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| Birth Name(s) : Bill Gates |
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Full Bill Gates Biography
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American entrepreneur, philanthropist and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft he has held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and he remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 8% of the common stock.
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Although he is widely admired, his business tactics have been criticized as anti-competitive and in some instances ruled as such in court. 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, established in 2000.
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. At age 14, Gates also formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. That first year he made $20,000; however, when his age was discovered, business slowed.
As a youth, Bill Gates was active in the Boy Scouts of America where he achieved its second highest rank, Life Scout. According to a press inquiry, Bill Gates stated that he scored 1590 on his SATs. He enrolled at Harvard College in the fall of 1973 intending to get a pre-law degree, but did not have a definite study plan. While at Harvard, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer, whom he later appointed as CEO of Microsoft. At the same time, he co-authored and published a paper on algorithms with computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.
Early rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying 'I don't recall' so many times that 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.
Gates later said that he had simply resisted attempts by Boies to mischaracterize his words and actions. As to his demeanor during the deposition, he said "Whatever that penalty is should be levied against me: rudeness to Boies in the first degree." Despite Gates' denials, the judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization and tying, blocking competition, in violation of the Sherman Act.
Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of US$966,667. He founded Corbis, a digital imaging company, in 1989. In 2004 he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by longtime friend Warren Buffett. He is a client of Cascade Investment Group, a wealth management firm with diverse holdings.
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 $210 million for the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. The Foundation has also pledged over $7 billion to its various causes, including $1 billion to the United Negro College Fund. According to a 2004 Forbes magazine article, Gates gave away over $29 billion to charities from 2000 onwards. These donations are usually cited as sparking a substantial change in attitudes towards philanthropy among the very rich, with philanthropy becoming the norm.
On June 16, 2006, Gates announced that he would move to a part-time role within Microsoft (leaving day-to-day operations management) in July 2008 to begin a full-time career in philanthropy, but would remain as chairman. Gates credited Warren Buffett with influencing his decision to commit himself to charitable causes. Days later, Buffett announced that he would begin matching Gates' contributions to the Gates Foundation, up to $1.5 billion per year in stock.
Gates has received four honorary doctorates, from the Nyenrode Business Universiteit, Breukelen, The Netherlands in 2000, the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan in 2005, and a fourth in June 2007, from Harvard University. Gates was also given an honorary KBE (Knighthood) from Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in 2005, in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor. |
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