Gates Bill

American business magnate, software developer, investor, and philanthropist best known as the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. He is one of the best-known entrepreneurs and pioneers of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. From 1995 to 2017, he held the Forbes title of the richest person in the world all but four of those years. In October 2017, his estimated net worth was US$89.9 billion. Born to William Henry Gates Jr., and Mary (Maxwell) Gates, the only son of a lawyer and an educator, Gates is the second of three children. His father was a partner in a prominent Seattle law firm, his mother, a former teacher, was a member of the University of Washington Board of Regents and the boards of several corporations. His parents enrolled him at Lakeside School, a private institution known for its rigorous academic standards. In 1967 the Lakeside Mothers Club used the proceeds from rummage sales to buy a Digital training terminal that was linked by phone to a computer at a local computer company. Gates became hooked on it along with Paul Allen and another friend, cutting classes and hanging out at the schools computer center day and night. His parents helped instill his competitive nature by turning leisure time into games that reward skill and cunning. He went to Harvard intending to become a lawyer but after reading about the first commercially available microcomputer, the Altair 8800, Gates and Allen knew the future was in computers. They built a computer in 1975, working day and night in Gates dormitory room at Harvard. When their program worked, they dropped out of school to found Microsoft. When IBM was looking for a new operating system and was unable to make connections with the originator of the CPM operating system, they immediately contacted Microsoft. Microsoft called a local company named Seattle Computer Products and bought the rights to Tim Pattersons Q-DOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $50,000. Gates modified the program, renamed it MS-DOS and sold it to IBM. Microsoft incorporated on 25 June 1981 in Bellevue, Washington and the first trade of Microsoft on the New York stock market was on 13 March 1986. Gates is known for hiring shrewd, savvy businessmen and cream-of-the-crop computer experts to launch inexpensive and popular operating systems such as Windows 3, Windows 95 and Windows 98. During the 1990s, Microsoft Corp. was involved in several federal lawsuits over unfair competitive practices. A formal lawsuit of the federal government against Microsoft began in Washington DC on 19 October 1998 at 10:00 AM. Judge Jackson declared Microsoft to be a monopoly on 5 November 1999. Gates is known as a workaholic, turning vacations into "think weeks" and remarking that he did not take a day off for 13 years. He married Microsoft exec Melinda French on 1 January 1994 at the tiny Hawaiian resort of Lanai in a Roman Catholic ceremony. They built a 40,000 square foot $50 million house on Lake Washington in Seattle, Washington. Seven years after construction began, Gates, his wife and daughter Jennifer moved in, mid-September, 1997. The family makes every effort to retain a low-public profile. In May 1999, his son Rory John was born, followed by Phoebe Adelle Gates, born 14 September 2 Read less