Two minute read. Written by Samya – a grade 8 student

Bill Gates – one of the world’s richest men – is leaving the Board of Microsoft – the company he created.

What that means is that he will now not be involved on a day to day basis with the company. When we say Board, we mean Board of Directors – these are a group of people who govern (or run) a company. They are the main leaders and make all the big decisions. Not all companies have a board of directors, but the really big ones do (many rules for which ones need to have a Board).

So, till now Bill Gates was on the Board of Directors. He created Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975. Microsoft is the world’s largest personal computer software company. If you are reading this article on a computer, it is possible that the operating system is Windows (which is made by Microsoft). Or, if you use the computer to do any homework, you may use a software called Microsoft Office. These are only two of the software that Microsoft makes (there are many more).

Bill Gates is one of the world’s richest men today. Here’s his interesting story:

Bill Gates went to a school called Lakeside High School (in a city called Seattle, which is in America), where he and his friend Paul Allen used to skip classes to write programming code! Together they wrote many programmes and even created something called Traf-o-Data, which was a software that measured traffic flow.

They finally founded Microsoft together in 1975. By the time Bill Gates was 31, he was already a billionaire (that’s very, very rich). Did you know that he dropped out of college (Harvard University) to keep working at Microsoft?

His real name is William Henry Gates III and he was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington (America).

Bill Gates stepped down from being the Chairman of Microsoft (a Chairman is the top leader) in 2014 and now he has left the Board as well.

He and his wife run a charity foundation called Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (it’s a company that only does charity work – charity means helping people with money). They do a lot of work in healthcare. He has donated a large amount his money to charity to help fight many diseases (like malaria and polio). He now wants to spend more time in doing charity. More leaders can learn from Bill Gates and give more to people who need it.

Here’s a fun fact on him:

As a child he loved played board games – Risk and Monopoly and he was very good at them!

Today he is worth 97.8 billion dollars! The numbers might make your head spin, but just to give you an idea – 1 billion dollars is 100 crores, so now calculate how much is 97.8 billion in Rupees!!

Send us your answer – first two get a prize!