Bill Gates

On October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, Bill Gates was born into a family that encouraged competition, reading, and civic ambition. He studied at the Lakeside School, where early access to computers gave him rare programming experience, and later enrolled at Harvard before leaving to pursue software full time. Partnership with Paul Allen turned teenage experimentation into a transformative business venture.

Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975, built the company's dominance through operating systems and software licensing, and made Windows central to office, home, and business computing by the 1990s. The United States v. Microsoft antitrust case in the late 1990s also placed him at the center of a defining confrontation over monopoly power in the digital economy. In the twenty-first century, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation extended his influence into public health, education, and global philanthropy.

Gates helped shape the personal computer revolution, the structure of software markets, and later expectations about billionaire philanthropy. Antitrust politics in tech, the expansion of digital work, and large-scale private foundations all developed in a public world transformed by Microsoft's rise.