Bill Gates / Human Spirit
He hopes to be running Microsoft for another 10 years, he says, then promises to focus as intensely on giving his money away. He says he plans to leave his children about $10 million each. “He will spend time, at some point, thinking about the impact his philanthropy can have,” Buffett says. “He is too imaginative to just do conventional gifts.” Already hes given $34 million to the University of Washington, partly to fund a chair for human genome-project researcher Leroy Hood; $15 million (along with $10 million from Ballmer) for a new computer center at Harvard; and $6 million to Stanford. An additional $200 million is in a foundation run by his father, and he has talked about taking over personally the funding of Microsofts program to provide computers to inner-city libraries, to which hes donated $3 million in book royalties. “Ive been pushing him gently to think more about philanthropy,” his father says. “I think his charitable interests will run, as they do now, to schools and libraries.”
Asked about his regrets, Gates talks about not getting a Microsoft E-mail application to the market quickly enough. “We were too busy, and at a retreat where I wrote our
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