Word: microsoft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
Very soon, however, they realized that they could never do what they hoped to do because even their money was a drop in the bucket. Instead of downsizing their ambition, they decided they needed force multipliers--or leverage, to use one of Bill's favorite terms from Microsoft. They needed other organizations and countries to step up and make the foundation look puny. According to WHO's Commission for Macroeconomics and Health, it would cost $25 billion annually to save 8 million lives a year. The Gates Foundation will spend, this year, about $1 billion on global health. Bill Gates...
...challenge of "stupid poverty"--the people who die for want of a $2 pill because they live on $1 a day--was enough to draw Gates away from Microsoft years before he intended to shift his focus from making money to giving it away. He and Melinda looked around and recognized a systems failure. "Those lives were being treated as if they weren't valuable," Gates told FORTUNE in 2002. "Well, when you have the resources that could make a very big impact, you can't just say to yourself, 'O.K., when I'm 60, I'll get around...
BILL GATES: I've always been a music fan. Paul [Allen, Microsoft's co-founder] played guitar and made sure I knew all the Jimi Hendrix songs. He's a real music nut. Not many people create a music museum. [Allen founded Seattle's Experience Music Project...
...definitely step back once a month and say, Did we as a couple spend time on the right issues, be it the foundation, Microsoft, our children? And if it ever gets where it feels like it's not the right balance, then we reshuffle...