Bill Gates
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William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955), known as Bill Gates, is an American businessman, software developer, philanthropist, and public commentator on artificial intelligence. He co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and led the company as chief executive until 2000, building it into the dominant force in personal computer software and turning himself into the world's wealthiest individual for much of the 1990s and 2000s. Since stepping back from day-to-day management at Microsoft, Gates has run the Gates Foundation, the largest private charitable foundation in the world, and used its scale to push global health, agricultural development, and pandemic preparedness. In recent years he has become one of the most-cited voices on artificial intelligence, calling the demonstration of GPT-4 the second revolutionary tech demo of his life and predicting that AI will substitute for many doctors and teachers within a decade. Microsoft's multi-billion dollar partnership with OpenAI, launched while Satya Nadella was rebuilding the company around the cloud, made Gates a key (if no longer operational) figure in the deployment of large language models at global scale.
| Born | October 28, 1955 (Seattle, Washington, U.S.) |
| Full name | William Henry Gates III |
| Education | Lakeside School; Harvard University (1973 to 1975, did not graduate) |
| Occupation | Businessman, software developer, philanthropist, author |
| Years active | 1975 to present |
| Known for | Co-founding Microsoft; chairing the Gates Foundation |
| Spouse | Melinda French (m. 1994; div. 2021) |
| Children | Jennifer (b. 1996), Rory (b. 1999), Phoebe (b. 2002) |
| Parents | William H. Gates Sr.; Mary Maxwell Gates |
| Employer | Gates Ventures; Gates Foundation (chair) |
| Net worth | About US$108.8 billion (Forbes, February 2025) |
| Honors | Presidential Medal of Freedom (2016); Padma Bhushan (2015); honorary KBE (2005) |
Gates was born in Seattle on October 28, 1955, the second of three children of William H. Gates Sr. (1925 to 2020), a prominent Seattle attorney, and Mary Maxwell Gates (1929 to 1994), a schoolteacher who later served on the boards of First Interstate BancSystem, KIRO-TV, and United Way of America, where she worked alongside IBM chairman John Akers. The family was upper middle class. His maternal grandfather, J. W. Maxwell, had been president of a national bank.
His parents enrolled him in the private Lakeside School in Seattle when he was 13. The Lakeside Mothers' Club used proceeds from a rummage sale in 1968 to lease time on a General Electric mainframe and buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal. Gates wrote his first program on it: a tic-tac-toe game written in BASIC. He later said the rummage sale that funded the terminal probably did more to shape his life than anything else his school did. It was at Lakeside that he met Paul Allen, a sophomore two years his senior, who became his lifelong collaborator.
The Lakeside Programmers Club, formed by Gates, Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans, soon found ways to wangle more computer time. Computer Center Corporation in Seattle banned the four boys for a summer after catching them exploiting bugs in the operating system, then hired them to find more bugs in exchange for access. By the time he was a teenager, Gates was being paid for code. With Allen, he wrote a payroll program for a company called Information Sciences Inc. and a class-scheduling program for Lakeside that, by his own later admission, conveniently placed him in classes with a disproportionate number of girls.
He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and enrolled at Harvard University in the fall of 1973. At Harvard he met Steve Ballmer, who lived down the hall in Currier House. Gates took graduate-level math and computer science courses but never declared a major. In his memoir Source Code, published in 2025, he reflected that if he were growing up today he would probably be diagnosed on the autism spectrum, recalling self-stimming behaviors like rocking and an inability to read social cues that his parents had no framework to understand at the time.
He never finished his degree. In late 1974 Allen showed him the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics with the Altair 8800 on the cover, and the two saw their opening: a microcomputer needed software, and they could write it. Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard in 1975 and never came back as a student. Harvard awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws in 2007, when he gave the commencement address.
Gates and Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 by emulating its Intel 8080 processor on a Harvard PDP-10, then flew Allen to Albuquerque to demonstrate it to MITS, the Altair's manufacturer. The interpreter worked the first time it ran on real hardware. MITS agreed to license it. On April 4, 1975, Gates and Allen formally founded their partnership in Albuquerque under the name Micro-Soft (the hyphen was dropped a year later). Gates was 19. Allen was 22.
In 1976 Gates wrote his Open Letter to Hobbyists, a complaint to the Homebrew Computer Club crowd that copying Altair BASIC without paying was theft. The letter is now read as the moment a generation of programmers got their first lecture on commercial software.
Microsoft moved to Bellevue, Washington in 1979. The pivotal deal of Gates's career came in 1980, when IBM, racing to ship a personal computer, asked Microsoft to provide the operating system. Microsoft did not have one. Gates pointed IBM at Digital Research, then changed his mind, bought a CP/M clone called QDOS from a small Seattle firm for $50,000, polished it into MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM on a non-exclusive basis. The non-exclusivity clause is the reason Microsoft, not IBM, owned the next two decades.
