Magazine cover story details Microsoft founder's new life's work
You know that Bill Gates is devoting his post-Microsoft life and fortune to philanthropy, most notably children’s health. However, if you’re not familiar with the current details and history behind these efforts, as I was not, this Forbes cover story is highly recommended reading:
It’s heady, historic stuff: America’s richest man-he’d be the world’s richest had he not already given away so much money-still in his prime (he just turned 56), with the reputation, resources and determination to stamp out infectious disease. “I’d be deeply disappointed,” says Gates, if in the next 25 years he can’t lower the death toll by 80%. Otherwise, “we’re just not doing our job very well.”
Sitting with Gates, overlooking the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s gleaming new $500 million campus, full of glimmering reflecting pools and glass edifices, it’s possible to see a future with exponentially less pain and suffering. It’s also a remarkably incisive exercise in getting inside the brain of one of history’s greatest business visionaries. By dissecting with him and his wife, Melinda, how he tackles this grand human problem, you can also learn intuitively how he built Microsoft. How a mechanical genius methodically tackles an abstract problem. And perhaps most of all, how power and capital-both literal and political-can be spent to maximize positive impact on the world.
Reasonable people will disagree on both the importance of Gates’ personal contributions as a sofware maker and corporate titan, as well as the ethics of the means by which he achieved them. The haters are going to hate.
But most everyone reading this story should come away convinced that the Bill Gates of today is a great man accomplishing historically beneficial deeds.
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