William Henry Gates III is currently the world’s third-richest person, with a current net worth of around $58 billion USD. Out of all of the billionaires on the Forbes and Fortune magazine’s lists, it is William Henry Gates III, better known as Bill Gates, who is the most world-famous. And, also unusual for a top world billionaire, he is what you might call a one-trick pony. He made his fortune from microcomputer software at the exact moment when the world adopted microcomputers, and that is that. One company, one product.

Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington, United States. He was the son of two already highly affluent parents; his father, William H. Gates, Sr. (the only one in the family line not to have the number), was already a career business lawyer who co-founded Preston Gates & Ellis LLP, and his mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, was a career banker who was serving on the board of directors for First Interstate Bank. Furthermore, his grandfather, William H. Gates II, was the president of a bank himself, and there are many other affluent business persons in the Gates family tree.

Although it was his father’s wish that he become a lawyer, Bill Gates did not at first seem to start out with much motivation to create his own career. Though he attended and graduated Lakeside, an exclusive preparatory school, he only briefly attended Harvard University before dropping out. Despite this, he holds an honorary degree from Harvard anyway, in recognition of his business success.

Bill Gates’ first brush with computers happened almost accidentally, in 1971. His best friend from Lakeside, Paul Allen, happened to be interested in programming, and founded the Lakeside Programming Group, a hobby club within the prep school. The hobby club attracted new members who would tinker with the big, mainframe machines - PDPs among them - of the time, playing with assembly, Lisp, and BASIC code and using teletypes and even punched cards. Eventually Gates and Allen joined another hobbyist computer club, called the “Homebrew Computer Club”, which had an open-source BASIC program interpreter which they had written. This put them in the right place at the right time when a new computer company, called Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MIPS) approached the club offering to buy their BASIC interpreter. Gates and Allen acted for the club and sold the program to MIPS. The rest of the club was not happy with this outcome, reasoning that it was everyone’s open source program and Gates and Allen had no right to sell it.

The feud between them eventually fueled Bill Gates’ famous “Open Letter to Hobbyists” in 1976, and this set a precedent for Gates to hold all free and open source software in contempt and to swear to stamp it out wherever he could. The feud between Microsoft and the open source community still goes on today, in the form of the rivalry between Microsoft and Linux, as well as with BSD and Apple, whose Mac OS software is also based on BSD. Nevertheless, the pair of Gates and Allen formed Micro-Soft Corporation and continued to hire programmers and sell more software. Microsoft, as the company eventually came to be called, essentially grew up alongside the microcomputer revolution, when old mainframe machines and time-shared systems gave way to stand-alone personal computers that could fit on a desktop.

It was Bill Gates’ family connections that paved the way for the next big break, when his mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, served on the board of the United Way charity at the same time as John Akers, the CEO of IBM. Akers mentioned to Mrs. Gates that the company was looking for an operating system for the new personal computers, and Mrs. Gates naturally recommended her son. Bill Gates, upon being approached, had to hire a scab programmer by the name of Tim Paterson to quickly write the QDOS (literally “Quick and Dirty Operating System”) operating system, which was a clone of the then-existing CP/M operating system. IBM bought the license rights to QDOS and yet through the nature of an unusual agreement between IBM and Microsoft, Microsoft continued to own the system and IBM had to pay them every time it sold a computer. The concept of proprietary software was born, since before this time the normal practice was that software had been given away for free, because computers themselves were so expensive as to prohibit additional costs. Gates continued this business plan by buying up other software products and companies, then incorporating the software into its own programs to be sold as part of its offerings.

QDOS became DOS, DOS became Windows 3.0, Windows became Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, and Vista, and Microsoft grew into the richest software company in the world. In 1986, at the age of just 31, Bill Gates became the youngest billionaire in history at the time. In 1990, Windows 3.0 enjoyed sales of over $1 billion, a historical record for a software product. In 1993, United States president George H.W. Bush presented Bill Gates with the National Medal of Technology, an act which would foreshadow his son George W. Bush’s presidential act of pardoning Microsoft from its antitrust and monopoly convictions. Gates became the richest person in the United States in 1994 and the richest person in the world in 1995, although since relinquishing that title to Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim Helú.

While other billionaires have shown a great deal of struggle and fortitude to get where they are today, Bill Gates seems to have simply fallen into his success. To his credit, he does not take himself too seriously to this day, appearing in public in the relaxed, casual manner of any “computer geek”. Nevertheless, although he has now, at the age of just 52, stepped down as CEO of Microsoft, his personal fortune is still vast and he has stated that he has many more ambitious plans in store.

