Bill Gates - creator of Microsoft
Who is Bill Gates?
American entrepreneur and chairman of Microsoft, William Henry Gates, was born in October 1955. During his career at Microsoft he has held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and he remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 9 percent of the common stock.
Of the personal computer revolution, Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs. Even though Bill Gates is admired by many people, there are many that criticise his business tactics, as they consider them to be anti-competitive.
Bill Gates' early life
William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates, Jr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was very wealthy, as his father was a prominent lawyer and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate Bank and the United Way.
Gates has one older sister, Kristi, and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had dropped his own "III" suffix.
In elementary school, Bill Gates excelled particularly in Mathematics and the Sciences. At the age of 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, which was Seattle's most exclusive preparatory school.
Gates was active in the Boy Scouts of America as a youth, where he achieved the second highest rank, Life Scout. Gates stated that on his SATs he scored 1590. In the fall of 1973, he enrolled at Harvard College, intending to get a pre-law degree, but he didn't have a definite study plan and eventually left without his degree.
Whilst Bill Gates was at Harvard, he met his future business partner Steve Ballmer, whom he later appointed as CEO of Microsoft. At the same time, he co-authored and published a paper on algorithms with computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.
