Word: microsoft
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Both Gatses guard their privacy closely, barring reporters from their plane and their home in Seattle. Melinda, in particular, has resisted the attention that comes with their wealth. For the first nine years of their marriage, she declined almost all media interviews. She quit her job at Microsoft after she had their first child in 1996. "I wanted to have some privacy in our community," she says. "When I took the kids to a preschool event, a mommy-and-toddler event, say, I could be like all the other moms...
...Bill and Melinda have 21/2 degrees: she has two; he has a half." (Melinda, 41, has a bachelor's degree in computer science and economics and a master's in business from Duke University. Bill, 50, dropped out of Harvard at the end of his sophomore year to run Microsoft...
Melinda is in the foundation office about two days a month. Bill is still busy being chairman of Microsoft, but they are both in regular contact with the staff, and they each spend about 15 hours a week on foundation business...
...same year Bill became worth $100 billion (on paper) and one year into an epic antitrust suit brought against Microsoft by the U.S. government, they endowed the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with an initial $17 billion. They folded the old foundation into the new one and persuaded Bill Sr. to move out of his basement and into a real office. Patty Stonesifer, a former Microsoft executive who had been running the Gateses' library project, joined him to lead what was suddenly the biggest philanthropy in the country...
Until she quit in 1996, Stonesifer was the highest-ranking female executive at Microsoft, and she got generous stock options to go with it. As a result, she has chosen to forgo a salary at the foundation. But she runs it with the ferocity of a Wall Street titan. When she met with Senator Jesse Helms on Capitol Hill, he called her a spark plug--twice. "None of us knew much about health," she says. "We just kept finding people whom we trusted. And we learned and learned. We used the same skills we'd applied to business prospects...