Warren Buffett is ranked by Forbes magazine as the richest person on Earth as of February 11, 2008. His net worth at this point was estimated at $62 billion USD. So, how did he manage that?

“The Oracle of Omaha”, as he is sometimes known, was born August 30, 1930, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Howard and Leila Buffett. The senior Buffett was a stock investor and four-term U.S. Representative. It is then no surprise that the junior Buffett followed in his father’s footsteps to the world of business investing, minus the political career. Warren Buffett’s first step in this direction after high school was to enroll in the Columbia Business School to study under his mentor, Benjamin Graham, the economist and professional investor. Ironically, Mr. Buffett had originally applied to Harvard Business School but was turned down.

At the age of 21, Warren Buffett paid a personal visit to Benjamin Graham after discovering he was on the board of GEICO insurance at the time, where he made a huge impression on the Vice President. This same year, he graduated Columbia Business School and went to work on Wall Street as a common stockbroker, and furthered his education with a public speaking course. He then started teaching a night class on investment principles at the University of Nebraska.

In 1954, a mere 3 years later, he was offered a position working under Benjamin Graham in a partnership, with a salary of $12,000/year. However, this position was only to last two years, until Graham retired. Nevertheless, Buffett’s personal savings at this point was $140,000, and he moved on to form his own investment partnership as Buffett Partnership Ltd. Working through his many partnerships, he eventually became a millionaire in 1962 and the age of 32.

It was at this point that he began purchasing Berkshire Hathaway, originally a textile manufacturing company which had been founded in 1839. By 1965, he had taken control of Berkshire Hathaway and appointed a new president to run the company. He remains the CEO of the corporation to this day. By 1967, he had expanded the company’s core business into insurance, which eventually became the sole focus of the company. The biggest move in this effort was acquiring an equity stake in the Government Employees Insurance Company, better known to the public as the insurance company GEICO.

Seeing as how the company slogan “Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on car insurance.” is familiar to us all and the CGI-animated gecko, the company’s virtual TV spokesperson, is a recognized household celebrity, it should come as no surprise that the aggressive marketing of the GEICO brand contributed even further to the success of the parent company Berkshire Hathaway, and to Buffett’s fortune. GEICO became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway by 1996.

Meanwhile, Buffett did not rest on his laurels. Throughout the 1970’s, either directly or through Berkshire Hathaway, acquired stock in the Washington Post Company, purchased the Buffalo Evening News, acquired stock in the American Broadcasting Company, and performed or oversaw numerous other mergers and investments. By 1980, Warren Buffett’s net worth had reached $620 million, although he continued to live only on his salary of $50,000/year. Continuing into the 1980’s, Buffett became a 7% shareholder in the Coca-Cola Company.

Today, Berkshire Hathaway is celebrated as the most highly-priced stock on the New York Stock Exchange, in part because the stock has never split, which is an unusual attribute for a company of such size. Perhaps the most remarkable ally to Buffett is Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft and himself America’s second biggest billionaire. Buffett and Gates have had ties going back nearly a decade, with Gates’ Cascade Investments LLC owning a 5% stake of class B shares in Berkshire Hathaway and Buffett, in turn, donated the majority of his charitable contributions to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In addition, they are known to play bridge together.

There is no secret to Warren Buffett’s success. He has demonstrated a “nose to the grindstone” philosophy and his earliest childhood showed his ambitions to acquiring wealth through hard work and diligence. Throughout the decades, Buffett has shown a radar-like focus on spotting the next big business opportunity, and he has almost never made a business deal that went wrong. Today, he has announced his intentions of seeking out a successor to his vast empire, and to donate the majority of his fortunes to charity.

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. gives us an amazing anomaly in the world of business, for the Waltons, the family which owns the retail chain, is the richest family in the world. So much so, that the Walton family tree has produced a total of - count them - 18 billionaires! Currently, six of the surviving members of the family are on the Forbes top world billionaires list.

It is difficult to get a handle on the scope of the Walton family fortune without resorting to comparisons. Their fortune is greater than that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s combined. The family’s total holdings equals the Gross Domestic Product of the nation of Singapore. The dividend stream from their combined holdings alone produces approximately a billion dollars annually. They are compared to the Rockefeller family, whose riches they equal after adjusting for inflation, and in terms of raw dollars are far richer. If they simply raked one million dollars every day into the fireplace and burned it, they would still never go broke. You get the picture.

The corporation they own, Walmart, is the world’s largest public corporation, the largest private employer in the world, and the largest grocery retailer in the United States. Employees of Walmart Stores, Inc., amounted to 2.1 million people worldwide in 2008. For comparison, the country of Kosovo had a population of 2.1 million people in the same year. The immense size of the company requires the Walton family to tread carefully when they make decisions, since every move they make actually has a measurable impact on the United States economy.

