Billionaire entrepreneur Bill Gates is cofounder of Microsoft, the world’s largest software business, and the Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates News: Entrepreneur Reflects on His Childhood In New Memoir
Bill Gates is sharing exclusive insight into his childhood in his new memoir that hit shelves on February 4. The first of a three-volume autobiography, Source Code: My Beginnings details the Microsoft founder and philanthropist’s early years, including his upbringing and passion for computers.
“My parents had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects, missed social cues and could be rude and inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others,” he shared elsewhere in the book. Gates credits his parents for helping him with his social skills by sending him to therapy and private school and getting him involved in sports.
Who is Bill Gates?
Entrepreneur Bill Gates is the cofounder of Microsoft and a noted philanthropist. He started his business with Paul Allen in 1975. Through technological innovation, keen business strategy, and aggressive business tactics, Gates helped build the world’s largest software company and became a billionaire in the process. The Seattle native resigned as Microsoft’s CEO in 2000, the same year he cofounded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (now the Gates Foundation). Gates and his ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, divorced in 2021 after 27 years of marriage.
Early Life
William Henry Gates III, widely known as Bill Gates, was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle. He was named after his father, William H. Gates II, who was a lawyer. His mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, worked briefly as a teacher before devoting her time to raising the couple’s children and working on numerous nonprofit and corporate boards of directors. She was the first woman to sit on the board for First Interstate Bank of Washington and the first female chair of United Way International.
Young Bill grew up in an upper-middle-class family with his older sister, Kristianne, and younger sister, Libby. All three children were encouraged to be competitive and strive for excellence. Bill showed early signs of competitiveness when he coordinated family athletic games at their summer house on Puget Sound. He also relished in playing board games and excelled at Risk and Monopoly.
Education
While Gates was attending Lakeside School, a Seattle computer company offered to provide computer time for the students. The Mother’s Club used proceeds from the school’s rummage sale to purchase a teletype terminal for students to use. Gates became entranced with what a computer could do and spent much of his free time working on the terminal. He wrote a tic-tac-toe program in BASIC computer language that allowed users to play against the computer.
Microsoft Goes Public
On March 13, 1986, Gates transitioned Microsoft into a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq stock market. Its initial public offering was $21 per share. The move made the 30-year-old CEO an instant millionaire. Two weeks earlier, the company had moved its headquarters to nearby Redmond, Washington, where it remains today.
For all of Microsoft’s successes, Gates never felt totally secure. Always checking on the competition over his shoulder, he developed a white-hot drive and competitive spirit. One assistant reported coming to work early to find someone sleeping under a desk. She considered calling security or the police until she discovered it was her boss, Gates. His intelligence allowed him to see all sides of the software industry, be it product development or corporate strategy. When analyzing any corporate move, he developed a profile of all the possible cases and ran through them, asking questions about anything that could possibly happen. He expected everyone in the company to have the same dedication.
The Gates Foundation
Throughout the 1990s, and with his wife Melinda’s influence, Gates took an interest in becoming a civic leader in the footsteps of his mother. Studying the philanthropic work of American industrial titans Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, he realized that he had an obligation to give more of his wealth to charity.
In 2000, the couple combined two family foundations and contributed close to $16 billion to form the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Its initial focuses were education, world health, and communities in the Pacific Northwest. Bill’s father, William H. Gates Sr., was one of the first co-chairs. Melinda oversaw the foundation’s grant-making and soon became co-chair alongside her father-in-law and Bill.
