Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, the second of three children in a prosperous and well-connected family. His father, William H. Gates Sr., was a prominent Seattle attorney, and his mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, served on corporate and civic boards, including that of United Way, where she worked alongside senior IBM executives ^[1]. The family called the boy Trey, a nod to the III in his name, and encouraged competition in everything from card games to swimming.

At age 13 Gates enrolled at Lakeside School, a private preparatory school in Seattle. In 1968 the Lakeside Mothers Club used proceeds from a rummage sale to buy computer time on a General Electric time-sharing system, an unusual luxury for a school at that time ^[2]. Gates was hooked almost immediately. He wrote his first program, a tic-tac-toe game, in BASIC, and soon spent every available hour at the terminal. At Lakeside he met Paul Allen, two years his senior, who shared his obsession with code. The two studied operating system manuals, found bugs in commercial software in exchange for free machine time, and as teenagers formed a small venture called Traf-O-Data that analyzed traffic counter tapes for municipalities ^[1].

Gates scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and entered Harvard College in the autumn of 1973 ^[3]. He registered as a pre-law student to satisfy his parents but spent much of his time in the computer lab and the poker room. At Harvard he met Steve Ballmer, a fellow student who would later run Microsoft. Gates also produced serious academic work: with professor Christos Papadimitriou he co-authored a paper on pancake sorting, a combinatorics problem, published in the journal Discrete Mathematics in 1979 ^[3].

The turning point came in January 1975, when the magazine Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800, a build-it-yourself microcomputer kit from a small Albuquerque company called MITS. Allen showed Gates the cover story, and the two decided the moment they had been waiting for had arrived. They told MITS they had a BASIC language interpreter for the machine before writing a single line of it, then built the software in a burst of work on a Harvard computer, simulating the Altair chip because they did not own one ^[1]. The demonstration in Albuquerque worked, MITS licensed the product, and Gates took a leave from Harvard that became permanent.

Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft (the hyphen was soon dropped) in Albuquerque in April 1975, with Gates holding the larger ownership stake ^[2]. From the beginning Gates insisted that software was property to be paid for, a contested idea among hobbyists who freely copied programs. His 1976 Open Letter to Hobbyists, which accused users of stealing the company's BASIC, made the argument bluntly and drew heavy criticism, but the principle of paid software licensing became the foundation of the entire industry ^[4].

The company moved to the Seattle area in 1979. Its defining deal came in 1980, when IBM, racing to build a personal computer, needed an operating system. Microsoft did not have one, so it bought a product called 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products for a modest sum, adapted it, and licensed it to IBM as PC-DOS while retaining the right to sell the same system, branded MS-DOS, to other manufacturers ^[1]. When clone makers copied the IBM PC design, every clone needed MS-DOS. That licensing structure, not the IBM contract itself, made Microsoft the toll collector of the personal computer revolution.

Through the 1980s Gates ran Microsoft with an intensity that became legendary inside the industry. He reviewed code personally in the early years, memorized employees' license plates to track their hours, and pushed the company into applications, programming languages, and eventually graphical interfaces ^[2]. Microsoft Windows shipped in 1985 to unimpressive reviews, but Gates kept investing in it. Windows 3.0 in 1990 and Windows 95 five years later turned the product into the default face of computing for hundreds of millions of people ^[1].

Microsoft went public on March 13, 1986, and the offering made Gates, then 30, a paper billionaire within a year. In 1987 Forbes listed him as the world's youngest self-made billionaire, and from 1995 to 2007 the magazine ranked him the richest person on earth ^[5]. His wealth became a cultural shorthand for the new economy, though Gates himself remained focused on a fear he repeated often inside the company: that Microsoft could be displaced by a technology shift it failed to see.

One such shift nearly arrived with the internet. Gates initially treated the web as a secondary concern, then reversed course in his May 1995 internal memo titled The Internet Tidal Wave, which redirected the company toward browser and network software ^[4]. The resulting battle with Netscape ended with Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominant, but the tactics used drew the attention of regulators. In 1998 the United States Department of Justice and twenty states sued Microsoft for illegally protecting its Windows monopoly. Gates's videotaped deposition, in which he quibbled over the meanings of common words, was widely seen as evasive and damaged his public image ^[6]. A federal judge found in 2000 that Microsoft had violated antitrust law and ordered a breakup; an appeals court overturned the breakup remedy in 2001, and the case ended in a settlement that left the company intact but constrained ^[6].