When the IBM PC shipped in 1981, MS-DOS shipped with it. Compaq and other PC clone makers licensed the same operating system, and Microsoft's revenue compounded. Microsoft incorporated on June 25, 1981, and Gates became its president and chairman of the board. He held the chairman title until 2014.
Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0 on November 20, 1985, a graphical shell layered on top of MS-DOS. The product was unimpressive at first but improved with each release. The company went public on March 13, 1986 at $21 a share. The IPO made Gates a paper billionaire by 1987. He was 31, the youngest self-made billionaire on the Forbes list.
Windows 3.0 in 1990 and Windows 95 in 1995 turned Microsoft into the operating system for almost every desk in the developed world. Office, the bundled productivity suite, did the same to word processing and spreadsheets. By the late 1990s Microsoft was, by some measures, the most valuable company on earth.
The success drew the attention of regulators. On May 18, 1998 the U.S. Department of Justice and 20 states sued Microsoft for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, alleging that bundling Internet Explorer with Windows had illegally crushed Netscape. Gates's videotaped deposition, in which he quibbled over the meaning of words like "compete" and "we," became a public-relations disaster for the company. A federal judge ordered Microsoft broken in two in 2000. The order was overturned on appeal, and Microsoft settled in 2001 by agreeing to share APIs with third parties.
On January 13, 2000, Gates handed the CEO title to Steve Ballmer, his Harvard hallmate who had joined Microsoft in 1980. Gates took the new role of chief software architect and stayed deeply involved in product strategy. In June 2006 he announced he would transition out of day-to-day work over two years to focus on the foundation. Ray Ozzie took over as chief software architect on June 27, 2008. Gates remained chairman.
On February 4, 2014 Microsoft named Satya Nadella as its third CEO, replacing Ballmer. On the same day Gates stepped down as chairman to become a technology adviser to Nadella, and John W. Thompson, the former Symantec chief executive who had led the CEO search committee, took over as chairman of the board. Gates left the Microsoft board entirely on March 13, 2020.
| Role | Period |
|---|---|
| Co-founder | April 4, 1975 to present (legacy title) |
| President | 1975 to 1981 (informal); 1981 to 1982 |
| Chairman of the board | 1981 to February 2014 |
| Chief executive officer | 1981 to January 2000 |
| Chief software architect | January 2000 to June 27, 2008 |
| Technology adviser to the CEO | February 2014 to March 2020 |
| Member, board of directors | 1981 to March 13, 2020 |
Gates met Melinda French at a Microsoft press event in 1987. She was a product manager at the company. They married on January 1, 1994 on the Hawaiian island of Lanai in a ceremony for which Gates had reportedly booked all the helicopters on the island to keep paparazzi away.
They had three children: Jennifer Katharine Gates, born April 26, 1996; Rory John Gates, born May 23, 1999; and Phoebe Adele Gates, born September 14, 2002. The couple kept the children out of the public eye, capped their inheritances at a fraction of the family fortune, and raised them in a 66,000 square foot compound on Lake Washington known as Xanadu 2.0.
Gates and Melinda French Gates announced their divorce on May 3, 2021. It was finalized on August 2, 2021. Court filings showed an extensive separation agreement but no public details on terms. Reporting later linked the timing of the split to Melinda's discomfort with Bill's continued contact with Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier, after Epstein's 2008 conviction. Gates has acknowledged meeting Epstein several times beginning in 2011 and called the meetings a mistake. He has denied any involvement in Epstein's crimes.
Gates's mother Mary died of breast cancer in 1994. His father William Sr. died in September 2020 at age 94, after years of helping run the family foundation. His youngest daughter Phoebe became a public figure in her own right after co-founding the fashion-tech startup Phia in 2024.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was incorporated in 2000 from the merger of the Gates Learning Foundation and the William H. Gates Foundation. It became the largest private foundation in the world by assets, with an endowment that has hovered around US$67 to 75 billion in recent years, supplemented by a separate trust that holds incoming gifts from Warren Buffett.
The foundation focuses on global health (vaccines, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, polio), agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, family planning, and U.S. education. It is the largest single funder of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and a major backer of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. By the foundation's own count, programs it has supported are credited with helping prevent more than 80 million child deaths since 2000, mostly through routine vaccination at scale in low-income countries.
Warren Buffett joined the foundation as a third trustee in 2006 when he pledged the bulk of his Berkshire Hathaway stock, then worth roughly $30 billion, to it in annual installments. He resigned as a trustee in June 2021 but continued giving until 2025, when he announced his Berkshire shares would instead go to a trust controlled by his children.
