Bill Gates has worn many hats: software creator, tech CEO, billionaire, philanthropist, and vaccine proponent among them. It’s an impressive resume, and Gates doesn’t seem poised to stop any time soon.
As a child, Bill maintained a comfortable middle-class life and a close relationship with his mother. Considering his high SAT score — 1590 out of 1600 — and the fact that he enjoyed reading the encyclopedia as a kid, it’s no surprise that Gates has come as far as he has, but he originally enrolled in Harvard with the intent of taking law, but his heart always remained with computers. In 1975, Gates and his high-school friend Paul Allen founded Microsoft. Their software turned out to be the perfect software for IBM’s hardware. Just a few years later, Microsoft had offices around the world. When the company went public in 1986, Gates became a millionaire at just 31 years old.
Despite this initial success of Microsoft, Bill Gates was always worried about competition, and he had plenty from rival tech company Apple and its leader Steve Jobs. This pushed the company to continue innovating, and Microsoft branched out from just an operating system to software. This ensured the company’s continued success, but Gates was increasingly concerned with increasing health and education around the world.
Gates hasn’t been Microsoft’s CEO since 2000 when he turned the job over to Steve Ballmer. Although Gates remained chief software architect and member of the board, his time with the company was limited. By 2008, Gates had decided to end full-time work with the company so he could focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And in 2014, Gates stepped down as chairman entirely. Since then, he and his wife have focused on their foundation.
More recently, Gates and his foundation have focused on the search for a universal flu vaccine. In 2018, he paired with Google co-founder Larry Page to provide the initial $12 million in funding that would be broken up into research grants and distributed to teams that want to work on finding a medical breakthrough. It only makes sense that Gates has been part of the push to find a vaccine for the novel coronavirus that first appeared in 2019.