Gates met Melinda French, a Microsoft product manager from Dallas, at a company event in 1987. They married on January 1, 1994, in a private ceremony on the Hawaiian island of Lanai ^[5]. The couple raised three children, Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe, at a large lakeside home in Medina, Washington, a house famous for its technological fittings and its library, which holds a Leonardo da Vinci notebook, the Codex Leicester, that Gates bought at auction in 1994 for 30.8 million dollars ^[1].

His mother's influence shaped his turn toward giving. Mary Gates, who died of cancer in June 1994, urged her son and his new wife to think about philanthropy, a message she reinforced in a letter read at their wedding ^[1]. That same year Gates created the William H. Gates Foundation, run by his father, which merged with another of his charitable vehicles in 2000 to form the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In May 2021 Bill and Melinda Gates announced the end of their 27-year marriage, stating that they no longer believed they could grow together as a couple. The divorce was finalized that August, and both said they would continue to co-chair the foundation ^[7]. Away from work, Gates is a serious contract bridge player who often partners with his friend Warren Buffett, reads voraciously, publishes regular book recommendations on his blog GatesNotes, and has long taken solitary Think Weeks in a secluded cabin to read and plan ^[5].

Gates handed the chief executive role to Steve Ballmer in January 2000, taking the new title of chief software architect, and in June 2006 announced a two-year transition out of full-time work at Microsoft to concentrate on the foundation ^[1]. He stepped down as chairman in February 2014, remained a board member and technology adviser, and left the board entirely in March 2020 ^[6].

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, based in Seattle, grew into one of the largest private foundations in history, with an endowment measured in the tens of billions of dollars ^[8]. Its priorities reflect an argument Gates has made repeatedly: that the lives of poor children are worth as much as anyone else's, and that markets alone will not deliver vaccines or drugs to people who cannot pay. The foundation has been a principal funder of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and it bankrolled a long campaign against polio that helped push the disease to the edge of eradication ^[8]. In 2006 Warren Buffett pledged the bulk of his fortune to the foundation, roughly doubling its resources, and in 2010 Gates and Buffett launched the Giving Pledge, a public commitment by billionaires to give away most of their wealth ^[5].

Gates has also used his platform to warn about risks he considers underpriced. In a widely viewed 2015 TED talk he argued that the world was unprepared for a fast-moving respiratory epidemic, a warning that drew renewed attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the foundation committed more than a billion dollars to vaccines, tests, and treatments ^[8]. In 2015 he founded Breakthrough Energy, a coalition of funds and programs investing in low-carbon technology, and in 2021 he published the book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster ^[9]. His earlier books, The Road Ahead (1995) and Business at the Speed of Thought (1999), were both bestsellers, and a memoir of his early years, Source Code, appeared in 2025 ^[9].

Anyone asking who was Bill Gates, or rather who is, since he remains an active public figure, confronts a double legacy. The first is industrial. Gates did not invent the personal computer, the operating system, or the graphical interface, but he understood earlier than almost anyone that software, sold separately from hardware and licensed at scale, would be where the value of computing settled ^[4]. Microsoft's standards, for better and worse, defined how most of the world used computers for decades, and the antitrust fight over its conduct still shapes how governments think about technology monopolies ^[6].

The second legacy is philanthropic, and it is still being written. Among Bill Gates achievements, admirers count the hundreds of millions of vaccinations funded through Gavi, the near-elimination of wild polio, and a broad shift in how development aid is measured and evaluated ^[8]. Critics counter that foundation-scale giving concentrates unaccountable influence over global health policy in private hands, a debate scholars and journalists continue to press ^[10]. Gates has said publicly that he intends to give away the great majority of his fortune and that the foundation will spend down its assets within decades of the founders' deaths.

The plain Bill Gates facts are striking on their own: a teenager who talked his way onto mainframes, a college dropout who built the most valuable company of its era, the world's richest person for 13 consecutive years, and then a donor operating at a scale with few precedents ^[5]. Whether history remembers him mainly for the software or for the giving may depend on results, in polio wards and vaccine cold chains, that have not yet arrived.