Bill Gates ‘never set out to make money’

Andrew Callus

CAMBRIDGE, England: The world's richest man says he never set out to make

money. Coming from boyish Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, with his open face

and obvious enthusiasm for giving it away, the idea somehow sounds plausible.

"When I started out I had no notion that what I was doing would lead to

great wealth," he told reporters on Friday at a Cambridge University

presentation for international students sponsored by his personal charity.

"People say I'm an entrepreneur, and I am, but I'm not a generic

entrepreneur. I was going to do software whatever it meant economically."

Gates has had a tough year, fighting off an attempt by US anti-trust

authorities to break up the company he co-founded a quarter of a century ago,

and seeing Microsoft suffer from economic downturn and investor disaffection

with technology stocks.

But if the strain is taking its toll on the 46-year-old chairman of one of

the world's top companies, it does not show. Rocking back and forth in his seat

with his arms clasped together as he talks, he still resembles the sharp-yet-shy

1970s Seattle teenager who revolutionized the computer world.

Though he dropped out of Harvard, Gates says this was because he had to move

quickly to gain the advantage in the emerging world of software.

In the British university town of Cambridge, where Microsoft has its own

research division, he was not going to advocate such a cavalier approach to the

first 151 Gates Scholars sponsored by his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"Unless you have some monumental time urgency everybody should finish

college," he said. "I loved school. I got to grow up a little bit,

which is important, and I got to hang out with a lot of other smart kids."

World's largest charity



Gates the giver, whose charity is the world's largest with more than $24 billion
in trust, says he plans to give 98 per cent of his wealth -- estimated at well

over $40 billion -- back to society over time through his health and education

schemes.

He has been criticized in the US press for taking too long to start giving,

but he says he really did not register until recently how huge the inequalities

were in the world.

"When I was a teenager my parents got me involved in some very

philanthropic things, but nobody was telling me about malaria...I knew about

leprosy from the Bible. My awareness about these things really wasn't until the

90s."

He puts his own achievements down to luck playing "a huge role",

healthy academic competition with his sister as a child, and an early start at

reading. The books? Science fiction, and C.S. Forester's novels chronicling the

life British naval officer Captain Horatio Hornblower.

"If you want to know about Captain Hornblower, I'm your man," says

Gates. Can this really be the man responsible for a generation of children

hooked on computer games?

(C) Reuters Limited.