The life story of Bill Gates is an extraordinary tale, seeing him grow from being bullied as a child to become the richest man on Earth, but what’s truly fascinating is where the story goes from there. Since stepping back from his role at Microsoft, Gates has used his enormous wealth to tackle the biggest problems facing humanity today, fighting to alleviate poverty and disease and ultimately solve the issue of climate change.
Bullies and tornados
Gates was born in 1955 in Seattle, and while his family was prosperous his childhood was still filled with adversity and challenges. One of the most alarming events happened when Bill was just seven years old; a tornado ripped through the View Ridge neighborhood where he grew up and caused enormous damage to the Gates’ home, throwing their garage into a neighboring garden and ripping the roof off of the house. It’s clear that this incident left a long-standing impression on a young Bill, who some 50 years later would go on to file patents on new technologies for controlling and preventing hurricanes and tornados.
A youthful Bill Gates modelling Microsoft products in the 1980s
Life was also difficult for Bill at school; while always an exemplary student, he was small for his age and subjected to bullying throughout his school years. Fortunately, Bill was able to meet several like-minded students at his school’s computer club, including one, Paul Allen, who would go on to become not just a friend but a business partner. Their first venture together, Traf-O-Data, was not successful. They founded their second business, called Microsoft, in 1975, and it would go on to become the biggest company on Earth.
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The life story of Bill Gates is an extraordinary tale, seeing him grow from being bullied as a child to become the richest man on Earth, but what’s truly fascinating is where the story goes from there. Since stepping back from his role at Microsoft, Gates has used his enormous wealth to tackle the biggest problems facing humanity today, fighting to alleviate poverty and disease and ultimately solve the issue of climate change.
Bullies and tornados
Gates was born in 1955 in Seattle, and while his family was prosperous his childhood was still filled with adversity and challenges. One of the most alarming events happened when Bill was just seven years old; a tornado ripped through the View Ridge neighborhood where he grew up and caused enormous damage to the Gates’ home, throwing their garage into a neighboring garden and ripping the roof off of the house. It’s clear that this incident left a long-standing impression on a young Bill, who some 50 years later would go on to file patents on new technologies for controlling and preventing hurricanes and tornados.
A youthful Bill Gates modelling Microsoft products in the 1980s
Life was also difficult for Bill at school; while always an exemplary student, he was small for his age and subjected to bullying throughout his school years. Fortunately, Bill was able to meet several like-minded students at his school’s computer club, including one, Paul Allen, who would go on to become not just a friend but a business partner. Their first venture together, Traf-O-Data, was not successful. They founded their second business, called Microsoft, in 1975, and it would go on to become the biggest company on Earth.
Few would have predicted this outcome. Traf-O-Data did something people understood; it collated traffic data from automated roadside observers and sold that data to traffic engineers. Microsoft sold computer operating systems, something that very few people at the time understood, or even knew that they needed. Nonetheless, this strange new product became ubiquitous as the home computer boom spread throughout the 1980s, with more and more people coming to rely upon Microsoft’s products to make their computers function. By the time the Internet started to become a global phenomenon in the late 1990s, it was Microsoft’s software that enabled the vast majority of users to get their first taste of online life.
Bill showing off the first version of Windows in the early 90s
Looking back, it’s surprising to think that Bill Gates was the world’s richest person before most people had even heard of the Internet; he overtook Japanese real estate developer Yoshiaki Tsutsumi in 1995, with a reported personal wealth of $12.9bn. 1995 was a pivotal year for Microsoft as it saw the launch of the wildly successful Windows 95 - the first of Microsoft’s products to enable Internet browsing - which was in turn dwarfed by the launch of the more online-focused Windows 98. By 1999, Gates was worth $90bn, and from that point onward he began the process of stepping back from his work at Microsoft and looking at ways to use his incredible wealth to change the world for the better.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The following year, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was created, and swiftly became one of the largest privately held charitable organizations on the planet. The full list of the Foundation’s activities would be far too long to outline here, but they can be broken down into two main categories.
Firstly, the Foundation supports a huge number of global development initiatives seeking to eradicate poverty throughout developing countries, through means such as supporting education initiatives or clean water facilities. Secondly, the Foundation funds an extraordinary range of medical programs. Many of these have proved extremely effective; for example, the Foundation has been heavily focused on the fight against polio, and is very close to achieving its goal of eradicating wild polio globally. The Foundation has also been heavily focused on combating HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis, and the tremendous resources that Gates has been able to bring to bear on these issues have enabled great progress in the fight against all three diseases.
Gates giving a speech in 2017, warning of the dangers of pandemics
There has also been a well-timed focus on epidemic preparedness, with the Foundation being heavily involved in the launch of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) in 2017, which has played an important role in the fight against Covid-19. Through all of these means, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has had an incalculable impact on the prosperity and life expectancy of people all around the globe, but increasingly Bill Gates is turning his attention toward the existential threats that humanity will face in the years to come.
Fighting for the future
Aside from the work of his Foundation in combating poverty and disease, Gates has been coordinating with other philanthropists and governments to tackle global warming. In 2015 he formed Breakthrough Energy, an umbrella group dedicated to fostering innovation in sustainable energy that was backed by 28 of the planet’s wealthiest individuals, including Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. At the same time he launched Mission Innovation, which performs a similar role on a national level, with 20 major world governments pledging to double their energy research and development investment. This was followed in 2021 by the launch of the Breakthrough Energy Catalyst program, which brings together both public and private sectors to continue nurturing and accelerating the next generation of climate solutions, in an effort to get to net-zero emissions by 2050.
How To Avoid A Climate Disaster was published in 2021
Breakthrough Energy Catalyst is targeting four specific areas. First is the production of green hydrogen, which can provide an alternative power source for a huge number of applications, but will prove especially useful in the highly carbon-dependent world of heavy industry. Hydrogen can also help to revolutionize transport emissions, as will the second area of focus for the Catalyst program, aviation biofuels. The third target is to nurture new battery technology and other energy storage solutions to increase the utility of sustainable power sources such as wind and solar power, and finally there’s the emerging world of Direct Air Capture , where carbon is cleaned from the ambient air.
The success of these four initiatives could well be enough to help the planet reach the crucial target of net zero carbon emission by 2050. It’s a race against time, and Bill Gates is devoting more and more of his efforts to ensuring that humanity wins that race, and while it remains to be seen whether those efforts will be successful there is little doubt that the work being carried out in his name can be described as truly Superheroic.
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