NET WORTH : $112.8 BILLION
Born on October 28, 1955, William Henry Gates III is an American writer, philanthropist, businessman, and investor who is most renowned for having co-founded Microsoft, the software behemoth, with his boyhood buddy Paul Allen. In his tenure at Microsoft, Gates served as chairman, CEO, president, and chief software architect. Until May 2014, he was also the company's largest individual shareholder. He played a significant role in the 1970s and 1980s microcomputer revolution as an entrepreneur.
Gates was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. In 1975, he and Allen founded Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It later became the world's largest personal computer software company. Gates led the company as its chairman and chief executive officer until stepping down as CEO in January 2000, succeeded by Steve Ballmer, but he remained chairman of the board of directors and became chief software architect. During the late 1990s, he was criticized for his business tactics, which were considered anti-competitive. This opinion has been upheld by numerous court rulings. In June 2008, Gates transitioned into a part-time role at Microsoft and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the private charitable foundation he and his then-wife Melinda had established in 2000. He stepped down as chairman of the Microsoft board in February 2014 and assumed the role of technology adviser to support newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella. In March 2020, Gates left his board positions at Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to focus on his philanthropic efforts on climate change, global health and development, and education.
Early life and education
William Henry Gates III, the sole child of William H. Gates and his first wife Mary Maxwell Gates, was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955. He has German, Irish/Scots-Irish, and English heritage. His mother was on the boards of United Way of America and First Interstate BancSystem, and his father was a well-known attorney. J. W. Maxwell was the president of a big bank and Gates' maternal grandfather. He also has a younger sister named Libby and an elder sister named Kristi (Kristianne). Despite being the fourth person in his family to have that name, he goes by William Gates III, or "Trey" When Gates was seven years old, a rare tornado devastated the family's house in Seattle's Sand Point neighborhood.
Companies Owned By Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft's best-known software products are the Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity applications, and the Edge web browser. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 14 in the 2022 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; it was the world's largest software maker by revenue as of 2022. It is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet (parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, and Meta.
Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Windows. The company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO) and subsequent rise in its share price created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made several corporate acquisitions, the largest being the acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in October 2023,
Incorporation Year : 1975
Revenue : $211 Billion Dollars
Nuance Communications
Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software.
Nuance merged with its competitor in the commercial large-scale speech application business, ScanSoft, in October 2005. ScanSoft was a Xerox spin-off that was bought in 1999 by Visioneer, a hardware and software scanner company, which adopted ScanSoft as the new merged company name. The original ScanSoft had its roots in Kurzweil Computer Products.
Incorporation Year : 1992
Revenue : $1.33 Billion Dollars
LinkedIn
LinkedIn (/lɪŋktˈɪn/) is a business and employment-focused social media platform that works through websites and mobile apps. It was launched on May 5, 2003. Since December 2016, it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. The platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows jobseekers to post their CVs and employers to post jobs. From 2015 most of the company's revenue came from selling access to information about its members to recruiters and sales professionals. LinkedIn has more than 970 million registered members from over 200 countries and territories.
LinkedIn allows members (both workers and employers) to create profiles and connect with each other in an online social network which may represent real-world professional relationships. Members can invite anyone (whether an existing member or not) to become a connection. LinkedIn can also be used to organize offline events, join groups, write articles, publish job postings, post photos and videos, and more.
Incorporation Year : 2003
Revenue : $13.8 Billion Dollars
ZeniMax Media Inc.
ZeniMax Media Inc. is an American video game holding company based in Rockville, Maryland, and founded in 1999.
Microsoft announced its intent to acquire ZeniMax Media and all its subsidiaries for $7.5 billion on September 21, 2020. The acquisition was completed on March 9, 2021. ZeniMax Media is a subsidiary of Microsoft Gaming along with Xbox Game Studios and Activision Blizzard.
Incorporation Year : 1999
Revenue : $510.5 Million Dollars
Activision Blizzard
Activision Blizzard, Inc. is an American video game holding company based in Santa Monica, California. Activision Blizzard currently includes five business units: Activision Publishing, Blizzard Entertainment, King, Major League Gaming, and Activision Blizzard Studios.
Founded in July 2008 through the merger of Activision, Inc. (the publicly traded parent company of Activision Publishing) and Vivendi Games, the company owns and operates additional subsidiary studios, as part of Activision Publishing, including Treyarch, Infinity Ward, High Moon Studios, and Toys for Bob.
Incorporation Year : 2008
Revenue : $7.53 Billion Dollars
GitHub
GitHub, Inc. is a platform and cloud-based service for software development and version control, allowing developers to store and manage their code. It uses Git software, providing the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018
It is commonly used to host open source software development projects. As of January 2023, GitHub reported having over 100 million developers and more than 372 million repositories, including at least 28 million public repositories. It is the world's largest source code host as of June 2023.
Incorporation Year : 2008
Revenue : $1.0 Billion Dollars
Skype
Skype (/skaɪp/) is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, debit-based calls to landline and mobile telephones (over traditional telephone networks), and other features. Skype is available on various desktop, mobile, and video game console platforms.
Skype originally featured a hybrid peer-to-peer and client–server system. It became entirely powered by Microsoft-operated supernodes in May 2012; in 2017, it changed from a peer-to-peer service to a centralized Azure-based service. As of February 2023, Skype was used by 36 million people each day.
Incorporation Year : 2003
Revenue : $184 Million Dollars
aQuantive
aQuantive, Inc. was the parent company of a group of three digital marketing service and technology companies: Avenue A/Razorfish, Atlas Solutions, and DRIVE Performance Solutions. Based in Seattle, Washington, the company was founded in 1997. According to Advertising Age magazine, in 2005 it ranked 14th by revenue among advertising agencies worldwide.
On July 2, 2012, Microsoft announced that it would take a $6.2 billion writedown, mostly related to the 2007 acquisition of aQuantive
Incorporation Year : 2005
Revenue : $700 Million Dollars
Visio
Microsoft Visio (/ˈvɪz.i.oʊ/ VIZ-ee-oh) (formerly Microsoft Office Visio) is a diagramming and vector graphics application and is part of the Microsoft 365 family. The product was first introduced in 1992 by former American software company Visio Corporation, and its latest version is Visio 2021. Microsoft acquired the assets of Visio Corporation in 2000 and thus also inherited the licensing agreements for the Visio application. A lightweight version of Visio is now included with all commercial SKU of Microsoft 365 and is known as Visio in Microsoft 365. It has two other subscription based SKUs. Visio Plan 1 includes the Visio web app whereas Visio Plan 2 provides access to both the web app as well as the Desktop application.
Incorporation Year : 1992
Revenue : $17.1 Billion Dollars
Yammer
Yammer is an enterprise social networking service that is part of the Microsoft 365 family of products. It is used mainly for private communication within organizations but is also used for networks spanning various organizations. Access to a Yammer network is determined by a user's Internet domain, so only individuals with approved email addresses may join their respective networks.
The service began as an internal communication system for the genealogy website Geni.com and was launched as an independent product in 2008. Microsoft later acquired Yammer in 2012 for US$1.2 billion (~$1.52 billion in 2022)
Incorporation Year : 2008
Revenue : $1.0 Billion Dollars
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