Business person: Bill Gates - the richest man of our time

The new column “Business Person” tells the readers of “Megamind” about what stories and facts surround the most striking IT entrepreneurs from around the world, the value of companies under their management exceeds any reasonable limits. We will not be limited only to the “new wave” of businessmen and we will also tell about those who are called the “old school”.

Today, close-up is Bill Gates, who remains one of the richest people in the world with a fortune of $ 87 billion. Sometimes it seems that you can earn such a fortune only with the help of a fair amount of luck, but in fact Gates is one of the smartest managers who doesn’t afraid to make enemies with the development of Microsoft.
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Childhood, education, hobbies

William Henry Gates was born the third in the family of a lawyer and a former banker in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955. Gates's parents tried to steer him in their footsteps and help with a career as a lawyer. For this, parents even enrolled him in Lakeside High School, a high school where later Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen also studied.

Studying at Lakeside gave a serious impetus to understanding what exactly Gates wants to do. As part of Lakeside, the Lakeside Mothers Club club worked, providing access to the Teletype Model 30 computer, which was connected to the General Electric mainframe. Even then, Gates literally fell in love with the idea of ​​personal computers.

Moreover, Gates and Allen were so fascinated by the very concept of a computer that they used software bugs to gain additional access time. It was left without consequences and they were banned from the General Electric Computer Center Corporation from the mainframe.



Even then, Gates realized the benefits that computers can bring in life - he, without the knowledge of the school administration, used the internal Lakeside computers to form classes, consisting mainly of girls.

Before leaving Lakeside, Gate and Allen launched the first startup, Traf-O-Data, a computer that made it possible to read information from the city traffic meters for later analysis and transfer to the city administration.

In 1973, Gates entered Harvard, gaining 1590 points out of 1600 in the SAT test, but he was not going to grow in any way in the profile of his studies and, as a result, had a banal amusement with school computers. However, while studying at Harvard, he was able to acquire useful contacts, including the notorious Steve Ballmer, who later took an active part in the development and development of Microsoft.

Entrepreneurial experience

1974 was a turning point in the life of Bill Gates - MITS introduced the Altair 8800 computer, which became breakthrough by the standards of its time. It is based on the Intel 8080 processor, which greatly simplifies the programming process. Of course, the release of such a computer was not ignored by Gates and Allen. Almost immediately after the start of sales, they called MITS representatives and suggested optimizing the BASIC version for the Altair computer. At that time, they never worked with Altair computers, but wanted to do something for a fee in this area.

Within a few weeks, they were able to optimize BASIC for Altair, after which they immediately went to the MITS office in Albuquerque to demonstrate their work. The impression was sufficient - Gates and Allen were hired by MITS and they moved to New Mexico. At the same time, Gates never completed his studies in Garvada.



The partners called their team Micro-soft and opened a small office in Albuquerque. By this time, their company was discharged from MITS and at the end of 1976 they registered Microsoft as a company. By the way, around the same time, Bill Gates was caught driving without a license and took the famous 1977 snapshot at the police station.



In 1979, a company in Bellevue, Wash., And a year later, Steve Ballmer joined Microsoft and in 1988 he was appointed Senior Vice President, Sales.

During the first years of its work, Microsoft focused on writing new programming languages ​​for the personal computer market. At that time, Bill Gates became known as the CEO, personally evaluating the code written by each employee.



In 1980, a turning point in the development of the company would come - IBM needed to develop an operating system for a new personal computer and the corporation turned Microsoft. As part of this, Bill Gates quickly organized a takeover of a startup developing the 86-DOS operating system. After renaming to PC DOS, he sold the IBM operating system for $ 50,000.

But even after the purchase, IBM never asked to transfer exclusive rights to the implementation of PC DOS, and Microsoft never offered such conditions and began selling its own modification called MS-DOS. The success of the IBM PC was so phenomenal that other companies began developing their own computers that were compatible with IBM applications, and for this they needed to make a deal with Gates and Microsoft.



The company continued to grow at the expense of order flow from IBM, Compaq, Dell, and other computer manufacturers — each of them needed DOS-based software. In fact, it was these companies that made Microsoft the center of a new generation of computers.

Already in 1983, Microsoft received $ 55 million from software sales, becoming the largest company in the computer business. The release of Windows 1.0 in 1985 marked the beginning of a rivalry between Microsoft and Apple, as well as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs personally. Then Jobs accused Microsoft of stealing the concept of a graphical interface, and Apple even sued for the illegal use of proprietary technologies. This trial Microsoft will be able to win only in 1993.



Love in the hard type of company management pushed Gates to launch the Microsoft Office suite, which literally conquered the market at that time. He adhered to a similar management style among the senior managers of Microsoft - the head of the company could interrupt any speech with the words: “I did not hear anything more stupid than this”, forcing opponents to defend their opinion.

A few years later, on March 13, 1986, Microsoft placed shares on the stock exchange at a price of $ 21 and on the same day their cost jumped to $ 28, and by 1987, Gates had become a billionaire at the age of 31. It was Microsoft that made Gates the richest person in the world in 1995 - this title was entrusted to him until 2007, and he returned it to himself in 2009, and in 2014, remaining the richest person to this day.

At that time, in fact, the only company that could oppose Microsoft remained Apple. In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to her position as CEO and he had no choice but to accept an investment of $ 150 million from Gates.

But such an aggressive policy against competitors has brought bad results - the company met with a lawsuit in 1998, when Microsoft took over the antitrust commission in the US. Subsequently, Microsoft agreed to reform its approach to business in order to avoid problems in the future.

After just a couple of years in 2000, Bill Gates put Microsoft under the leadership of Steve Ballmer. Many of his decisions as head of Microsoft were controversial, but still allowed the company to remain a leader in the global market.

Finally, Bill Gates retired from Microsoft management in 2014, choosing Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella as successors. Microsoft co-founder then took the position of technology adviser for selected successors.

Charity and the desire to change the world as a hobby

The enormous fortune of Bill Gates could have been even greater, but instead of merely accumulating, he takes an active part in charity. During his life, he donated more than $ 36 billion to charity - from a variety of donations to universities such as the Washington, Harvard, Detroit Public Library and many others, to AIDS funds, the United Nations International Health Fund and others.

As part of a charitable activity in 1994, he launched the William Gates Foundation, and in 1999 changed his name to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Among the priorities of the charitable foundation was the development of medicine and the improvement of the health care system, together with overcoming hunger in poor countries.



But Bill Gates didn’t stop at his own donations to charitable foundations - along with Warren Buffett he persuaded 60 billionaires to take part in the Giving Pledge campaign - each of them promised to donate most of his fortune during his lifetime or after his death. The main objective of the Giving Pledge program was “an attempt to encourage the richest people and their families to donate most of their wealth to philanthropy.” As of 2010, 69 billionaires from the United States have joined the program.

As it happens with any large projects or famous personalities, Bill Gates and his foundation have been repeatedly criticized for their lack of transparency and the desire to invest in the most profitable areas. One can argue for a long time about the effectiveness of using his state, but it is already obvious that Bill Gates had a tremendous impact on the development of various areas of modern society.