Bill Gates Career | Co Founded the Microsoft Corporation

Bill Gates | Life Story, Career, Founder of Microsoft, World Top No.1 Software Company 

Bill Gates, born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He co-founded Microsoft Corporation, the largest personal computer software company in the world.

Early life and education

Gates wrote his first software program when he was 13. In high school, he helped create a group of programmers who computerized their school’s payroll system. They also started Traf-O-Data, a company that sold traffic-counting systems to local governments.

In 1975, while a sophomore at Harvard University, Gates teamed up with his friend Paul G. Allen from his hometown to develop software for the first microcomputers. They began by adapting BASIC, a popular programming language from large computers, for microcomputers. Following the success of this project, Gates left Harvard during his junior year and formed Microsoft with Allen.

Founding Microsoft and shaping the PC revolution

Gates’s influence in the early microcomputer industry grew when Microsoft licensed an operating system called MS-DOS to International Business Machines Corporation. At the time, IBM was the largest computer supplier in the world and set the pace for the industry. This agreement allowed MS-DOS to dominate and push out competing operating systems.

Although Microsoft operated independently, this strained relations with IBM. Gates skillfully ensured that IBM relied on him for essential software. Manufacturers of IBM-compatible PCs also sought Microsoft for their basic software. By the early 1990s, Gates had established himself as the decisive figure in the PC industry.

Building a fortune and a public profile

Thanks to Microsoft’s success, Gates accumulated a vast wealth as the company’s largest shareholder. He became a billionaire in 1986, and within ten years, his net worth soared into the tens of billions of dollars, making him, by some estimates, the richest private individual in the world.

Initially, Gates preferred to stay out of the highlight, managing civic and philanthropic activities through one of his foundations. However, as Microsoft’s influence and reputation grew, especially with the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust scrutiny, Gates reluctantly took on a more visible role.

Competitors, especially those in Silicon Valley, depicted him as overly ambitious and willing to profit from nearly every electronic transaction. His supporters, however, admired his sharp business sense, adaptability, and relentless drive to improve the usefulness of computers and electronics through

software.

Responding to the rise of the Internet 

These traits were evident when Gates quickly reacted to the surge of public interest in the Internet. Between 1995 and 1996, Gates vigorously redirected Microsoft toward developing software solutions for consumers and businesses online. He also created the Windows CE operating system platform for connecting non-computer devices like home televisions and personal digital assistants. Additionally, he launched the Microsoft Network to compete with America Online (AOL) and other Internet providers. Through his company Corbis, he acquired the extensive Bettmann photo archives and other collections for electronic distribution.

Microsoft Corporation Bill Gates Introduced Windows XP operating system on 2001 Conference.

Philanthropy and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation 

Beyond his work at Microsoft, Gates gained recognition for his philanthropy. With his then-wife Melinda, he started the William H. Gates Foundation in 1994, which was renamed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 1999. This foundation funded global health programs and local projects in

the Pacific Northwest. 

In the late 1990s, the couple also supported North American libraries through the Gates Library Foundation, which was renamed Gates Learning Foundation in 1999. They raised money for minority study grants with the Gates Millennium Scholars program. 

“I think 20 years is the right balance between giving as much as we can to make progress on these things and giving people a lot of notice that now this money will be gone.” —Bill Gates on accelerating efforts to improve global health and education 

In 2006, Warren Buffett announced a continuing gift to the foundation. By 2025, around 41% of the foundation’s funds had come from Buffett, with the rest drawn from Gates’s Microsoft wealth. These donations helped the foundation become a powerful voice in global health and education—what Gates has called his “second and final career.” 

In 2010, Gates and Buffett introduced the Giving Pledge, a campaign encouraging billionaires to devote most of their wealth to charitable causes. Gates and Melinda French Gates were among the first to sign. 

Gates expanded on that promise in May 2025, announcing he would donate 99% of his remaining fortune—valued at about $107 billion—to the Gates Foundation. This commitment allows the foundation to spend $200 billion over the next 20 years, after which it plans to wind down operations by 2045, much earlier than originally planned. 

With a $9 billion annual budget over the next 20 years, Gates said the foundation aims to focus on a smaller number of high-impact goals. These goals include eradicating polio, reducing childhood malnutrition, and controlling diseases like malaria before it winds down. 

Later career and transition from Microsoft 

At the start of the 21st century, the foundation continued its work in global health and development, as well as community and education initiatives in the United States. After a brief transition, Gates stepped away from daily oversight of Microsoft in June 2008, though he remained the chairman of the board to focus more on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

In February 2014, he resigned as chairman but stayed on as a board member until 2020. During this time, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. The documentary series Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates aired in 2019. Two years later, Gates and his wife divorced. 

Memoir explores early life 

In February 2025, Gates published Source Code: My Beginnings, the first in a planned three-part autobiography. The memoir gives a detailed look into Gates’s childhood, high school, and college years. 