The surviving members of the family who are also on the Forbes top billionaires’ list are currently: Jim Walton, Christy Walton, and S. Robson Walton, with $19.2 billion each, Alice Walton at $19.0 billion even, and from the James Lawrence “Bud” branch of the family tree, Ann Walton-Kroenke with $2.8 billion and Nancy Walton-Laurie with $2.4 billion. However, one must remember not to think of their fortunes individually, since the entire family acts in consensus. They are usually tied for the high 20’s and low 30’s in the Forbes list of richest people, so it’s hardly worth trying to allocate each dime separately.

Of the second-generation Waltons, S. Robson watches the business the most, not so much managing Walmart directly as consulting for the people who do manage it; the current CEO and president is H. Lee Scott. Jim Walton is the “family banker”, tending to the family side of the empire and all of its subsidiary holdings. John and Alice Walton spend most of their time working for the various causes and charities they support - John with education reform and Alice with children’s charities and environmental causes.

How did it all start? Sam Walton, at the age of 22, got a job working for a J.C.Penny store in Des Moines, Iowa. Five years later, he decided to work for a chain of stores called Ben Franklin and got offered his own franchise with one of them. He just kept getting more and more successful in retail, and opened the first Wal-mart in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 1962. The company incorporated in 1969. And they just kept growing!

The Walton family is obviously enjoying their status, and the family seems to get along very well with each other while managing the corporate empire. Walmart still has plans for the future yet, since they are still expanding and opening new stores around the world. The only place they’ve lost ground is Germany, where the Aldi chain is beating them. They have chosen to offer franchises in India, since Indian law prevents them from owning stores in that country directly. Currently, they have 2,980 stores in 14 countries outside the United States and 2,447 Wal-Mart Supercenters within the United States.

Of course, having more money than most people would know what to do with tends to make some people a little odd. And what’s the point of having all that money if you can’t do whatever you want, no matter how bizarre? Here are the extreme cases of people who would be oddities anyway - even if they were broke!

Nicolas Berggruen - the homeless billionaire

Nicolas Berggruen has a net worth of $3 billion. He made that by being born into the famous family of art collectors. He made even more money through his involvement in private equity and hedge fund businesses. Yet he has no house, preferring to live out of hotels. Every meal he eats is at a restaurant. He doesn’t even own a car! In his interview, he explained, “Living in a grand environment to show myself and others that I have wealth has zero appeal. Whatever I own is temporary, since we’re only here for a short period of time.”

Bill Gates - the technophile

You’d expect the founder of Microsoft to be enthusiastic about technology, but he takes it to an extreme beyond all reason. His mansion includes an underground music system for his swimming pool, two secret bookcase doors, speakers hidden in the wallpaper so that music flows into the room from nowhere, and an RIF-chip system so that the house can adjust the thermostat in a room according to the preferences of whoever is in that room. Sometimes he pushes technology too far - he has been caught onstage with a 50-foot “blue screen of death” when he’s demoing Windows and it crashes, he spent his first night in his mansion trying to figure out how to turn off the TV, and he once wrote a blistering letter to his engineers when he spent a whole day trying to get his own computer to install a media codec.

Carl Icahn - the predator

Carl Icahn is self-described “corporate raider”. His specialty is hostile takeovers, his greatest being TWA in 1985. His latest move has been a years-long battle to take over Yahoo!, Inc., for pretty much no reason except he feels like it. While other billionaires build fortunes, he waits for somebody else to build one - then he goes in to take it away! He has also described himself as an “investor activist”. The Wall Street Journal is even up in arms about him, as written in their article “Why Carl Icahn Is Bad For Investors”: He pushes for strategies that raise prices in the short term while harming companies’ long-term prospects. Carl Icahn is a bad boy that won’t play nice with others. But he’s fun to watch!

Sultan of Brunei - the playboy

Bored? Well, just build your own amusement park! That’s apparently what Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah was thinking when he built Jerudong Park, a $1 billion theme park which boasts a steel looping roller coaster, carousel, pedal boats, pirate ship, skydiver, bumper cars, go-carts, shooting gallery, amphitheater, and a musical fountain show. Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston have performed at the amphitheater. Can’t he just watch TV like the rest of us?

Zimbabwe - the starving “billionaires”

OK, we’re cheating with this one. The “billionaires” of Zimbabwe are only “billionaires” in Zimbabwe dollars - a one-billion-dollar Zimbabwe banknote is currently worth one United States penny - and falling! Zimbabwe has inflation at the rate of 2.2 million percent. 80% of the population of Zimbabwe lives below the poverty line. It is an especially sad sight to see a filthy Zimbabwe child in rags and bare feet walk down a muddy path to the store to buy a slice of bread for today’s meal, while carrying huge armloads of worthless paper money to do so.

