Saturday 27 November 2010

A Good Rich Man

 How would you feel if you have enough money to spend for the rest of your life? Will that make you happy? OK, now think about this: How about if you have three million dollars to spend every day for the next 100 years. How will this make you feel? 


This is the money that Bill Gates (The co-founder of Microsoft) has right now. He gets even richer by the day. He is one of the richest people on earth but he really doesn't care that much about money. Perhaps because he has been extremely rich for a very long time that it doesn't mean much to him now. 


His father worked as a lawyer and he got very good education when he was young. He went to a private secondary school and fell in love with programming. At school he learned how to develop programs to control what computers can do and make them do new things. He dropped out of university to start a business in making software. Software is a computer word that we use to mean computer programs. 


The truth is that Bill Gates feels that with wealth comes responsibility. When he started his company from the family's garage at home, he couldn't have imagined how successful it would become. At the age of 24 he made the first million dollar. One year later, he made 100 million dollars but it was all because of his hard work and business sense. 


He is a charitable man who spends a lot of money fighting poverty and disease in poor countries. He spends billions of dollars every year giving education to those who need it most. He has spent tens of billions of dollars fighting malaria in poor countries and looking after people's health. Malaria is a deadly disease that is common in many poor countries in Africa and Asia. A lot of pharmaceutical companies stopped developing new drugs to fight malaria because there is not much money they can make if they do. This is how greedy most big companies are nowadays. Everyone is after money but not Bill Gates. 
 Because Bill Gates has spent a lot of his personal money on charitable projects, he is not the richest man on earth. Does he care much about being number one? Of course not. He feels more satisfied working on his one charitable organization. To do his charitable work, he gets help from his wife and his father as well.