Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates IIIis an American business magnate, entrepreneur, philanthropist, investor, and programmer. In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, which became the world's largest PC software company. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, and was the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. Gates has authored and co-authored several books...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth28 October 1955
CitySeattle, WA
CountryUnited States of America
The US in some ways has been the best. Who figured out shale gas? Although that wasn't a good thing [for CO2 levels], it was very innovative. It's led to low-cost energy. Who figured out nuclear power? Largely the United States. Once you get past the steam engine, which is mostly British, then the US has been at the center of most of the energy things that have happened.
We paired this announcement of the R&D [commitment] with the so-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which is 27 [major investors] saying, "Hey, we'll put significant money into [energy innovations] when they're ready to spin out probably into startup companies."
The nuclear approach I'm involved in is called a traveling-wave reactor, which uses waste uranium for fuel. There's a lot of things that have to go right for that dream to come true - many decades of building demo plants, proving the economics are right. But if it does, you could have cheaper energy with no CO2 emissions.
Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy.
Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game.
The trouble with energy farming is that the energy isn't always where you want to use it, and it isn't always when you want to use it.
I have a particular relationship with Vinod Khosla because he's got a lot of very interesting science-based energy startups.
In 80% of the world, energy will be bought where it is economic. You have to help the rest of the world get energy at a reasonable price.
If you want to improve the situation of the poorest two billion on the planet, having the price of energy go down substantially would be the best thing you could do for them.
We decided that we wanted our developers to come with clear minds, not polluted by some other approach, to learn the way that we liked to develop software, and to put the kind of energy into it that we thought was key.
With the launch of Energy City, we have the opportunity to work together to create new tools and solutions that will enable oil and gas companies to achieve new levels of performance in every phase of their business.
It's simply the ingenuity of the software developers -- their brilliance, their energy in coming together and writing these software packages. At Microsoft, we need to recruit the best and the brightest.