Word: melinda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...talk about Bono. Bill is not easily impressed; if you're not talking to him at a very high level about science or business, you're wasting his time, and he lets you know it. (In our first interview, he didn't look at me for 15 minutes. Melinda fielded the soft questions he couldn't bear to handle, as she often does.) But Bono talks about global problems on a very high level, and one gets the sense their friendship is one of the great surprises of Bill's life. "It's not about making himself look good," Bill...
...concert. The next night they went back to see it again. They were stunned by the way Bono could move thousands of people at a rock concert to vow to make poverty history. "You always worry for him when he gets up onstage to say these things," says Melinda. "Yeah, [we think] Oh, no, these are normal people here!" says Bill. Bono slept at their house, and the three of them stayed up until 3 a.m. scheming about the G-8 summit and listening to Bono's impressions of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy...
...November, which fell on Senior's 80th birthday, his son surprised him with a gift: a $33 million scholarship program for University of Washington law-school students who go into public service. It's the largest scholarship at the university and will last 80 years. For months, Bill, Melinda and the staff had secretly crafted the gift. As he announced it, Bill did something he almost never does: he choked up and had to pause for a second. "Dad's not big on gifts. But we did come up with a grant that fits in very much with the things...
...took about three minutes with Bono for Gates to change his mind. Bill and his wife Melinda, another computer nerd turned poverty warrior, love facts and data with a tenderness most people reserve for their children, and Bono was hurling metrics across the table as fast as they could keep up. "He was every bit the geek that we are," says Gates Foundation chief Patty Stonesifer, who helped broker that first summit. "He just happens to be a geek who is a fantastic musician...
...named partner in a $2 billion private equity firm), moves in political circles like a very charming shark, aptly named his organization DATA (debt, AIDS, trade, Africa) to capture both the breadth of his ambitions and the depth of his research. Meanwhile, you could watch Bill and Melinda coolly calculate how many lives will be saved by each billion they spend and miss how impassioned they are about the suffering they have seen. "He's changing the world twice," says Bono of Bill. "And the second act for Bill Gates may be the one that history regards more...