Bill Gates' Success

In 1975, Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen established the world's largest software business, Microsoft. Gates wrote his first software program at the age of thirteen. While he was in high school he helped form a group of programmers who computerized their school’s payroll system and founded Traf-O-Data, a company that sold traffic-counting systems to local governments. In 1973, he became a student at Harvard University, where he also met Steve Ballmer who is now Microsoft's chief executive officer. They began by adapting BASIC, a popular programming language used on large computers, for use on microcomputers. With the success of this project, Gates left Harvard during his junior year and, with Allen, formed Microsoft.

One of the first projects Gates and Allen set out on was to make an operating system for computers famously known as MS-DOS to International Business Machines Corporation—then the world’s biggest computer supplier and industry pacesetter—for use on its first microcomputer, IBM. IBM quickly set the technical standard for the PC industry, and MS-DOS likewise pushed out competing for operating systems. By the start of the 1990s, he had become the face in the PC industry’s ultimate kingmaker. Gates amassed a huge paper fortune as the company’s largest individual shareholder. He quickly became a paper billionaire in 1986, and within a decade his net worth had reached into the tens of billions of dollars. At age 31, Gates becomes the youngest billionaire ever. He meets his future wife, Melinda French, at a Microsoft event in New York. In 1990, The Federal Trade Commission begins an investigation into possible collusion between IBM and Microsoft.

The FTC charges that IBM and Microsoft collaborated to divvy up the market for operating systems in an anticompetitive way, with IBM’s OS/2 capturing the high-end of the market and Microsoft’s Windows covering the low-end of the market. In July, at age 39 and with a fortune of $12.9 billion, Gates becomes the world’s richest man. Later that summer, Microsoft introduces Internet Explorer to the world, as part of Windows 95. The Road Ahead, Gates’ book about his vision for the digital future, holds the No. 1 spot on The New York Times best-seller list for seven weeks. Gates begins to shift Microsoft’s focus toward the emerging Internet. In 1995, computers were still mostly for office and productivity. But Windows 95 brought with it a word that consumers understood: “Start.” Start what? Start anything.” There was also built-in, broad support for multimedia, which helped propel an explosion of CD-ROM titles. The release was a massive success. Microsoft sold seven million copies within the first five weeks of its launch and Windows 95 quickly became the number one operating system on the market. As thrilling and as innovative as that was, nothing will eclipse Bill Gates' dance at the press conference - not even Microsoft's introduction of the now-iconic Start button, the taskbar and a support for filenames up to 250 characters (hard to believe now but the release of these new features was a huge deal at the time). Bill Gates became the richest man on the planet at the age of 39. He stayed at number one on the Forbes list of the World's Richest People until 2007.

According to Wikipedia, Bill Gates was worth more than $101 billion in 1999; while Wired reports that, when Microsoft stock hit a high in 1996, Gates was earning $30 million a day. He's now third on the Forbes list (behind his friend Warren Buffet and Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helu) with an estimated fortune of $58 billion. As Bill Gates clocks out of his day job at Microsoft, the world will arguably be a better place for it. Inspired by the work of John D Rockefeller, Gates and his wife Melinda's head up the charitable behemoth that is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2006, Warren Buffet gifted $31 billion to the Foundation, which already had over $30 billion of Gates' own money in its coffers. In 2007 alone, the Foundation spent over $2 billion on global education and health initiatives.