But, like anyone of his status, he has his detractors. In the 1990s he was often portrayed as the greedy head of the evil Microsoft monopoly.
But in the age of the coronavirus crisis, he is most often treated like some sort of epidemiologist or leading health researcher.
But in truth, none of these perspectives are accurate.
Microsoft’s big break famously came from a deal to provide software for IBM as they moved into the personal computer market. But the deal was not the result of Gates’ technical genius or amazing business acumen. As has been quietly admitted by IBM executives in the years since, Microsoft was given their shot at the chance to work with “Big Blue” as a result of Gates’ mother’s relationship with IBM CEO John Opel.
GORAN MILIC: You remember your partnership of IBM and Bill Gates? How did it break up?
EDWARD ANDRUS: I do remember very well, actually. Bill Gates at the time at the beginning of our relationship with them was living on pizza and Pepsi Cola in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And his mother happened to be on the United Way board with our chairman and asked our chairman to help him. And you know, when the chairman comes in and tells you to go help this kid, nine hundred people get on the plane Monday morning and they all go down to try to help Bill Gates.
[. . .]
So I don’t see Bill Gates as this great, creative person. I see him as an opportunist. And, in fact, in those days there was a lot of sharing of software code. People gave it away in Silicon Valley; they would share everything. He came in and he tried to control everything and put a price on it.
Computer historians have long known how the basis for what became MS-DOS was not Bill Gates’ brilliant imagination, but QDOS, a “Quick and Dirty Operating System” that had been thrown together by Tim Patterson, a worker at Seattle Computer Products, as a placeholder until he could sell a proper operating system to his customers. And as even Gates himself admitted, the breakthrough Graphical User Interface that became the basis for Windows was ripped off from the researchers at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
And, as Gates also admits, it is not a spirit of selfless generosity that motivates his interest in vaccines and other lucrative health interventions.
Bill Gates: It’s been a hundred billion overall that the world’s put in—our foundation is a bit more than 10 billion
As we have seen, Gates’ “philanthropic” investment scheme has paid off well, with his $50 billion net worth having ballooned to over $100 billion after his decade of “altruism” in the vaccine market. As critics of his foundation have repeatedly pointed out, the 9,000,000 people who die every year of hunger would be best served by securing food supplies, running water and other basic necessities, not costly medical interventions for rare diseases. But there is no return on investment to be made from that kind of charity.
No, this is not about charity. It is about control. The population control grid that Gates has been quietly funding into existence for the past decade—a biometric identification system tied to a digital payments infrastructure that will be used to track, catalogue and control every movement, every transaction and every interaction of every citizen—is just now coming into view.
But the real question is: Why is he doing this? What drives a man like Bill Gates, a man rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, to spend his time and invest his fortune in schemes to control the population? To find the answer to that question, we have to examine Gates’ family background.
Bill Gates, it should not be surprising to learn, was born into money. His great-grandfather, J. W. Maxwell, was the president of National City Bank in Seattle. His grandfather, Willard, was also a banker, and his grandmother, Adele, a prominent Seattle civic leader.
Bill Gates’ mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, was a scion of the Maxwell banking family and, by all accounts, as hard-driving as her forebears. She served as a director of several companies, including First Interstate Bancorp and KIRO-TV of Seattle. She served as a regent at the University of Washington. And she was appointed to the board of the United Way of America, where, as we have seen, she persuaded IBM CEO John Opel to help her son in his fledgling software development career.
Bill’s father, William H. Gates, Sr., was a prominent Seattle-area lawyer. He co-founded a powerful law and lobbying firm, helped Howard Schultz in his bid to buy Starbucks, served on the boards of numerous companies and organizations, and, along the way, had a profound influence on his son’s life and career.
The young Bill Gates—technically “William H. Gates III,” although his card-playing family dubbed him “Trey”—learned much from his parents. From his mother’s banking family he inherited a “nose for the dollar,” as one childhood friend’s father called it. From his hard-driving legal-minded father, he learned the value of legalizing business arrangements. As a child, he even had a legal contract drawn up to grant him the use of his older sisters’ baseball mitt.
These traits would not earn him many friends, but they served him well as he began to bring order to the anarchic software development community of the 1970s. At that time, software for the brand new personal computer market was the realm of computer hobbyists—people whose excitement about the microcomputer revolution and love of engineering and problem-solving led them to develop and share code freely with each other.
But this was no good for the young Bill Gates, who, even before Microsoft was off the ground, was already dreaming of commoditizing this hobby and turning it into the basis of a business empire. In 1976, with the ink still wet on Microsoft’s first contract with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the then-21-year-old Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists excoriating the early computer enthusiasts, who represented his main market, for sharing Microsoft’s code for Altair BASIC.
The letter was awkward and tone-deaf, as many people have described the young Bill Gates in his social interactions. It heaped vitriol on the very people who would be the customers of any future business and tried to change an established culture of sharing software code merely by decree. Even Apple Computers, which would go on to be one of the prime purveyors of “walled garden” systems that restrict users’ ability to control their own computers, scored an easy marketing victory by responding to Gates’ angry letter with a reminder that “Yes, Folks, Apple BASIC is Free!”
But the gauntlet was thrown down, and Gates would have his way. Although freeware and other forms of open source software development still exist, the establishment of software code as legally protected intellectual property has led to the rise of billionaires like Gates.
A “nose for the dollar” and a knowledge of how to use the legal system to get what you want were not the only things to emerge from Bill Gates’ childhood, however.
— source techrights.org