Gates left daily Microsoft work for giant-scale philanthropy
Bill Gates, born 28 October 1955 in Seattle, co-pioneered microcomputer software with Paul Allen after Lakeside School tinkering. He later stepped back from Microsoft to run the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, often called the world's largest private foundation. Cascade Investment and other vehicles extend his capital beyond software.
His father was a well-known lawyer and his mother sat on corporate and charity boards; the family pushed competition in everything from cards to swimming races, with prizes for winners and forfeits for losers. At 13 he entered Lakeside, where the Mothers' Club spent rummage-sale money on a Teletype terminal and time on a General Electric computer. Gates was let off maths classes to write BASIC programs. He, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland and his best friend Kent Evans were banned one summer from a company's PDP-10 for exploiting bugs to get free time, then traded bug-hunting for computer access. Evans died in a climbing accident before they finished automating Lakeside's class schedule, and Allen stepped in to help complete it.
At 17 Gates and Allen started Traf-O-Data to build traffic counters on the Intel 8008. He scored 1590 on the SAT, entered Harvard in 1973, took Math 55 and met Steve Ballmer, who later succeeded him as chief executive from 2000 to 2014. In a combinatorics class he devised a pancake-sorting method that stayed the fastest known for over 30 years.
When Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800 in January 1975, Gates told its maker MITS he had a BASIC interpreter for it, though he and Allen had neither the machine nor the code. They wrote it in weeks, the Albuquerque demonstration worked, and Allen named their partnership Micro-Soft. In February 1976 Gates's Open Letter to Hobbyists complained that over 90 percent of Altair BASIC users had not paid. He said he reviewed and often rewrote every line the company shipped for its first five years. IBM came calling in July 1980 after his mother mentioned Microsoft to IBM's chief executive John Opel.
Microsoft's 1986 stock offering made him the youngest billionaire the next year, at 31. His foundation, co-chaired with Melinda French Gates from 2000 to 2024, targets tuberculosis, malaria and polio, and in 2010 he and Warren Buffett launched the Giving Pledge, asking billionaires to give away at least half their wealth. He also chairs TerraPower and Breakthrough Energy.
Source: Bill Gates
