Mr. William H. Gates, III, is Co-Chairman & Trustee at Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, Founder, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer at Cascade Investment LLC, Chairman at Corbis Corp., at Corbis Images LLC and at TerraPower LLC.

He is on the Board of Directors at Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. and Microsoft Corp. At Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he shapes and approves grant making strategies, advocates for the foundation’s issues, and helps set the overall direction of the organization.

In 1975, Mr. Gates left Harvard University in his junior year to focus on Microsoft, the company he founded with his childhood friend. As chief software architect and chairman, he led the company to become the worldwide leader in business and personal software, services, and solutions. In July 2008, Mr. Gates transitioned into a new role as chairman of Microsoft and advisor on some key development projects.

He also founded Corbis, which is developing a comprehensive digital archive of art and photography from public and private collections around the globe. Mr. Gates was previously employed as Founder by Shop.com, Trustee, Officer & Volunteer by Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, and President by The King County Bar Association.

He also served on the board at ICOS Corp. and Kymeta Corp.

He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington.

William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born 28 October 1955) is an American business magnate, philanthropist, investor, computer programmer, and inventor. Gates is the former chief executive and chairman of Microsoft, the world’s largest personal-computer software company, which he co-founded with Paul Allen.

He is consistently ranked in the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people and was the wealthiest overall from 1995 to 2014—excluding a few brief periods post-2008. Between 2009 and 2014 his wealth more than doubled from $40 billion to more than $82 billion. Between 2013 and 2014 his wealth increased by $15 billion, or around $1.5 billion more than the entire GDP of Iceland in 2014.

During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, he was also the largest individual shareholder up until May 2014. Refn | group = "lower-alpha" | Gates regularly documents his share ownership through public U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission form 4 filings. His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. Gates's maternal grandfather was JW Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has one elder sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or "Trey" because his father had the "II" suffix.Sfn |Manes | 1994 |p= 15 Early on in his life, Gates's parents had a law career in mind for him.Sfn |Manes|1994|p = 47 When Gates was young, his family regularly attended a Congregational church. The family encouraged competition; one visitor reported that "it didn't matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock ... there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing".

Source @ Wikipedia