Bill Gates

Gates was born into a wealthy Seattle family that prioritized competition, whether in board games or athletics. At age 13, he gained rare access to a Teletype terminal funded by the school's Mothers' Club, where he met Paul Allen and began programming in BASIC. His early obsession was so intense that he was banned from a local computer center for exploiting bugs to get free time, only to later be hired by that same company to find software vulnerabilities.

Before even graduating high school, Gates and Allen formed Traf-O-Data, a venture to automate traffic-flow data. This early experience in real-world software utility, combined with his near-perfect SAT score (1590/1600) and brief stint at Harvard, provided the intellectual and social foundation for his career. When the MITS Altair 8800 launched in 1975, Gates dropped out of Harvard, recognizing a fleeting window of opportunity to build a software industry from scratch.

The pivotal moment in Gates’s career was the 1980 deal with IBM. When IBM needed an operating system for its new PC, Gates didn't have one; he bought the rights to 86-DOS from another company for $50,000, refined it, and licensed it to IBM as PC-DOS. Crucially, he retained the right to license the software to other manufacturers. As "IBM-compatible" clones flooded the market, Microsoft’s MS-DOS became the de facto industry standard, creating a massive revenue stream without the overhead of hardware manufacturing.

This strategy of platform dominance continued with the release of Windows in 1985. By layering a graphical user interface over the established DOS foundation, Gates fended off competition from Apple and cemented Microsoft’s position at the center of the computing universe. For much of the next two decades, Gates’s focus on market share and developer ecosystems made him the world's wealthiest individual, becoming the first "centibillionaire" in 1999.

In Microsoft’s first five years, Gates personally reviewed and often rewrote every line of code the company produced. He was known as a demanding executive who prioritized technical elegance and market aggression. This "neat hack" philosophy drove the company to release era-defining products like Excel and Word, but it also led to accusations of anti-competitive behavior. Courts eventually upheld findings that Microsoft used its monopoly power to stifle rivals, a period that defined Gates's public image as a polarizing corporate "monopolist."

As the company grew, Gates transitioned from a developer-manager to a long-term strategist. He stepped down as CEO in 2000, passing the reins to Steve Ballmer, and assumed the role of Chief Software Architect. This shift allowed him to focus on the technical direction of products like Windows XP and 8.1 before eventually pivoting away from the company entirely to focus on global issues.

Starting in 2000, Gates began transferring his wealth and intensity to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Applying the same data-driven, results-oriented approach he used at Microsoft, the foundation became the world’s largest private charitable organization. His work shifted toward "eradicating" rather than "treating," with massive investments in vaccines and infrastructure to combat polio, malaria, and tuberculosis in developing nations.

In 2010, he expanded this influence by co-founding the Giving Pledge with Warren Buffett, a commitment for billionaires to give away the majority of their wealth. Even after his 2021 divorce and resignation from the Microsoft board in 2020, Gates remains a central figure in global policy, funding ventures in climate change (Breakthrough Energy) and next-generation nuclear power (TerraPower), effectively rebranding himself as a premier architect of global solutions.