Bill Gates, a new world leader
The philanthropist has become a respected global voice amid the pandemic crisis. His leading role is a vindication of science, research and solidarity. He a few years ago he predicted what was to come and today he will invest millions to help fix it.
Bill Gates is not only the richest businessman in the world, but also the rarest of today's capitalists. After retiring from Microsoft, he took an amazing turn in his life, taking him from brilliant software programmer to toilet expert, and from unscrupulous business strategist to renowned funder of the fight against world hunger and disease. . He no longer fights Steve Jobs over patents and licenses; he now he discusses with Piketty about models of socioeconomic development. And just as one day, back in the eighties, he predicted that his software would be installed on every computer, and he made it happen with Windows and Office, five years ago he predicted that a dangerous virus would bring the world to its knees. And he was right too.
In late 1995, Gates, then 40, achieved two unforgettable titles: he was first declared the richest man in the world by Forbes magazine, and at the same time he became the most detested businessman in popular culture. . Digital activists saw in him a kind of Sauron who embodied the spirit of the new monopoly capital, no longer oil, but computer, as would be expected in the new era of technological revolution that Gates helped to forge. Cold and rational, his brilliant mind led him from a programming genius boy to a visionary young entrepreneur, and then to amassing the greatest fortune on the planet. Nothing in his speech or in his actions suggested that this software industry leader, obsessed with putting Windows in every home and office and tirelessly billing for every Office package installed on computers in every country, would end up becoming the greatest philanthropist of all time, in the antithesis of Uncle Sam, and who would surprise the world when he announced that he planned to give back to society all that he had earned.
Bill Gates made other billionaires want to give big to worthy causes. His friend Warren Buffett, the most successful stockbroker in history, who entered the Olympus of the world's richest men by speculating in stocks on Wall Street, donated more than half of his wealth - $ 35 billion exactly - to projects. social in Africa. Bill and his wife Melinda inspired him to such a testimony of altruism, and together they shattered the old romantic notion of corporate social responsibility. On a typical day, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation puts up $ 20 million to fund the development of a vaccine, or $ 50 million to support an educational inclusion program for Latino and African children in the United States. These types of billionaires do not give away what they have left over, nor do they use the figure of donation to cushion taxes, but they are literally leaving their children with almost no inheritance. In fact, from the days when he was declared the richest man in the world by Forbes, Gates said in an interview that his children would not inherit his fortune and that they would have to work, as he did, to earn every dollar. .
Gates is no longer involved in running Microsoft. He definitively retired earlier this year. And in the same way that forty years ago he spent entire days writing the operating system code that would bring him fame and fortune, today, at 65, he spends days and nights pondering how to solve deep problems of the human race, such as the cure against HIV and malaria, or the provision of clean water for poor countries. The scale of his ambitions remains colossal; But he no longer claims that there is one of his products on every screen, but that 4,000 million people drink clean water or that the almost 40 million AIDS patients regain health. How was the quantum leap possible for this brilliant introvert, turning him into the kind of capitalist that today's world thinks it needs more than ever?
In the last eight years he has invested more than 200 million dollars in his greatest obsession: to make a technological revolution in the sanitation of cities. He now he is a reference.
This man's story is somewhat different from that of other corporate heroes. The son of a well-off middle-class family in Seattle, he never knew hunger or economic distress. His father was a successful lawyer, and his mother, a well-known promoter of charity programs in Seattle. She instilled in him the foundations of his later philanthropy, which she kept well hidden, by the way, during the building of the Microsoft empire. Although he was always a quiet man, devoid of the moody outbursts or unbridled megalomania of other leaders of technological innovation, such as his friend and rival Steve Jobs, Gates made a name for himself in the corridors of the company for arrogance. intellectual of him. He disqualified every idea he heard from his engineers, to whom he reminded that he wrote the code for the first version of Windows in two or three days, when they asked him for a week to develop a project.
