Bill Gates was born in Seattle in 1955. He dropped out of Harvard in his junior year to devote his energies fulltime to Microsoft. He and childhood friend Paul Allen believed that computers would soon have a place in every home and office, and this vision of personal computing helped launch the software industry and led to Microsoft’s astonishing success.

Microsoft Corporation had revenues of $32.19 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2003, and employs more than 55,000 people in 85 countries and regions. The company invested more than $6.8 billion on research and development in the current fiscal year.

In 1999, Gates wrote Business @ the Speed of Thought, a book that shows how computer technology can solve business problems in fundamentally new ways. The book was published in 25 languages and is available in more than 60 countries. Gates' previous book, The Road Ahead, published in 1995, held the No. 1 spot on the New York Times' bestseller list for seven weeks.

Gates and his wife, Melinda, have endowed a foundation with more than $24 billion to support philanthropic initiatives in the areas of global health and learning. In 1999, Gates donated $20 million to MIT for construction of the William H. Gates Building, which is part of the Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences.

Gates also founded Corbis, a comprehensive digital archive of art and photography from public and private collections around the globe.