ABSTRACT
In 1987 a company called Microsoft went public on the stock exchange, making the Harvard dropout and software developer Bill Gates the youngest billionaire in history at the age of 31. The William H. Gates Foundation was started and initially run by Gates' father, a Seattle lawyer, from the basement of his house. A system was created in which Gates Sr would screen requests for charity and send the appropriate ones to his son. Over the first years, the Gates family added around $2 billion to the foundation's assets. By 1999 Gates' charity activities were spread out across two different foundations: The William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation, both of which were run by a fairly limited staff. In August 1999 these were joined into one foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. One of the political issues in the SDGs on which the Gates Foundation and Bill Gates himself have been relatively silent is inequality.
