Bill Gates
Well, somebody had to be the richest man on Earth, but why did it have to be him? William Henry Gates III, now just called "Bill Gates" or "billg", rules over a company that is the undisputed monopoly of the computer software business, with tendrills extending in nearly all related fields (and some unrelated ones as well). Through his efforts and the efforts of the folks he has groomed over the decades, his domain and personal wealth have increased at near psychotic-levels while at the same time causing what some might consider permanent damage to the landscape of the very industry he helped form.
In the present day, it is quite useless to discern where Microsoft ends and Bill begins, and vice versa. Instead, to get any idea of Bill Gates, it's best to go back to the 1970s and the early 1980s, before Microsoft went public and shot the little dweeb into the financial stratosphere.
People with roman numerals after their names generally don't lead hard lives, and Gates started his life in a rich suburb of Seattle, Washington. He was sent to the Lakeside Private school starting at age 13, where the school started acquiring a number of high-tech toys from local industry and sales. Gates fell in love with computers at that point, a relationship that never really soured for him.
With his best friend Paul Allen, Gates founded the Lakeside Programming Group in 1971. Not a company but really more of a social group, they made it a goal to get as much computer time as possible from local businesses. One particularly useful contact was the Computer Center Corporation, C-Cubed, which Gates and the rest of the Programming Group would do computer work for in exchange for time on the machines at night. In the first of several major ironies, Gates and pals would comb through the source code of the computer systems they worked on to get programming ideas. more