In 2017, President François Hollande awarded Bill and Melinda with the France's highest national award – Legion of Honour in Paris for their charity efforts
Gates was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs on January 31, 2016, in which he talks about his relationships with his father and StEve Jobs, meeting his then future wife Melinda Ann French, the start of Microsoft and some of his habits (for example reading The Economist "from cover to cover every week")
In 2015, Gates, along with his wife Melinda, received the Padma Bhushan, India's third-highest civilian award for their social work in the country
In 2014, Bill Gates sparked a protest in Vancouver when he decided to donate $50 million to UNAIDS through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the purpose of mass circumcision in Zambia and Swaziland
To date, Bill Gates has written two books:In 2013, Gates became a LinkedIn Influencer
According to Forbes, Gates was ranked as the fourth most powerful person in the world in 2012, up from fifth in 2011
Also in 2010, he was honored with the Silver Buffalo Award by the Boy Scouts of America, its highest award for adults, for his service to youth
In 2009, Gates and Warren Buffett founded The Giving Pledge, whereby they and other billionaires pledge to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropy
In 2008, Gates appeared in a series of ads to promote Microsoft
He was also made an honorary trustee of Peking University in 2007
Gates was made an Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005
Time magazine named Gates one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th century, as well as one of the 100 most influential people of 2004, 2005, and 2006
In 2002, Bill and Melinda Gates received the Jefferson Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged
Gates has received honorary doctorates from Nyenrode Business Universiteit, Breukelen, The Netherlands, in 2000; the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, in 2002; Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in 2005; Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in April 2007; Harvard University in June 2007; the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, in 2007, and Cambridge University in June 2009
In 1999, Gates received New York Institute of Technology's President's Medal
Entomologists named Bill Gates's flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor in 1997
Gates also donated $6 million to the construction of the Gates Computer Science Building, completed in January 1996, on the campus of Stanford University
From 1995 to 2017, he held the Forbes title of the richest person in the world all but four of those years, and held it consistently from March 2014–July 2017, with an estimated net worth of US$89
In 1994, he was honored as the twentieth Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society
Gates was number one on Forbes' 400 Richest Americans list from 1993 through to 2007, 2009, and 2014 through 2017
In 1989, he founded Corbis, a digital imaging company
Since 1987, Gates has been included in the Forbes The World's Billionaires list and was the wealthiest from 1995 to 1996, 1998 to 2007, 2009, and has been since 2014
He remained interested in technical details; in 1985, Jerry Pournelle wrote that when he watched Gates announce Microsoft Excel, "Something else impressed me
He gained a reputation for being distant from others; as early as 1981 an industry executive complained in public that "Gates is notorious for not being reachable by phone and for not returning phone calls
IBM approached Microsoft in July 1980 in reference to an operating system for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC
The company moved from Albuquerque to its new home in Bellevue, Washington, on January 1, 1979
Ballmer, both of whom were students (Ballmer was a member of the School's graduating class of 1977, while Gates left his studies for Microsoft), and donated funds for the laboratory's construction
Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems
From Microsoft's founding in 1975 until 2006, Gates had primary responsibility for the company's product strategy
Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen, and he joined him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974
Gates was a National Merit Scholar when he graduated from Lakeside School in 1973
The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when the company went out of business
Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955
He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973
