computer time on a General Electric computer from a "Mothers Club" rummage sale.[7] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted he and other students sought time on other systems, including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation, which banned the Lakeside students for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.

Bill Gates was arrested at least twice in New Mexico: once in 1975 for speeding and driving without a license, and in 1977 when this photograph was taken.

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Bill Gates was arrested at least twice in New Mexico: once in 1975 for speeding and driving without a license, and in 1977 when this photograph was taken.

At the end of the ban, the Lakeside students (Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans) offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for free computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, not only in BASIC but FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language as well. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when it went out of business. The following year Information Sciences Inc. hired the Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them not only computer time but royalties as well. Gates also formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.[10][11]

According to a press inquiry, Bill Gates stated that he scored 1590 on his SATs.[12] He enrolled at Harvard University in the fall of 1973 intending to get a pre-law degree,[13] but did not have a definite study plan,[14] While at Harvard he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer.

Microsoft

Main article: Microsoft

BASIC

After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.[15] 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. Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS, and they dubbed their partnership Micro-Soft.[16]

In 1984, Bill Gates appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine; he has since appeared seven more times.

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In 1984, Bill Gates appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine; he has since appeared seven more times.

Microsoft's