Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates IIIis an American business magnate, entrepreneur, philanthropist, investor, and programmer. In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, which became the world's largest PC software company. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, and was the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. Gates has authored and co-authored several books...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth28 October 1955
CitySeattle, WA
CountryUnited States of America
My dream is that every child has enough food to eat, good medical care, and the chance to go to school and even attend college.
Most innovations, unfortunately, actually increase the net costs of the healthcare system. There's a few, particularly having to do with chronic diseases, that are an exception. If you could cure Alzheimer's, if you could avoid diabetes - those are gigantic in terms of saving money. But the incentive regime doesn't favor them.
Test scores aren't perfect, but having a test score for math or reading or other things that we can objectively measure is a meaningful component that makes a lot of sense.
It's paradoxical that, when you have better health, families choose to have less children, because they've been having enough children so that they can be sure that a few of them will survive and take care of them. So as health improves, then all the other problems are dramatically easier to tackle.
I could name about a dozen paths, and you'd like to have a whole bunch of research on all those paths, and then, eventually, at least four to five companies with really significant financing try and get to big scale, going down and really trying to prove it out.
Someone in the society has to deal with the reality that there are finite resources and we're Making trade-offs, and be explicit about that. When the car companies were found to have a memo that actually said, "This safety feature costs X and saved Y lives," the very existence of that memo was considered damning. Or when you made it reimbursable for a doctor to ask, "Do you want heroic care at the end-of-life," that was a death panel. No, it wasn't a death panel! It was asking somebody to make a decision.
I think that society has to be careful not to shift all of its resources to the elderly versus the young. I get very concerned when people talk about cutting education budgets.
The trick generally is to break programs into pieces and have those pieces be individually testable and so then when you move on to the other pieces you treat it as a black box knowing that it either works or doesn't work.
Make sure people get educated, help out with health emergencies. Those things, the government should do. That's 96 per cent of the economy, those two sectors.
When making choices, or setting policies about the economy, education or medicine, society is best served by electing people who are particularly hardworking, intelligent and interested in long-term thinking.
Vaccination is pretty special because you can do a vaccination campaign anywhere in the world. All you are doing is gathering women from the villages, getting them the vaccines and asking them to go around and find the children.
Microsoft has had many, many successful products. I'm committed to one company. This is the industry I've decided to work in.
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.
I don't think you're as capable of handling lack of sleep or whatever challenges you throw at your body as you get older. However, I never missed a day of work.