Steven Eckard - Bill Gates: Biography of a Business Legend and Philanthropist

Bill Gates: Biography of a Business Legend and Philanthropist

By Steven Eckard

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Introduction

M any people have said many things about life, and there are numerous definitions of life in the dictionary. The simplest of these definitions is; the period during which a person is alive. In the simplest terms, life is the period between a persons birth and their death. And while every person goes through the same life stages of birth, childhood, adulthood, and death, some people accomplish more during their lifetime than others. Their impact on the world lasts long after their physical existence on earth ends. So in a way, they live eternally. And their stories, well that is the stuff legends are made of.

Bill Gates is, without question, one of the worlds most outstanding personalities. He has created a legacy for himself that is granted to outlive him. This biography covers the life of a man who has dominated the computer software industry with the worlds biggest software company and amassed a huge personal fortune. What shaped him into the philanthropist he is now? How did his early childhood prepare him for the later stages of his successful life? And in a detailed study of the business maneuverings of Bill Gates, another question always arises; to what extent would you go to win? With this text, I hope that you will understand not just the makings of legends, but also the small things that define the lives of legends.

Family Background and Childhood

A few minutes after 9:00 p.m. on the evening of 28th October 1955, William H. Gates Sr., a prominent Seattle lawyer, and his wife Mary Maxwell Gates welcomed their second-born child, a boy, into the world. They named him William Henry Gates III. His family would christen him Trey, but the world would know him as Bill Gates, the man who would at one time in the future command the worlds greatest fortune and whose name would be synonymous with Microsoft, the worlds largest software company.

Bill Gates is known for being a self-made multi-billionaire, having built a large fortune from scratch over the course of several decades. His self-made tag becomes even more impressive when you discover that he had been bequeathed with a million-dollar trust fund which he chose not to use, choosing instead to bootstrap his start-up company. Greatness was in Bill Gates blood from the very first.

And while he could shun the trust fund, his pedigree was inescapable. The family on his mothers side, the Maxwells, could trace its roots to Iowa where its patriarch J.W. Maxwell, Bill Gates great-grandfather, had been born in a farm. At the age of 19, J.W. Maxwell moved to the town of Lincoln in Nebraska and joined the banking industry, starting out as a teller and rising up the ranks. In the year 1882, he moved to South Bend, Washington on a colleagues suggestion. There he started the National City bank and built it into one of the most prominent banks in the region before pursuing a political career; first as town mayor and later as a representative in the Washington legislature.

His son James Willard Maxwell went to the University of Washington in the 1920s to pursue a business course. There he met his future wife, and after graduating in 1925, he joined his father at the bank, first as a messenger and later, after having risen through the ranks, as its leader in his fathers place. The family was prominent in the Seattle high society, with Maxwells wife participating actively in community organizations. Mary Maxwell was born in 1929, was brought up in the high society of Seattle and grew up as an active child and a good student all the way to the University of Washington.

The family on his William H. Gates side of the family was less high-flying. His grandfather was a carpenter who operated a furniture store in Bremerton. Bill Gates father had enlisted in the army as soon as he graduated from high school in 1943 to fight in World War II. After his discharge in 1946, William H. Gates Sr. joined the University of Washington to pursue a law degree.

Mary Maxwell and William H. Gates Sr. were introduced by a student leader named Brock Adams and started going out. In 1950, William Gates graduated and started practicing as an assistant in a Bremerton law firm. Two years later, Mary graduated and followed him to Bremerton where they were married a few months later. Their first child, daughter Kristi, was born shortly after their marriage in 1954.

With such great wealth, the family on Bills mothers side was naturally well connected. Mary Maxwell herself would go on to serve on the board of prominent corporations like Pacific Northwest Bell and the First Interstate Bank.

Bill enjoyed the idyllic childhood of an only boy born into an upper-middle-class family. To add to Kristi, a younger sister named Libby was born 9 years after Bills birth.

While he is naturally very intelligent with the IQ of a genius, Gates developed many of the traits from his childhood the world would later come to identify. For example, he had already read the World Book Encyclopedia from cover to cover by the age of eight. He also started the habit of rocking himself on the cradle, a habit that persisted into his adulthood and became something of an inside tradition for Microsoft programmers emulating their role model.