Bill Gates

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2016

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway is Bill Gates.

He sat at his first computer while still at school in Seattle, wrote his first computer programme aged just 13 and went on to co-found the company Microsoft, becoming one of the key figures of the technological revolution. In 2000, he and his wife, Melinda, launched the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has given to date over $34 billion to projects aimed at reducing health inequality around the world.

Born into a professional family - his father was a lawyer, his mother a former teacher who later became involved with volunteer work - he was introduced to the idea of 'giving back' at an early age. An avid reader as a child, he attended Harvard where in his sophomore year he and Paul Allen developed software for the first micro-computers. The company would go on to achieve huge success with its Windows operating system.

By 1987, Gates had become the world's youngest self-made billionaire, then worth $1.25 billion. Consistently listed as the Richest Man in the World, he stepped down as CEO of the company in 2000 although he remained as Chairman until 2014.

These days his primary focus is his philanthropy. In 2010, Gates and his friend Warren Buffett announced the Giving Pledge which aims to inspire the wealthy people of the world to give away the majority of their net worth to worthy causes.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. My cast away this week this week is Bill Gates. He is known principally for three things.
0:38.6	Microsoft making money and now giving vast sums of it away. The first part of his life saw him
0:44.8	found build and run a software company so successful it's made him the richest
0:49.3	person on earth. Now he's turned his formidable drive and intellect to funding and running the world's largest independent
0:56.4	charitable foundation with the simply stated aim of dramatically improving the quality of life of billions of people.
1:04.4	All this from the world's most celebrated college dropout.
1:08.2	His father says his son has never done things by halves.
1:11.2	Age 11. He was a boy who appeared to gain the
1:14.0	intellect of an adult almost overnight reading anything he could get his hands
1:18.1	on, including a full set of encyclopedias cover to cover. Forty years, his early ability to work on code, the very architecture of computer technology,
1:28.0	and to so readily grasp its profound implications,
1:32.0	has indelibly shaped both his life and hours.
1:36.6	He says it's pretty amazing to go from a world where computers were unheard of and very complex to where they're a tool of everyday life.
1:44.8	That was the dream that I wanted to make come true and in large part it's unfolded as I expected.
1:51.6	So Bill Gates, welcome to Desert Island Disks. In this fast-moving digital age,
1:56.4	I think it would be fair to say that time is pretty much our most precious commodity and
2:01.0	I have it on good authority that your life and your
2:03.9	appointments are timed in one minute slots. Am I right about that? Well I'm very
2:09.0	busy but no I don't do one minute meetings and I do leave a lot of time so I can read and think about things.
	...

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