Thinker Profile
Bill GATES2009 ranking: 7
William Henry Gates III (b. 1955) was born in Seattle. He won a place at Harvard but dropped out, partly through lack of confidence in his teachers. In 1976 his interest in electronics propelled him to found with his friend Paul Allen a company for writing software for micro-electronic devices called Microsoft. Their first product was a version of the programming language BASIC for the primitiv...