Few living Americans have been so panned, praised and vilified as Bill Gates.

He entered Harvard but dropped out to found Microsoft in 1975. It wasn't until 1996 that Microsoft "embraced the Internet wholeheartedly."

Today, more than 90 per cent of the surfers use Microsoft's browser IE to access the World Wide Web. He's not just the chairman of Microsoft and the richest man in the world with $31 billion in his bank account. Gates sits at the center of world technology swallowing smaller software and technology companies at regular intervals and at will.

He is no visionary. He just happens to love computers and knows how to make money from them.

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