William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle on October 28, 1955. Known simply as Bill Gates, he is an American businessman, computer scientist, and also a philanthropist, co-founder of the globally known company Microsoft. His fortune is currently valued at 82.6 billion dollars, making him the richest man in the world today.
Bill Gates is one of the most well-known businessmen who emerged during the early days of personal computers. On numerous occasions, he has been criticized for his business tactics, which have been labeled as anti-competitive.
Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955. He is the son of William Henry Gates II, a prominent lawyer, and Mary Gates, a professor at the University of Washington.
On April 4, while still a student at Harvard University, he created the company Microsoft. In 1976, he dropped out of college and moved to Albuquerque, headquarters of MITS, to negotiate a deal giving the company 50% of the rights to the Basic computer language. The following year, he learned about the success of Apple and that they needed a Basic interpreter.
By 1980, he met with several IBM representatives. He managed to sell them the MS-DOS operating system, although he did not yet own it. He later bought it at a very low price from a young programmer. IBM needed an operating system to compete with Apple, which made the deal possible. Microsoft wanted licensing and maintenance rights, and even the ability to sell DOS to other companies. IBM agreed, believing that the real profits would come from hardware, not software.
Aware of the importance of the graphical interface Apple had introduced, Gates set out to acquire a graphical environment and the mouse to operate it. Around the same time, Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder, was promoting major improvements to spreadsheets and other software programs.
He claimed he would sell his computer tools to IBM, forming an alliance with Microsoft. The company legally obtained the graphical interface and mouse technology and launched the globally known Microsoft Windows.
By the third millennium, the Windows operating system, in all its existing versions, was used on the vast majority of computers worldwide.
Personal life
Bill Gates is vegan. Since stepping down as CEO of his company in 2008, he has been involved in several projects to promote that lifestyle.
In 1994, he acquired a manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci for 30 million dollars.
Since 2007, Gates had ranked second as the richest man in the world, but due to fluctuations in both magnates’ fortunes, their net worths eventually settled at 72.7 billion and 72.1 billion dollars, respectively.