Bill Gates on Business Philosophy

William Henry Gates III, born in Seattle on October 28, 1955, co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975 and became the defining executive of the microcomputer revolution. He ran the company as chief executive for twenty-five years, added the presidency and board chairmanship when Microsoft incorporated in 1981, and became the world's youngest self-made billionaire in 1987 at thirty-one, a year after the public offering began compounding his stake. Forbes ranked him the wealthiest person alive in eighteen of the twenty-four years between 1995 and 2017, and in 1999 he became the first person whose net worth briefly passed one hundred billion dollars. Over time he traded operating control for philanthropic scale, co-chairing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with Melinda French Gates from 2000 until 2024, and Time counted him among the twentieth century's hundred most influential people. He and French Gates jointly received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

In February 1976, after discovering that a pre-release copy of Altair BASIC had leaked and was being copied widely through the hobbyist community, Gates wrote An Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter. He asserted that more than ninety percent of Altair BASIC users had not paid Microsoft for it, and that such unpaid copying threatened to eliminate the incentive for anyone to develop, distribute, and maintain high-quality software. The unfairness he attacked was hobbyists gaining the benefit of authors' time, effort, and capital without paying, and the same argument led him to refuse to publish the source code, keeping the program's blueprints from being copied from library shelves into hobby machines. The letter made Gates deeply unpopular among hobbyists, many of whom saw software sharing as the culture's point, but he persisted in the conviction that developers deserved payment, a position the entire software industry eventually institutionalized.

The Road Ahead, published in November 1995 by Viking and co-written with Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold and journalist Peter Rinearson, summarized the personal-computing revolution and forecast a future transformed by a global information superhighway. Gates received a $2.5 million advance, with his proceeds and subsidiary-rights money donated to encourage educational technology through a foundation created by the National Education Association. The book shipped with a CD-ROM carrying the text and supplemental material, and the publisher's promotional budget of one million dollars ranked among its largest ever, rivaling the campaign for Colin Powell's memoir. The hardback treated the Internet as an important precursor of the coming highway, suggesting one could think of it as the beginning, the way the Oregon Trail prefigured the interstate; within a year the Internet's explosion forced a substantially revised trade paperback from Penguin in October 1996, promising readers a completely updated edition.

The economics behind the letter were unforgiving. MITS sold the Altair 8800 itself at break-even, counting on memory boards, input-output cards, and other add-ons for profit, so software royalties were one of the few clean revenue streams available to the young partnership, and the April 1975 MITS newsletter had already trumpeted Altair BASIC as up and running. The 8K and extended editions carried the higher royalty tiers that unpaid copying erased. The 1975 contract paid Gates and Allen thirty dollars per 4K copy sold against a $180,000 cap, meaning widespread copying struck directly at their income. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976 and kept developing programming-language products for other systems, carrying the paid-software doctrine forward. Looking back, the letter functions as the industry's founding declaration that software is a product with value, not a giveaway that rides along with hardware.

Gates has also built a substantial body of writing. The Road Ahead, published in November 1995 with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, summarized the personal-computing revolution and forecast a world reshaped by a global information superhighway. Business @ the Speed of Thought, written with Collins Hemingway and published in 1999, argued that digital infrastructure and information networks could give companies a competitive edge. Two decades later his subject matter turned planetary: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, published in 2021, distilled more than a decade of studying climate change and investing in energy innovation, and How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, published in 2022, proposed a Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization team of full-time experts under the World Health Organization, with about a billion dollars of annual funding. In February 2025 he published Source Code: My Beginnings, the first of three planned memoirs.

The original 2010 pledge letter that Gates signed with Melinda opened with rotavirus, a highly preventable disease killing half a million children every year while airplane crashes dominated front pages and most people could not name the killer. The couple committed the vast majority of their assets to the foundation to stop such deaths and dismantle barriers to health and education, animated by the principle that all lives have equal value. Vaccines, they wrote, are miracles, tiny vessels of hope, and the letter pressed for both wider delivery of existing vaccines and the development of new ones, alongside a parallel push in American education. The pledge itself grew out of gatherings with other givers, comparing what had worked in philanthropy and what had not, and the letter closes on inheritance values passed from their parents: work hard, show respect, keep a sense of humor, and use whatever talent or treasure life grants as wisely as possible.