Bill Gates
Bill Gates built Microsoft into the company that put a computer on every desk, and then spent the rest of his life giving the proceeds away. Born in Seattle in 1955 to a lawyer and a bank director, he had unusual access to a computer terminal at his private school and spent his adolescence on it. He left Harvard in 1975 to found Microsoft with Paul Allen after seeing the Altair on a magazine cover. The decision that made the company was a licensing term. IBM needed an operating system for its personal computer in 1980; Gates bought one from a Seattle programmer for $50,000, adapted it as MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM non-exclusively — which meant that when the clone manufacturers copied the hardware, they all had to come to him for the software. Windows shipped in 1985 and the Office applications followed, and by the 1990s Microsoft held something like ninety per cent of desktop computing. The methods that produced that share brought an antitrust suit in 1998 over bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. A judge ordered the company broken in two; the order was reversed on appeal and settled in 2001, and the litigation is widely credited with distracting Microsoft while the internet arrived. He stepped back from daily management in 2000 and left the board in 2020. The Gates Foundation has spent over $75 billion, chiefly on vaccination, malaria, polio eradication and agriculture, and has been criticised for the influence that scale of private money buys over public health priorities.
- Lived: 1955 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: entrepreneur, programmer, philanthropist
