ABSTRACT
William H. Gates II was a prominent lawyer in Seattle in the 1950s. As such he would probably have seen himself as middle class. His son, William H. Gates III, was born on October 28, 1955. As he grew up in this class of origin, young Bill developed an abiding, indeed compulsive interest in computer programming. Although his father helped him get into Harvard, Bill dropped out to pursue his business interests. He had the insight to realize that computer technology (like oil a century earlier) was about to become a valuable commodity. Eventually, he founded the Microsoft Corporation, bought DOS, and in 1981 persuaded IBM to use a revised version of it as the operating system for its line of personal computers. When Microsoft became a publicly traded stock corporation in 1986, its Chief Executive Officer, Bill Gates, became an instant multimillionaire and eventually a multibillionaire. 1 The third Mr. Gates’ experience implies an interesting question: Can you become a billionaire?