Melinda French Gates resigned as co-chair on May 13, 2024, with effect from June 7, 2024, leaving the foundation with $12.5 billion to direct to her own work on women and families through her firm Pivotal Ventures. After her departure the board approved a name change. The foundation was officially renamed the Gates Foundation in early 2025, with CEO Mark Suzman saying the rename was meant to honor both William H. Gates Sr.'s legacy and Melinda's contributions while reflecting Bill as sole chair.
On May 8, 2025, the 25th anniversary of the foundation, Gates announced that he would give away "virtually all" of his remaining wealth through the foundation over the next two decades and that the foundation itself would sunset by December 31, 2045. He said the foundation would spend more than $200 billion between 2025 and 2045, doubling its current rate. "There are too many urgent problems to solve," he wrote, "for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people." The 2045 closure replaced the previous plan, written into the foundation's charter, that called for it to wind down 20 years after Gates's death.
In June 2010, Gates and Buffett launched The Giving Pledge with an initial 40 American billionaires committing to give at least half of their wealth to charity in their lifetimes or at death. The pledge has since expanded to more than 240 signatories from over 30 countries.
Gates has been an unusually loud voice on artificial intelligence among people his age and wealth. His public commentary tends to oscillate between two registers: a venture capitalist's enthusiasm for the technology's productivity gains, and an aging philanthropist's worry about who gets left behind.
On March 21, 2023 Gates published the essay "The Age of AI has begun" on his Gates Notes blog. It was, in effect, his official endorsement of large language models as a generational shift. He wrote that in his career he had seen only two technology demonstrations he would call revolutionary. The first was the graphical user interface, which he saw demonstrated by Charles Simonyi (then at Xerox PARC) in 1980 and which became the conceptual basis for Windows. The second was a demonstration by OpenAI in mid-2022.
Gates had challenged the OpenAI team to train a model that could pass an Advanced Placement Biology exam, a test he picked because answering it well required reasoning rather than just recall. He gave them what he expected would be two or three years to do it. They came back in a few months. In September 2022 the team showed him GPT-4 answering 59 of 60 multiple choice questions correctly and giving good responses to all six free-response questions. Gates wrote that he was "stunned." "I knew I had just seen the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface," he said.
The essay laid out his case that AI would change every sector and that, handled correctly, it could shrink the gap between rich and poor countries faster than any prior technology. Handled badly, it could entrench inequality and accelerate misuse. Gates argued that the first applications would be in health (medical advice for places with no doctors), education (a personal tutor for every child), and productivity (an AI personal agent for everyone, not just CEOs).
Gates has repeatedly predicted that AI will replace large fractions of skilled white-collar work within a decade. On The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in February 2025, he said that over the next ten years humans "won't be needed for most things" and that the kind of expertise once limited to "a great doctor or a great teacher" would become free and ubiquitous. He has framed this as good news for patients in poor countries who cannot see a specialist now. Critics have noted it is less obviously good news for the doctors themselves.
In 2024 he told CNBC Make It that if he were starting a new company he would build it around AI, and in late 2024 he predicted that within five years general-purpose AI assistants would handle most knowledge work that today requires a junior employee. He has been more cautious on timelines for fully autonomous AI systems, distinguishing the rapid progress of language models from the much harder problem of agents that can plan and act reliably over weeks.
The Gates Foundation has made AI a stated priority for its global health and agricultural programs. Its Grand Challenges program has funded dozens of projects using AI for early diagnosis of tuberculosis from chest X-rays, AI-assisted clinical decision support for community health workers in rural Africa, machine learning to predict malaria outbreaks, and large language model based tutoring tools for adolescent girls in low-income countries. Gates has personally championed the use of AI to compress the time it takes to develop new vaccines and to predict the genetic variants of pathogens like the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.
In agriculture, the foundation funds work on AI-driven crop disease detection (a smartphone app aimed at smallholder farmers identifying cassava diseases is one of its frequently cited examples) and on AI tools that help breeders predict which crop varieties will perform best under climate change.
Gates is no longer involved in Microsoft's day-to-day strategy, but he was Nadella's most visible cheerleader for the OpenAI partnership. Microsoft's investments in OpenAI, beginning with $1 billion in 2019 and expanding by an additional reported $10 billion in early 2023, are what made GPT-4 cheap to train and ChatGPT fast to deploy. The Azure infrastructure that runs OpenAI's models is the same infrastructure Microsoft has used to embed GPT-class models into Office (as Microsoft 365 Copilot), Bing, GitHub, and Windows.
Gates has consistently said the partnership is the most important strategic move Microsoft has made since the IBM deal of 1980. He has also said publicly that he believes the field will soon hit limits and that pure scaling of current models will not, on its own, get to fully general intelligence. He has called for international cooperation on safety standards and has supported voluntary commitments by frontier AI labs but has been less alarmist than some peers about existential risk from misaligned AI.
