用英語寫Bill Gates和David Beckham的簡介.
William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is the co-founder, chairman, and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, the world's largest software company (as of March 2006). He is also the founder of Corbis, a digital image archiving company. According to Forbes magazine, Gates is the richest person in the world, with a net worth of about US $50 billion, as of March, 2006[2].
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. He is widely respected in business circles for his intelligence, foresight, and ambition. He is also widely criticized as having built Microsoft's business through unfair, illegal, or anticompetitive business practices. Government authorities in several countries have found some of these practices illegal, as in United States v. Microsoft.
Since amassing his fortune, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money (about 51% of his total fortune) to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founded in 2000. He, his wife Melinda and U2's lead singer Bono were collectively named by Time as the 2005 Persons of the Year. That same year he was given the honor of Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
Early life
Bill Gates' mug shot from 1977 when he was jailed for a stop-sign violation.Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington to William H. Gates, Sr. and teacher Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was wealthy; his father was a prominent lawyer and his maternal grandfather, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank vice president. Gates has two younger sisters, Kristanne and Libby.
According to a widely repeated story, Maxwell set up a million (or multi-million) dollar trust fund for Gates the year he was born. [3] Gates commented on the story in a 1994 interview with Playboy:
PLAYBOY: Did you have a million-dollar trust fund while you were at Harvard?
GATES: . . . . My parents are very successful, and I went to the nicest private school in the Seattle area. I was lucky. But I never had any trust funds of any kind, though my dad did pay my tuition at Harvard, which was quite expensive.
A 1993 biography by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews calls the trust fund story one of the "fictions" surrounding Gates' fortune.[4]
Gates excelled in elementary school, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. Bill Gates went to Lakeside, Seattle's most exclusive preparatory school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1760). Lakeside rented time on a DEC PDP-10, which Bill was able to use to pursue an interest in computers, a rare opportunity at the time. Gates was a member of the Boy Scouts of America and attained the rank of Life Scout. While in high school, he and Paul Allen founded Traf-O-Data, a company which sold traffic flow data systems to state governments. He also helped to create a payroll system in COBOL, for a company in Portland, Oregon.
According to a press inquiry he scored 1590 on his SATs[5], which allowed Gates to enroll in Harvard University pursuing a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science in 1973, where he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer. During his second year at Harvard, Gates (along with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff) co-wrote Altair BASIC for the Altair 8800. Gates dropped out of Harvard during his third year to pursue a career in software development. On December 13, 1977, Gates was briefly jailed in Albuquerque for racing his Porsche 911 in the New Mexico desert. [6]
Personal life
Bill Gates married Melinda French of Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. Melinda has given birth to three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). Bill Gates' house is one of the most expensive houses in the world, and is a modern 21st century earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. According to King County public records, as of 2006, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is just under $1 million. Also among Gates's private acquisitions is the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci which Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994 and a rare Gutenberg Bible.
Gates and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at the WEF in Davos, January 26, 2003In 2000, Gates founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization, with his wife. The foundation's grants have provided funds for college scholarships for under-represented minorities, AIDS prevention, diseases prevalent in third world countries, and other causes. In 2000, the Gates Foundation endowed the University of Cambridge with $210 million for the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. The Foundation has also pledged over $7 billion to its various causes, including $1 billion to the United Negro College Fund; and as of 2005, had an estimated endowment of $29.0 billion. He has spent about a third of his lifetime income on charity, although some question his intentions. Journalist Greg Palast suggests that the Gates Foundation is used to make tactical donations to hide media sensitive humanitarian side effects of treaties, such as the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which Gates has supported. TRIPS requires countries to agree to respect drug and other patents, therefore preventing the local manufacture of existing pharmaceuticals still under patent such as AIDS drugs in Africa.[11]
Gates has received two honorary doctorates, from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002 and Waseda University in 2005. Gates was also given an honorary KBE (Knighthood) from Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in 2005 [12], in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor. [13]
Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has stated that Gates is probably the most "spammed" person in the world, receiving as many as 4,000,000 e-mails per day in 2004, most of which were junk. Gates has almost an entire department devoted to filtering out junk emails. [14] In an article, Gates himself has said that most of this junk mail "offers to help [him] get out of debt or get rich quick", which "would be funny [given his financial state] if it weren't so irritating". [15]
Influence and wealth
Gates in Poland, 2006Gates is widely considered one of the world's most influential people. He was listed in the Sunday Times power list in 1999, named CEO of the year by Chief Executive Officers magazine in 1994, ranked number one in the "Top 50 Cyber Elite" by Time in 1998, ranked number two in the Upside Elite 100 in 1999 and was included in The Guardian as one of the "Top 100 influential people in media" in 2001. Gates has been number one on the "Forbes 400" list from 1993 through to 2006 and number one on Forbes list of "The World's Richest People" in 1996-2006, except for 1997 when the Sultan of Brunei was included despite Forbes' usual policy of excluding heads of state. In 2004, he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by Warren Buffett, the second wealthiest person in the world according to Forbes and a longtime friend of Gates.[16]
Since 2000, Gates's wealth has declined due to a fall in Microsoft's share price and the multi-billion dollar donations he has made to his charitable foundations. According to a 2004 Forbes magazine article, Gates gave away over $29 billion to charities from 2000 onwards. These donations are usually cited as sparking a substantial change in attitudes towards philanthropy among the very rich, as philanthropy eventually became the norm for the very rich. [17]
Gates has not engaged in conspicuous consumption beyond his lavish home, with its gardens and art collection. In contrast, his former associate Paul Allen has used his wealth in perhaps a more typical manner—owning sports teams, vintage airplanes, and multiple residences. Gates also claimed, in 2005, that he has gone to work every day since 1975, which in recent years includes both his role at Microsoft, and his leadership position at the Gates Foundation.
關於BECKHAM的;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_beckham