In an interview with CBS News, Gates discussed the book, mentioning his somewhat privileged childhood, the struggles he faced in social situations, and how he viewed the world through a “prism of mathematics” during his upbringing. The book concludes in 1979, just before Microsoft would

skyrocket into a global success. 

Legacy and influence 

It is yet to be seen if Gates’s remarkable success will ensure a lasting legacy among great Americans. Historians will likely regard him as a business figure as crucial to computers as John D. Rockefeller was to oil. Gates himself acknowledged the dangers of success in his 1995 bestseller, The Road Ahead, where he stated, “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”

Bill Gates Foundation of Global Fund

Twenty years ago, if you lived in one of the 100 countries where malaria was endemic and your child got a fever and chills, chances are you wouldn’t get a definitive diagnosis. The health clinic you visited would probably assume it was malaria. Even though the presumption would likely be right, the medicine you’d buy might not even help, because of widespread drug resistance.

Health officials would probably never know that a lot of kids in your community were sick or didn’t respond to the medicine. That means they couldn’t plan the right interventions, and scientists wouldn’t have the information they needed to develop new drugs.

But that was before a huge network of community health workers were trained to go door to door with rapid diagnostic tests and highly effective drugs. Before they were counting every case and sending the information on mobile devices to a comprehensive data system so health officials could address outbreaks quickly and scientists could track drug resistance. And before the mass distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets, which dramatically reduced the chances that your child would get malaria in the first place.

Which is to say, that was before the Global Fund. Over the past two decades, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has partnered with governments, nonprofits, and communities to fight these diseases using existing tools and constantly investing in new approaches.

The “Swiss Army Knife” of global health

I’ve long said that the Global Fund is one of the kindest things people have ever done for one another. It’s also one of the most effective. Over the past two decades, programs supported by the Global Fund have reduced the death toll from AIDS, TB, and malaria by more than half and have saved more than 50 million lives. In sub-Saharan Africa, life expectancy has increased by 12 years thanks in part to the Global Fund.

In sub-Saharan Africa, life expectancy has increased by 12 years thanks...to the Global Fund.
The Global Fund is the Swiss Army Knife of global health—it’s equipped with many tools and can solve many problems. And sometimes those problems aren’t AIDS, or TB, or malaria. As transformative as the Global Fund has been for those diseases, it has also made a massive difference with COVID. during the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that low-income countries, and by extension the whole world, have avoided a worst-case scenario during the pandemic because of what the Global Fund has already made possible: lab capacity, diagnostic tests, health workers, even multilateral relationships that have enabled quick and trusting collaboration. On top of that, the Global Fund has been the largest provider of COVID funding to low-income countries for everything except vaccines.

In Uganda, plummeting deaths and rising hope
To see what these Global Fund investments have meant in one country, consider the example of Uganda. Uganda has been fighting AIDS, TB, and malaria for a long time—and with pretty great success. Since the founding of the Global Fund, AIDS deaths there have fallen by 75% and malaria deaths by 57%. Tuberculosis deaths have increased somewhat, but they’d be 10 times higher without control efforts.

Because of the Global Fund, Uganda was able to respond quickly as COVID hit.

When oxygen cylinders were scarce, the Global Fund procured them and got them to Ugandan hospitals because of relationships and logistical capacity built up over years.
Financial tools and grants already in place with the government and the private sector made it possible to quickly mobilize funding.

Health workers who were trusted in communities to diagnose and treat AIDS, TB, and malaria shifted quickly to deliver COVID tests. And diagnostic devices were adapted to test for COVID. Nearly three-quarters of Uganda’s COVID tests were made possible by the Global Fund.

In the face of this historic threat, the world has been in a much better spot because of the Global Fund. Still, COVID has dealt a big blow. Malaria deaths are now rising. TB deaths are rising. Progress against HIV is slowing. It took 20 years to cut deaths from these diseases in half. We can’t wait 20 years to cut them in half again. Even though things have improved a lot, a child still dies every minute from malaria.

But we know what works. And amazing innovations are on the way, like better vaccines and diagnostics, new drugs to get ahead of drug resistance, and innovative ways to control the threat of malaria—like a sugar-bait trap that kills mosquitos, and only mosquitos. When these new tools are ready, the Global Fund will provide the resources to get them from the labs into communities. In other words, the Global Fund is the most important innovation of them all.

Why the Gates Foundation is committing $912 million to replenish the Global Fund

At the Gates Foundation, we are all in with the Global Fund—just as we have been since its founding. This month, we’re committing US$912 million to help replenish the Global Fund through 2026. And we’re asking leaders to make a big commitment too, so the world has a shot at making the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals a reality. Governments, the private sector, and nonprofits have all played a huge role in the Global Fund’s success—and are key to its future.

If everyone does their part, the Global Fund can save 20 million more lives over three years from the diseases it was created to fight. And it can continue to equip the world to respond to threats that haven’t yet emerged.