Bill Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft. After leaving Microsoft, Gates pursued a variety of philanthropic endeavors. He donated large amounts of money to various charities and scientific research projects through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, believed to be the largest private foundation in the world.

Gates held the title of richest person in the world from 1995 to 2017, except for four years, and held it continuously from March 2014 to July 2017, with an estimated net worth of US$89.9 billion as of October 2017. However, the July 27, 2017, and as of October 27, 2017, he was surpassed by Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who at the time had an estimated net worth of US$90.6 billion.

According to Forbes, as of November 17, 2022, Gates is worth an estimated $104 billion, making him the sixth richest person in the world. In a Keynote delivered at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which was held from 23 to 27 January 2008, Bill Gates calls for the beginning of a new era of creative capitalism.

By creative capitalism, Gates means a system in which the technological progress made by companies is not exploited simply for the logic of profit, but also to bring development and well-being especially where it is most needed, in the poorest areas of the world.

During a TED conference held in 2010, Gates presented projects to be applied in the future to reduce the impact of CO2 in daily life. The argument mainly concerned the possibility of adopting new, more efficient technologies, and to introduce the argument he presented a simple equation where the first among the multiplicative factors is the world population.