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Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955 is an American entrepreneur, software executive,
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. The annual
Forbes magazine's list of The World's Billionaires has ranked Gates as the richest person in the world from 1995 to 2007,
with recent estimates putting his net worth over $56 billion USD.When family wealth is considered, his family ranks second
behind the Walton family, heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. In July 2007, Fortune magazine reported that the increase
in value of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's holdings of stock caused him to surpass Bill Gates as the world's richest man.
Forbes maintains that Slim is second to Gates as of its last calculation of billionaire fortunes. Forbes does not plan to
recalculate Slim's wealth until next year.
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. Chris 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.[13] Several writers claim that Maxwell set up a million-dollar trust fund for
Gates.[14] 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.[13] Gates denied the trust fund story in a 1994 interview[15]
and indirectly in his 1995 book The Road Ahead.[16]
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. When he was in the eighth grade, the school mothers used proceeds from
Lakeside's rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric computer.[13]
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.
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.[17][18]
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.
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Awards and recognition
Time magazine named Gates one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th century, as well as one of the 100 most influential
people of 2004, 2005, 2006 and again in 2007. Gates and Oprah Winfrey are the only two people to make all four lists. Time
also collectively named Gates, his wife Melinda and U2's lead singer Bono as the 2005 Persons of the Year for their humanitarian
efforts. In a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted eighth in the list of "Heroes of our time".[55]
Gates was listed in the Sunday Times power list in 1999, named CEO of the year by Chief Executive Officers magazine in 1994,
ranked number one in the "Top 50 Cyber Elite" by Time in 1998, ranked number two in the Upside Elite 100 in 1999 and was included
in The Guardian as one of the "Top 100 influential people in media" in 2001.
Gates has received four honorary doctorates, from the Nyenrode Business Universiteit, Breukelen, The Netherlands in 2000,[56]
the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan in 2005, and a fourth[57] in
June 2007, from Harvard University.[58] Gates was also given an honorary KBE (Knighthood) from Queen Elizabeth II of the United
Kingdom in 2005,[59] in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor.[60]
Bill delivered the keynote address at the Fall COMDEX in 1983, 1985, 1988, 1990, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001,
2002, and 2003.
Bill and Melinda received the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation on May 4, 2006, in recognition of their
world impact through charity giving.[61] In November 2006, he and his wife were awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for their
philanthropic work around the world in the areas of health and education, particularly in Mexico, and specifically in the
program "Un país de lectores
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