The story of how it made Microsoft the most important technology company of the last 100 years is well known. As a high school student, he joined the computer club led by Paul Allen, a little older than him and who would later become his great friend and business partner. Together they saw what no one had seen before: that software would be the linchpin of the fourth industrial revolution, and not hardware, as the executives of the almighty IBM, creator of the first personal computer, thought. That's when Bill made his coolest move. IBM engineers had focused their efforts on developing the architecture to shrink the hulking computing machines of the 1960s, known as mainframes, and turn them into desktop computers for home and office use. Gates knew they needed an operating system and told them that he had one - which he didn't really have, but that he bought from an acquaintance for just $ 50. He then proposed to IBM the business of his life. He would not sell them the operating system, but would charge them a dollar for each personal computer they sold with that program pre-installed. The story goes that the IBM executives laughed when they heard the proposal, which they found most naive on the part of the skinny and gafufo young man sitting on the other side of the table. And, of course, they accepted it, because they estimated to sell 2,000 PCs, at most. They had no idea what would happen in the following decades with the personal computer.
In a 2015 TED talk he predicted the pandemic that has the world in check. "There will be no missiles, but microbes," he warned.
But an empire is not built by following all ethical rules, and Microsoft was no exception. He has always been accused of unfair competition, abuse of a dominant position, monopolistic intent and of crushing any innovation undertaken by others that could constitute a threat to the business. "He pretends to be Edison, but in reality he is Rockefeller," his enemies would tell him. Microsoft symbolized privately owned and for-profit software, as opposed to the libertarian ideas of the promoters of free and free software.
What's on Bill Gates's mind? A documentary on Netflix explores the ins and outs of his rationality, to describe a very intelligent subject, who usually reads 14 books during a trip, at a speed of 150 pages per hour, and who is able to retain 90 percent of the information . A connectionist mind, which processes data and organizes it into categories and networks, to produce original ideas and novel views of the topics it explores. “When he's still and quiet he has incredibly complex thoughts, he brings ideas together and sees the world in ways others can't,” says Melinda, his wife.
Bill and Melinda were married in 1994. "I didn't think I would get a wife," says his sister Elizabeth. Because he was never a sexy man who liked to seduce girls with his power and wealth. Since he was a child he was a typical nerd, obsessed with solving problems from a sharp mathematical rationality. However, he is a man who truly believes in gender equality, and Melinda, a brilliant engineer who worked at Microsoft since the age of 20 and held prominent positions in the company before marrying him, is truly his partner in the foundation that both lead. She is not just the millionaire's wife.
Today's Gates is an expert in vaccines and epidemiology, after more than a decade participating - as a funder and an executive - in cutting-edge research projects to defeat malaria, polio and HIV. He not only writes checks, but gets involved in projects, talks to scientists, and meets with villagers in Nigeria, making him an authority on two issues: public health and education. He is frequently invited to give lectures, and one of them, a famous TED talk in April 2015, was when he predicted the pandemic that today has the world in catastrophe. “If something is going to kill more than 10 million people in the next decades it will be a very infectious virus, much more than a war. There will be no missiles, but microbes, ”he said that day. He was clear that he has spent too much on nuclear weapons and too little on public health systems, and that we were not prepared for an epidemic.
Bill and Melinda married in 1994 and lead the Foundation. He is involved in all projects, such as the health issue in Nigeria.
During the last eight years he has invested more than 200 million dollars in his greatest obsession: making a technological revolution in city sanitation, which led him to become the world's leading expert on toilets. In addition, to develop, thanks to the work of his friend Peter Janicki, a celebrity in North American aerospace engineering: a waste processing system that converts feces into energy and clean water, without using electricity or water, and that they propose as an alternative world to provide a sanitary system to the thousands of cities that today do not have sewerage or wastewater treatment. He also developed ideas to produce cheap, clean energy and to radically improve the quality of education in America.
In an article in The Washington Post he proposed total lockdown, shutting down the US economy for at least six weeks, along with the massive implementation of tests to detect the carriers of the virus, as well as greater investment in the development of vaccines; exactly contrary strategies to those that Donald Trump adopted. Last year, a statement from him caught attention in which he winked at Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, voices from the far left wing of the Democratic Party, and insisted again that the rich should pay more taxes. And on his personal blog he praised the book Capital in the 21st Century, by left-wing economist Thomas Piketty, with whom he even debated aspects of inequality theory. But Gates is far from being an American socialist. He believes in private property, in the accumulation of wealth as a source of development and thinks that philanthropy, more than democracy, is the expeditious way to reduce poverty in the world. Likewise, he has convinced 204 wealthy people from various countries to follow his example by donating half of their fortunes.
Although he has carried out what he proclaims, his personal fortune is immense, estimated at $ 103 billion, most of which is invested in the Foundation. In the midst of philanthropy, he hasn't given up his talent for making money grow and is still an entrepreneur with a nose for business.