Steve Fossett - missing forever?

Billionaire Steve Fossett was a world-class adventurer, with five nonstop circumnavigations of the Earth to his credit including as a long-distance solo balloonist, as a sailor, and as a solo flight fixed-wing aircraft pilot. As a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, Fossett has set 116 records in five different sports. Now, how does a guy like this manage to lose an airplane over the bare, clear Nevada desert in September 2007 so thoroughly that no searcher can find him? The biggest search and rescue team in America’s history can’t even confirm he’s dead. Not a single bolt of his plane wreckage has turned up anywhere. Several reporters have brought up the possibility that he might have faked his own death. Lieutenant Colonel Cynthia Ryan of the US Civil Air Patrol, who has been part of the search effort, has stated, “I’ve been doing this search and rescue for 14 years. Fossett should have been found. We’re pretty good at what we do.”

Sheldon Adelson is currently the thirteenth-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $26 billion USD. He is also the United States’ third-richest person. This comes as no surprise when you consider that he is in the United States, and his business is casinos. He is the CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corporation and its subsidiaries. Casinos and resorts currently owned by Sand Corp. include the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino, the Palazzo Resort Hotel Casino, and the Sands Expo and Convention Center, all three in Las Vegas, USA, the Sands Macao and the The Venetian Macao Resort Hotel, both in Macau, China, and the Sands BethWorks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Sheldon Gary Adelson was born August 1, 1933, in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents were immigrants; his mother from the Ukraine and his father from Lithuania. He came from a household of humble means, where his father was employed as a taxi cab driver.

Adelson reportedly sold newspapers as a child and going into his early adulthood, he worked variously as a mortgage broker, investment adviser financial consultant, and eventually in the chartered tour business by the 1960’s. He and his friends ended up starting their own chartered tour business which enjoyed moderate success. He made a run at college in New York, but did not complete a degree.

One other achievement of Adelson of which it is good to take note of is that he founded the COMDEX computer trade show. Founded by Adelson and his business partners in 1979, COMDEX became the world’s leading computer trade expo, throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s during the height of the microcomputer revolution. Many of the titans of the computer industry, including Bill Gates, have appeared to give landmark keynote speeches and presentations at COMDEX. At the height of the COMDEX show’s popularity, Las Vegas events packed motels so densely that even the far-away town of Primm, Nevada, would find its hotel rooms booked during COMDEX weekends.

COMDEX also put on conventions in other major cities throughout the United States, and served to build Sheldon Adelson’s fortunes immensely. Although COMDEX has now seen its decline and possible demise in the 2000’s at the hands of competing conventions such as CeBIT and CES, the COMDEX empire is nevertheless to be considered the cornerstone of Adelson’s corporate empire.

In 1988, Adelson had amassed reserves sufficient to purchase the Sands Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. This acquisition brought with it much prestige, as the Sands, in its day, was the legendary hangout of Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, and the “Rat Pack”, in addition to having been owned by Howard Hughes at one time. The next year, plans commenced to construct the Sands Expo and Convention Center, also in Las Vegas, Nevada; the new convention center opened in 1990 and stands today as the only privately-owned convention center in the Unites States.

Meanwhile, the original Sands Hotel was closed down and eventually torn down in 1996. Sands Atlantic City filed for bankruptcy in 1998 and was sold to investor tycoon Carl Icahn. In the place of the Sands Hotel in Nevada, the Venetian was constructed. The Venetian is a celebrated achievement, boasting an all-suite hotel, 18 restaurants, a shopping mall, and, in a nod to it’s namesake in Venice, Italy, a canal complete with gondolas and singing gondoliers.

Sheldon Adelson has also been actively involved in the fields of politics and charity. He is married to Dr. Miriam Adelson, whose research he funds. Together, the couple have donated the maximum allowed contribution of $500,000 to the re-election of president George W. Bush. Adelson has founded, run, and supported “Freedom’s Watch”, a lobbyist group that advocates America’s continued involvement in the war in Iraq. He has also been an outspoken Republican and vehemently opposed the candidacy of Barrack Obama. As a result of these and other activities, he has drawn his share of lawsuits, controversy, and criticism.

Sheldon Adelson has overall lived the dream of any son of immigrants. Starting from the son of a taxi driver who ran a newspaper stand, he has built an empire forged from keeping an eye on the culture and times and moving accordingly.