Bill Gates Biography

William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is the co-founder, chairman, former chief software architect, and former CEO of Microsoft Corporation. He is also the founder of Corbis, a digital image archiving company. The Forbes international rich list has ranked him as the world's richest person for the last twelve years straight. In 1999, Gates' wealth briefly surpassed $100 billion, making him the world's first centibillionaire. When family wealth is considered, his family ranks second behind the Walton family.
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Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Since amassing his fortune, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money (about 52% of his total fortune) to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founded in 2000. He, his wife Melinda and U2's lead singer Bono were collectively named by Time as the 2005 Persons of the Year. 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". Gates has announced that he will move to a part-time role with Microsoft (namely surrendering the power of managing day-to-day operations) in 2008 to begin a career in philanthropy, but will remain as chairman.

Bill Gates married Melinda French of Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. Melinda has given birth to three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). Bill Gates' house is one of the most expensive houses in the world, and is a modern 21st century earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. According to King County public records, as of 2006, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is just under $1 million. Also among Gates' private acquisitions are the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci which Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994, and a rare Gutenberg Bible.

Gates and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at the WEF in Davos, January 26, 2003In 2000, Gates founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization, with his wife. The foundation's grants have provided funds for college scholarships for under-represented minorities, AIDS prevention, diseases prevalent in third world countries, and other causes. In 2000, the Gates Foundation endowed the University of Cambridge with $210 million for the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. The Foundation has also pledged over $7 billion to its various causes, including $1 billion to the United Negro College Fund; and as of 2005, had an estimated endowment of $29.0 billion. He has spent about a third of his lifetime income on charity. Journalist Greg Palast suggests that the Gates Foundation is used to make tactical donations to hide media-sensitive humanitarian side-effects of treaties, such as the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which Gates has supported. TRIPS requires countries to agree to respect drug and other patents, therefore preventing the local manufacture of existing pharmaceuticals still under patent such as AIDS drugs in Africa

Gates has received two honorary doctorates, from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002 and Waseda University in 2005. Gates was also given an honorary KBE (Knighthood) from Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in 2005, in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has stated that Gates is probably the most "spammed" person in the world, receiving as many as 4,000,000 e-mails per day in 2004, most of which were junk. Gates has almost an entire department devoted to filtering out junk emails. In an article, Gates himself has said that most of this junk mail "offers to help [him] get out of debt or get rich quick", which "would be funny (given his financial state) if it weren't so irritating".

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BILL GATES BIOGRAPHY