Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III (b. 28 October 1955) co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and led the strategy by which the company came to dominate both the operating-system and the productivity-software layers of the PC market. He topped Forbes's list of the world's wealthiest people for most of the years between 1995 and 2017, and from 2008 onwards has centred his work on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In May 2025, at the foundation's 25th anniversary, he announced that he would give away almost his entire remaining fortune — some 200 billion dollars — by 2045, at which point the foundation will close.

Background

Gates was born on 28 October 1955 in Seattle. His father, William H. Gates Sr., was a prominent lawyer; his mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, sat on the boards of a major regional bank and of IBM's United Way committee. The family was firmly in Seattle's professional upper-middle class. Mary's acquaintance with John Opel of IBM has, fairly or unfairly, often been mentioned in connection with Microsoft's later capture of the IBM operating-system contract in 1980.

At the private Lakeside School, the boy gained access to a GE Mark II time-sharing terminal that the school leased. In the computer club he met Paul Allen, four years his senior — Gates was thirteen at the time. The two collaborated on the school timetable program and, while still in their teens, took paid contracts from local businesses.

In 1973 Gates went up to Harvard to read applied mathematics and computer science. In 1975, on seeing the MITS Altair 8800 on the cover of Popular Electronics, he and Allen decided to write a BASIC interpreter for it. They demonstrated the program at MITS in February 1975 and founded Microsoft (originally "Micro-Soft") in Albuquerque that April. Gates went on leave from Harvard in 1975 and dropped out for good in 1976.

Major Contributions

Altair BASIC (1975)

Microsoft's first product was a BASIC interpreter for the Intel-8080-based Altair 8800. Gates and Allen wrote the interpreter on a simulator that ran on a PDP-10 at Harvard — neither of them had ever touched a real Altair — punched the result onto paper tape, and flew to Albuquerque. The tape ran first time in MITS's office. The "writing software for a machine you have never seen" story is now folklore but, importantly, was true.

In 1976 Gates published his "Open Letter to Hobbyists," denouncing as theft the freely circulated copies of Altair BASIC that members of the Homebrew Computer Club had been swapping. It is conventionally read as the first articulation of the idea that software ought to be sold as a discrete commodity.

MS-DOS and the IBM PC (1981)

In 1980, when IBM approached Digital Research about CP/M-86 for the forthcoming IBM PC (model 5150) and the licensing negotiations collapsed, IBM turned to Microsoft instead. Gates bought QDOS (Quick and Dirty OS, written by Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer Products) for 50,000 dollars, repackaged it as MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM.

The decisive clause in the contract was that the licence was non-exclusive — Microsoft could sell MS-DOS to anyone else as well. When Compaq and the rest of the IBM-compatible cloners arrived almost at once, it was therefore Microsoft, not IBM, that became the operating-system monopolist of the PC era. The episode is the textbook example of Gates's strategic eye.

Windows and Office (1985-)

Windows 1.0 shipped in 1985. It was at first little more than a GUI shell over MS-DOS, but Windows 3.0 (1990) and Windows 95 (1995) made it universal. Alongside it the Office suite — Word, Excel, PowerPoint — used Microsoft's command of its own platform to drive out Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect.

Through the 1980s Gates was repeatedly accused — and was so accused again under oath in the antitrust trial of the late 1990s — of deliberately keeping a structural advantage by letting the Office team see Windows API specifications earlier than third parties did.

United States v. Microsoft (1998-2001)

In 1998 the US Department of Justice sued Microsoft under the Sherman Act. The central allegation was that bundling Internet Explorer with Windows had driven Netscape from the market. In 1999 Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson found Microsoft to have abused a monopoly position, and in 2000 ordered the company broken in two — operating systems on one side, applications on the other.

The appellate court overturned the breakup order, but the videotaped deposition of Gates himself — sullen, evasive, picking long fights with the prosecutor over the meaning of words like "definition" and "concerned" — did serious damage to his public image. In January 2000 he handed the CEO role to Steve Ballmer and assumed the new title of Chief Software Architect.

Awards and Honours

• 2005 — Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE).
• 2010 — Bower Award for Business Leadership (Franklin Institute).
• 2016 — US Presidential Medal of Freedom (from President Obama).
• 2017 — Legion of Honour (France).

He holds neither the ACM Turing Award nor a Nobel.

Current Activities

Gates stepped down as chairman of Microsoft in 2014 and left the board altogether in 2020. Since then he has devoted himself almost entirely to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the private investment vehicle Cascade Investment, and his own writing — the Gates Notes blog, the 2023 book How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, and the 2025 memoir Source Code.

In 2021 he and Melinda French Gates announced their divorce after twenty-seven years of marriage. During the proceedings, reporting on Gates's repeated meetings and trips with Jeffrey Epstein — the financier who died in jail in 2019 awaiting trial for child sex trafficking — became public, as did the disclosure that in 2000 the Microsoft board had been concerned about a relationship with another female employee. Gates has broadly denied wrongdoing, but Melinda has cited the Epstein connection as one reason for the divorce. His public image suffered considerably as a result.

The Gates Foundation Sunset (announced May 2025)

In May 2025, at the foundation's 25th anniversary, Gates announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will close on 31 December 2045. He plans to spend, over the next twenty years, almost his entire remaining personal fortune — approximately 200 billion dollars, depending on markets and inflation. The original foundation charter had specified that it would wind down twenty years after Gates's own death; the new schedule is dramatically accelerated.

"There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people," he said in the announcement. In June 2025 the foundation added that the majority of that spending will be directed to Africa — primarily public health, agriculture and primary education.

The foundation's headline priorities remain the eradication of polio (still in progress in pockets of Asia and Africa), tuberculosis, malaria and HIV, and climate-adaptation agriculture. Large grants to GAVI, the Global Fund and CEPI — the institutions that handled COVID-19 vaccine distribution — continue.

Legacy

What Gates exemplified was a third business model, distinct from both Apple's and IBM's: hold the operating system and the productivity applications inside one firm, and let hardware become a commodity made by others. That model defined the PC ecosystem of the late twentieth century, and its lineage runs straight into the revenue structure of Microsoft Azure and Office 365 today.

As a philanthropist, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the largest private grant-making body in history, with an influence on global public health — through GAVI, polio eradication and malaria programmes — comparable to that of the WHO or the World Bank in the late twentieth century. There has been steady criticism, too: that a private individual should not effectively be setting global health priorities; that the foundation is over-attached to intellectual-property-protected interventions; that it has been too close to Monsanto on questions of seed monopoly. Gates has acknowledged some of this while continuing to defend his preferred model — private capital de-risks interventions which public institutions then scale.

Whether that model will look like a defensible inheritance when the foundation closes its doors in 2045 remains, for now, an open question.