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In the class they put a pasta disc: “Thirteen plus eighteen”, “Seventeen plus nine”, “Ten plus thirty-two”. Bill Gates —Then the blond and smiling boy that his sister usually describes— wrote down the accounts and the results in a notebook, without hesitation, fast, sure, to the rhythm of the voice emitted by the record. When he finished, he would look at his notebook, look around him and see the other children going crazy, praying that the sound would slow down. So Bill Gates realized that there were certain things (mathematics at least) for which he had more facility than others.
Five decades later, sitting in front of a camera and an interviewer recording a documentary about him (Bill Gates under the magnifying glass, Netflix, 2019), el genius confirmed says his biggest fear is that his brain will stop working. The American co-founder of Microsoft Y Windows He amasses a capital of at least $ 131.5 billion (that was the number through the end of 2020), and it was all, in part, thanks to his head.
In addition, and of that there is no doubt, Bill Gates positioned himself as one of the most powerful men in the world. The financing of seven different vaccines for the coronavirus and the current project to “cover the sun” demonstrate this. And, of course, the detail that Gates has become the most recent Nostradamus: he predicted the current pandemic and now talks about the next one that humanity will have to face. Many associate it with conspiracy theories that place it behind the origin of the pandemic.
“The unfortunate reality is that COVID-19 may not be the last pandemic. We don’t know when the next virus will arrive, or if it will be a flu, a coronavirus, or some new disease that we have never seen before. But what we do know is that we cannot allow ourselves to be caught off guard again, ”he wrote in Not Too Soon to Start Thinking About the Next Pandemic, an article on his Linkedin blog.
The entrepreneur is concerned about investments in scientific developments that may prevent or mitigate the effects of a future problem.
The 19-year-old boy who dropped out of Harvard
“My mother was the person who tried to make me interested in things,” confesses Gates in the Netflix documentary when referring to Mary Maxwell. About his father, William H. Gates, Sr, he says he was a role model. The Gates home, with a female teacher and businesswoman and a male lawyer, added to a Seattle in which the family stepped hard, were the propitious space for the concerns of that child prodigy.
Already in school, he formed a computer science group and was fascinated by a teletype terminal that the institution had bought. “I remember thinking he was kind of weird. And that his friends were weird. They were nerds, ”describes his sister Libby, recalling childhood times. Gates was no longer the imaginative kid who pretended to be a dog and spent much of his time locked in his messy room full of books. Back then, when he thought, Gates chewed on pencils. Now he does the same with the temple of the glasses. There are vices that are not lost.
Growing up was not an easy task. On the one hand, he had his friend, next to him, a boy who followed the thread in his intelligence. It was Paul Allen, who later became his co-founder of Microsoft. But on the other was the need to go for something more than what everyone expected of him.
In 1973 Bill Gates entered Harvard and was preparing to be a lawyer. In 1975, at the age of 19, he dropped out of college because there was something that interested him much more: computer software. And with Allen they launched Microsoft. Five years later Windows was born.
Various stories have been spread of his overly demanding (authoritarian) way of managing his employees, there is also talk that he wanted to ensure that his employees did not run out of income. “I wanted to have enough money in the bank so that if nobody paid us in a year, I could take on the salaries.”
The founding of Microsoft didn’t just bring technological advancement. Computers weren’t just machines. All this was accompanied by a social change that Bill Gates was not ignorant of: “I don’t think I have ever been so resounding as to speak of a new civilization. They are excessive words and I don’t usually go that far. Of course, the impact generated by the digital world is equivalent to that of the industrial revolution; not greater, but equivalent. The difference, which magnifies the current situation, is that industrialism developed over many generations, while the digital change is taking place in just a generation and a half or two ”, he answered in an interview with El País de Madrid in the year 2000.
Twenty years later, it has been 11 months since he retired from Microsoft’s board of directors, and several decades ago (in the 80s) he stopped being Allen’s unconditional friend (he died in 2018) to become enmity and then to a reconciliation. Twenty years later, Bill Gates went from being the CEO de Microsoft to follow steps for philanthropy. With the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which he founded with his wife in 2000, has followed a path that donates millions and millions of dollars to help with drinking water, sanitation systems in developing countries or other scientific advances that move him for some reason. And now, it seems, he wants to fight the intensity of the sun.
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