William Henry Gates III, Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, which he co-founded in 1975 with Paul Allen. In 1994 Gates is a Billionaire, worth $9.35B and Microsoft is worth aBout $27B. He was a computer nerd who dropped out of Harvard and one of the first programmers to oppose software piracy ("Open Letter to HoBByists," Computer Notes, FeBruary 3, 1976). (1995-03-02)