Gates founded Cascade Investment, LLC in 1995 as the holding company for his personal wealth outside Microsoft and the foundation. Cascade is run by Michael Larson, who has been Gates's chief investment officer since 1994. The firm is famously secretive about its holdings but its disclosed positions include a 71.3 percent stake in Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts (acquired through a 2021 deal with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal), large stakes in Republic Services and Ecolab, and roughly 270,000 acres of U.S. farmland, making Gates the largest private farmland owner in the country. The Kirkland, Washington firm manages tens of billions of dollars.
TerraPower is a nuclear reactor design company that Gates co-founded in 2006 (formally launched in 2008) and chairs. It is developing the Natrium reactor, a 345-megawatt sodium-cooled fast reactor with a molten salt energy storage system that lets it ramp output up and down with renewable supply. The Department of Energy is funding roughly half of the up to $4 billion cost of a demonstration plant in Kemmerer, Wyoming, on the site of a retiring coal plant. Gates personally attended the Kemmerer groundbreaking on June 10, 2024. The plant was originally scheduled to open in 2028 but slipped to 2030 in part because the high-assay low-enriched uranium fuel it needs has been hard to source outside Russia.
Breakthrough Energy is the umbrella for several climate vehicles Gates founded, beginning with Breakthrough Energy Coalition at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. The associated investment arm, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, has raised more than $3 billion across multiple funds and invests in long-duration energy storage, low-carbon steel and cement, sustainable aviation fuel, and other hard-to-abate sectors. Breakthrough Energy also runs a fellows program for early-stage scientists and a U.S. and European policy practice. Backers of BEV have included Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Mukesh Ambani, Jack Ma, and Masayoshi Son.
Gates Ventures is the private office that runs Gates's personal projects, his blog Gates Notes, his book research, and his policy and communications work. It is separate from the foundation.
| Title | Year | Co-author(s) | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Road Ahead | 1995 | Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Rinearson | Predictions about the personal computer revolution and the coming "information superhighway"; revised in 1996 to take the internet seriously after the first edition was criticized for underrating it |
| Business @ the Speed of Thought | 1999 | Collins Hemingway | Argued that companies should run on a "digital nervous system" of integrated software |
| How to Avoid a Climate Disaster | 2021 | (sole) | A plan to get global net greenhouse gas emissions to zero, organized around the cost of clean alternatives versus today's dirty ones (the "green premium") |
| How to Prevent the Next Pandemic | 2022 | (sole) | Lessons from COVID-19 and a proposal for a global outbreak response team called GERM |
| Source Code: My Beginnings | 2025 | (sole) | First volume of a planned three-part memoir; covers his life through 1978; debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list |
For much of the 1990s Gates was the public face of Microsoft, alternately admired as the boy genius of the personal computer revolution and disliked as a ruthless monopolist. His pie-in-the-face moment in Brussels in 1998, his strained antitrust deposition the same year, and the cultural shorthand of Microsoft as the Borg of Silicon Valley all date to that era.
His turn to philanthropy rehabilitated him in the public eye. By the mid-2010s polling consistently showed him as one of the most admired people in the world. The pandemic, his contact with Epstein, and the divorce eroded that. Conspiracy theories blossomed in 2020 and 2021 falsely claiming that Gates wanted to use COVID-19 vaccines to implant tracking microchips. He has called the rumors "crazy" and "evil."
Critics from the left have argued that the Gates Foundation, by virtue of its size, has too much influence over global health priorities and over U.S. K-12 education policy, where its support of the Common Core standards and of charter schools has been controversial. Critics in the agricultural development space have argued that the foundation's emphasis on improved seeds and fertilizers reflects an industrial-agriculture worldview that does not always fit smallholder African farming. Gates himself has acknowledged some of these criticisms while defending the foundation's results.
His large U.S. farmland holdings, his frequent flights on private jets, and what some see as an overreaching public role for a private citizen with no democratic mandate continue to draw scrutiny.
| Year | Honor | Country |
|---|---|---|
| 2002 | Knight of the Order of the Aztec Eagle | Mexico |
| 2005 | Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) | United Kingdom |
| 2006 | Order of the Crown (with Melinda French Gates) | Belgium |
| 2007 | Honorary Doctor of Laws | Harvard University |
| 2010 | Bower Award for Business Leadership | Franklin Institute |
| 2010 | Silver Buffalo Award | Boy Scouts of America |
| 2015 | Padma Bhushan (with Melinda French Gates) | India |
| 2016 | Presidential Medal of Freedom | United States (awarded by President Barack Obama) |
| 2017 | Légion d'honneur | France |
| 2022 | Hilal-i-Pakistan | Pakistan |
In 1999, Time magazine named Gates one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century. Forbes ranked him the world's richest person from 1995 through 2007 and again from 2009 through 2017.