BILL GATES: how college drop-out with a passion for computers became the world's richest businessman
HE IS known to his 20,000 employees across the world as Bill; he is famous to millions of Americans as Bill; his invitation to 10 Downing Street will presumably be addressed to Bill. But this man is not the President of the United States - although he does play golf with Bill Clinton - he is far richer and far more powerful than that. Bill Gates, founder of the Microsoft Corporation, is a phenomenon, a symbol of success.
William Gates III, now the richest businessman in the world, is an entrepreneur ahead of his time. He told the lowliest workers in his massive company to call him by his first name decades before Tony Blair cottoned on to the idea; he realised that if you had brains you could get away with being a nerd years before the term "geek chic" was invented; and, most crucially, he identified computer software as the market to tap ages before anybody else had even heard of the "World Wide Web".
And, of course, it worked. Time magazine called him "the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford of our age."
Since he co-founded Microsoft in 1974, Bill Gates has accumulated a personal fortune estimated at $18 billion ( £11 billion). One envious journalist calculated that this was the equivalent of nearly £1 for every year since the Big Bang created the Universe. On an average morning, he wakes up $20 million richer than when he went to sleep. He has more money than many countries, the gross national products of which are smaller than his salary. He has also turned many of his employees into dollar millionaires.
Bill Gates was born in 1955 to wealthy parents and grew up in Seattle, the area in which he has since chosen to base his company. He had an IQ of 170 and got a place at Lakeside, a school with a reputation for nurturing gifted pupils and - more importantly - with an enthusiastic computer department. He was seen as a swot and was not popular: "Very easy to sort of dislike," one fellow student said. But by the time he left, he had written computer programmes to produce the school's timetables and set up his own software firm to process traffic statistics.
From Lakeside, Gates got a place at Harvard to study applied mathematics, but he dropped out after a year to set up Microsoft with his friend Paul Allen. Their fantasy was to make computers as common as television sets and they realised that the way to do it was to concentrate not on the machines themselves but on the software, the information that made them work. They produced a computer language called BASIC and by the time he reached the age of 31, Gates was a billionaire.
Bill Gates is always portrayed as a typical computer nerd. He has all the characteristics such as steel-rimmed glasses and ill-fitting cardigans. He describes things as either cool, supercool or crummy. Some say that there are hints of autism in his behaviour: he finds eye contact difficult, rocks his body rhythmically backwards and forwards while talking to people, and will tap his foot on the floor for hours on end for no apparent reason.
But there is clearly more to him than this. He is a brilliant, some would say ruthless, businessman. At the age of 10, he drew up a written contract with his elder sister, leaving space for a witness signature, that gave him unlimited use of her baseball glove in return for $5. One former girlfriend, Melissa Ganus, once described how she had asked him what he would have done if he had not started Microsoft. "He told me, ΓÇÿNo matter, I would have been rich'," she said. "I thought he was the most fascinating man I had ever met. The public sees him as a geek but he was fascinating to listen to."
Gates is also enthusiastic about art. In 1994, he paid £20 million for a 72-page Leonardo da Vinci notebook. Alongside his 20 Ferraris at his $50 million home, where he lives with his wife Melinda French, he has images of paintings projected on to high-definition screens on his walls. If you can see them on your television set at home, he thinks, what is the point of visiting a gallery?
Microsoft is not just a business, it is a culture. The American writer Douglas Coupland immortalised it in Microserfs, a novel based around a group of brilliant software programmers trying to survive under the "Bill" regime. The Gates figure is "semi-visible at all times. Bill is a moral force, a force that shapes . . . A force with thick, thick glasses."
There is a joke, running on one of hundreds of anti-Bill websites on the Internet which reads: "Question: How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: None. Bill Gates just redefines Darkness as the new industry standard."
