Bill Gates

Bill Gates was born in Seattle into a well-off lawyer's family; his father was a prominent attorney and his mother a public-spirited teacher and community activist, and at home they nicknamed him "the Third." As a boy he attended the private Lakeside School, where a time-sharing computer terminal unexpectedly ignited his obsession with programming; it was also there that he met the like-minded Paul Allen. In an age when the personal computer was still science fiction, this clever and competitive boy already faintly sensed the coming of a revolution.

After entering Harvard, the code in the computer lab fascinated him more than the classroom. In 1975, a microcomputer called the Altair 8800 featured in Popular Electronics made him and Allen realize the opportunity was fleeting—they wrote a BASIC interpreter for it overnight, and after a successful demonstration, Gates resolutely dropped out of Harvard. A bet on software, rather than hardware, was thus placed: he firmly believed that in the future there would be a computer on every desk, and that what was truly scarce were the programs to make it run.

In its early days, Microsoft was no more than a small workshop in a little New Mexico town; the turning point came from a partnership with IBM. Gates provided the operating system for IBM's personal computer but, with astonishing business instinct, retained the licensing rights—MS-DOS spread across the world with the proliferation of the IBM PC, laying the groundwork for Microsoft's future dominance. Then Windows, with its graphical interface, climbed step by step to the top of the desktop; Microsoft's IPO created countless millionaires, and Gates himself became the richest man in the world in his thirties, the most dazzling and most controversial symbol of the digital age.

The pinnacle of power also invited scrutiny. When Windows nearly monopolized the desktop and Internet Explorer was bundled and pushed, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a protracted antitrust lawsuit, and Microsoft at one point faced the prospect of being broken up. This storm forced Gates, the ever-triumphant boy genius, to confront the responsibilities and boundaries that come with market dominance. His later remark that "success is a lousy teacher" is precisely a sober reflection on those years.

From the new century, he began a thorough transformation. Stepping down as CEO and withdrawing from daily operations, he shifted his focus to the Gates Foundation he co-founded with Melinda, devoting himself to global health, vaccines, and the eradication of polio and malaria, and joining Buffett to launch the Giving Pledge. He once warned in a speech that humanity was underprepared for pandemics, and for that became a target of conspiracy theories during the pandemic. In his later years he went through a divorce, left Microsoft's board, and solemnly pledged to devote nearly all of his wealth to charity, winding down the foundation within a set period. From the entrepreneur who shaped the personal computer era to the philanthropist devoted to giving his fortune away, Gates's life is a long experiment in how to create wealth—and how to let it go.