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“A large part of his contribution was not just the foundation’s strategic focus and institutional set-up, but it helped establish the principles we work by,” Stonesifer said of Mr. Gates Sr. in an interview for this obituary on January. . “It was a daily reminder that just because you have the checkbook does not mean that you have knowledge or experience about the issues we are trying to address; we need to listen to people who have the experience and the knowledge. “
Bill Gates Jr. credited his father with the initial success of the foundation. “I make sure the resources are available and he works to spend the money wisely,” he told The Seattle Times in 2003.
A prominent Seattle attorney with significant civic and professional obligations, Mr. Gates Sr. had largely left to his wife, Mary, the duties of raising their two daughters and a son, Bill, who, all agreed, they became insufferably argumentative as a child. resisting his mother’s requests that he clean his room, stop chewing on pencils, and sit down to dinner on time.
His test of will exploded one night at the dinner table, with Bill yelling at his mother in what he described years later in The Wall Street Journal as “total, total, sarcastic, impolite smart child.” In response, his father, in “a rare outburst of temper,” wrote The Journal, threw a glass of water in his son’s face.
Young Bill was taken to a therapist, who advised his parents to stop disciplining themselves. They sent him to Lakeside, a private preparatory school in Seattle, where he had access to computers. There he met Paul Allen, a computer genius student.
Years later, the parents agreed when Bill left Harvard and moved to Albuquerque, where he and Allen founded Microsoft in 1975.
Microsoft became the world’s largest personal computer software company. Its 1986 public offering made its founders billionaires and 12,000 employees millionaires. It became one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in America – the third, after Apple and Amazon, to reach the magical $ 1 trillion market capitalization.
