Bill Gates has stepped down from his position on the board of Microsoft. Gates, 64, is also stepping down from the board of Warren Buffet’s holding company, Berkshire Hathaway.
He is stepping down from the boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to focus more on philanthropic work.
Gates announced his decision in a statement posted to LinkedIn on Friday:
“I have made the decision to step down from both of the public boards on which I serve – Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway – to dedicate more time to philanthropic priorities including global health and development, education, and my increasing engagement in tackling climate change. The leadership at the Berkshire companies and Microsoft has never been stronger, so the time is right to take this step.”
Bill Gates professional bio
Born in October 1955 in Seattle, Washington, Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to set up Microsoft. He started the company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his childhood friend Paul Allen, who died in 2018.
Microsoft got its big break in 1980 when the company signed a deal with IBM to create the operating system known as MS-DOS. The company grew to become the largest PC software company in the world.
Microsoft went public in 1986 and Gates was a billionaire by the time he was 31 years old.
Bill Gates was CEO of Microsoft until 2000 when he stepped down from the position and Steve Ballmer took over. He remained on the board of the company as chairman and CEO until 2014 when Satya Nadella took over as CEO of the company. But he had been focussing more on the affairs of his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since 2008 when he withdrew from day-to-day management duties at Microsoft.
Bill Gates 2020 net worth
According to Forbes, Bill Gates’ net worth, as of March 14, 2020, is $103.6 billion. Gates is the second richest man in the world after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which estimates his net worth at $102 billion.
Gates remained for many years one of Microsoft’s top shareholders. But he has recently been selling and giving away some of his stake in the company. Forbes reports that he currently has only a little over 1 percent of the shares in Microsoft estimated to be worth about $7.3 billion.
However, he has also been diversifying his portfolio by investing in other stocks and assets.
Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, chair the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the biggest charitable foundation in the world. Gates donated about $35.8 billion in Microsoft stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Founded in the year 2000, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation focusses on supporting development, education and health-related projects around the world, and fostering equal opportunity for people.
The foundation has more than $50 billion in assets and has donated an estimated $40 billion to education and health projects around the world.
In 2010, Bill and Melinda Gates, and billionaire investor Warren Buffett, created The Giving Pledge. Members of The Giving Pledge commit to donating the majority of their wealth to philanthropy.
The joined Buffet in calling for increased taxation of billionaires in 2019.