Bill Gates

William Henry “Bill” Gates III

Born

October 28, 1955 ) (age 54)Seattle,

Washington, USA

ResidenceMedina, Washington,

USA

Alma materHarvard University

(dropped out in 1975)

Occupation

Chairman of MicrosoftCo-Chair of Bill &

Melinda Gates FoundationDirector of Berkshire Hathaway

CEO of Cascade Investment

Net worth ▼US$50 billion (2009)

Spouse(s)Melinda Gates (1994–

present)

Children 3

At 13 (in the Lakeside School) Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC.

He wrote his first computer program: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer.

For school administrators Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes.

At the age of 17 Bill Gates served as a congressional page in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973 (he scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT) and enrolled at Harvard College.

SAT score of 1590 corresponded roughly to an IQ of 170, a figure that has been cited by the press.

Bill Gates' mugshot from a traffic violation in 1977

While at Harvard, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer, his computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou. He remained in contact with Paul Allen.

In 1975 Bill with his partners opened a partnership “Microsoft”.

By 1980 the sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major player in the industry.

MITS Altair 8800 Computer with 8-inch (200 mm) floppy disk system

Management style Gates's role at Microsoft

for most of its history was primarily a management and executive role. However, he was an active software developer on the company's programming language products.

On June 15, 2006, Gates announced that he would dedicate himself to philanthropy.

Bill Gates giving his deposition at Microsoft on August 27, 1998

Personal life Gates married Melinda

French from Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. They have three children.

Gates is known as an avid reader. He also enjoys playing bridge, tennis and golf. Bill and Melinda Gates, June 2009

The Gates' home is an earth-sheltered house in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington.

The total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is $991,000.

Gates was number one on the "Forbes 400" list from 1993 through to 2007 and number one on Forbes list of "The World's Richest People" from 1995 to 2007 and 2009.

Philanthropy In 1994 Bill Gates created the

William H. Gates Foundation. In 2000, Gates and his wife

combined three family foundations into one to create the charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the largest operated charitable foundation in the world.

In November 2006, he and his wife were awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for their philanthropic work around the world in the areas of health and education.

Melezhikov Dmitri