Hey guys, welcome to three minute reviews,
where we talk about the most important facts
about a topic of your choice in under three
minutes. Today’s topic is the Bill Gates.
William Henry "Bill" Gates, born 1955, is an American computer
programmer, inventor, businessman, and philanthropist.
Today he is always ranked in the Forbes list
of the world's wealthiest people and according
to Bloomberg List of Billionaires he has a
net worth of approximately 83 billion dollars
as of March 2015.
Bill Gates was born in Seattle in an upper-middle-class
family. His father was a lawyer, and his mother
served on the board of directors of two different
banks.
At 13, he enrolled in the Lakeside
School where he had his first contact with
a Teletype terminal and a block of computer
time from General Electric. Gates immediately
took an interest in programming and wrote
his first computer program on this machine:
an implementation of tic-tac-toe .
Gates graduated in 1973 and was a National Merit Scholar enrolling
at Harvard College. Gates did not have a definite
study plan and spent a lot of time using school's
computers.
He remained in contact with his old friend
Paul Allen, and in 1975
they decided to start their own software company
and Gates dropped out of college.
They named their partnership "Micro-Soft".
In 1980 IBM approached Microsoft
regarding its upcoming personal computer,
the IBM PC for which they needed an operating
system.
A few weeks later, Gates presented a software
solution using DOS and closed an exclusive
licensing deal. Gates retained the copyrights
on the operating system, and eventually licensed
them to other hardware vendors.
In 1985 Microsoft launched
its first version of windows, a huge success,
that made Microsoft the biggest player in
the market. During his career at Microsoft,
Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO
and chief software architect, and was also
the largest shareholder until 2014.
Today most of Gates’s assets are held in
Cascade Investment, an entity through which
he owns stakes in more than three dozen companies,
including businesses in railways, real estate
and energy. He owns only about 3% of
Microsoft.
In 2000, Gates and his wife created the charitable
"Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation".
 
He has already donated $28 billion to his foundation
but the couple plans to eventually donate
95% of their wealth to charity.
