Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington) is the co-founder, chairman, former chief software architect, and former CEO of Microsoft. He is also the founder of Corbis, a digital image archiving company. Forbes magazine's The World's Billionaires list has ranked him as the richest person on earth for the last thirteen consecutive years. According to the Forbes 2006 magazine, Bill Gates's current net worth is approximately $53 billion. When family wealth is considered, his family ranks second behind the Walton family.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. He is widely respected for his foresight and ambition. He is also frequently criticized as having built Microsoft through unfair or unlawful business practices. Since amassing his fortune, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavours, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founded in 2000. On June 16, 2006, Bill Gates announced that he would move to a part-time role with Microsoft in 2008 to begin a career in philanthropy, but will remain as chairman; the announcement coincided with decisions by billionaire Warren Buffett to double the Gates Foundation, matching contributions $1.5 billion in stock per year for 20 years.

Time magazine has ranked Bill Gates among the world's most influential people more times than any other man, and as one of only four people in history to have shaped both the 20th century and the early 21st. 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. That same year he was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2006, Gates Foundation was awarded the Premio Príncipe de Asturias en Cooperación Internacional. In a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted eighth in the list of ‘Heroes of our time’.

William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington to William H. Gates, 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. . 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.

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 where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1,760). Gates took an interest in programming the General Electric system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He enrolled at Harvard University in the fall of 1973 without a definite study plan, but he spent most of his time in the computer centre on campus. While at Harvard he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer.