Beautiful People and Beautiful Events
Bill Gates
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On
June 15, 2006, Bill Gates, at age 50 the richest man in the world, announced
that he would resign his job at Microsoft Corporation and devote himself
to the Gates Foundation, a charitable fund which he runs with his father
and wife. The announcement was a major surprise. He told a stunned audience,
“With great wealth comes a responsibility…to help those
most in need.”
Since he created the Foundation a decade ago, Gates has demonstrated an innovative approach to giving money. Instead of using the money to put his name on local buildings, as many wealthy philanthropists do, Gates has directed 70% of his fund toward global efforts like fighting disease in Africa. The Foundation’s motto is: “Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to reduce inequities and improve lives around the world.”
Gates results-oriented approach to charity has been welcomed by public health officials. As one official from Johns Hopkins University said, “It wasn’t that long ago people thought we couldn’t make a malaria vaccine. But Bill said, ‘No, let’s do it’…We had amazing results!”
The Gates Foundation is the largest private foundation in the world, with gifts exceeding the foreign aid of many nations. Its contribution to public health alone rivals that of the World Health Organization. The Foundation contributes half of world funding for development of new drugs to fight diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. Recently, the Foundation allocated $1.5 billion to the immunization of children.
Gates has helped bring about a major shift in global attention toward disease and poverty eradication in Africa. In recognition of this, he was knighted last year by Queen Elizabeth, awarded the “Spanish Nobel Prize” (the Prince of Asturias Award for International Cooperation) in May 2006, and he and his wife were named “Person of the Year” for 2005 by Time magazine.
Gates is sometimes described as the smartest person in the world. As a high school student, he founded a company which sold traffic flow data systems to state governments. Later, at Harvard University, he created software for the first hardware PC, which did not even exist at the time. As soon as the first consumer processor chip was released, he dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft at the age of 20.
He became legendary at Microsoft for his “mental processing power.” He works on two computers at once, sends 100 emails per day, and receives up to 4,000,000 emails per day. He has been called the “most spammed” person in the world. Every year as head of Microsoft, he has gone on week-long retreats in the woods, accessible only by helicopter, to read hundreds of technical papers about the future of technology.
When he leaves Microsoft, he will be replaced by three different executives. No one else has such a broad understanding of technology from the level of software code to the level of global finance.
He has been the world’s richest man for the last twelve years. At the peak of his fortunes (before he began making large charitable donations), he was worth over $100 billion —the world’s first “centibillionaire.”
He lives in an “intelligent house.” While constructing the house, he was very concerned about saving an old tree next to the new driveway. The tree is now monitored by computers in Microsoft headquarters, which control its water supply.
He was a vegetarian for a few years in the 1980s.
