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logo    Robber Baron of the Twenty-First Century


Wikipedia defines Robber Baron as a term revived in the 19th century in the United States as a pejorative reference to businessmen and bankers who dominated their respective industries and amassed huge personal fortunes as a direct result of pursuing various allegedly anti-competitive or unfair business practices. The term may now be used in relation to any businessman or banker who is perceived to have used questionable business practices in order to become powerful or wealthy. Among the most famous American Robber Barons are John Jacob Astor (real estate, fur New York City), Andrew Carnegie (railroads, steel Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Jay Cooke (finance Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), Daniel Drew (finance New York state), James Buchanan Duke (tobacco near Durham, North Carolina), James Fisk (finance New York state), Henry Flagler (railroads, oil, the Standard Oil company New York City and Palm Beach, Florida), Henry Ford (automobile Dearborn, Michigan and metropolitan Detroit, Michigan), Henry Clay Frick (steel Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and New York City), John Warne Gates (steel, oil Chicago and Texas), Jay Gould (finance, railroads New York (both state and city), Edward Henry Harriman (railroads New York state), Collis P. Huntington (railroads California, Virginia, and New York), Mark Hopkins (railroads - California),Charles Crocker (railroads - California), James J. Hill (railroads St. Paul, Minnesota), J. P. Morgan (banking New York City. Presently JPMorgan Chase & Co. ), John D. Rockefeller (oil, the Standard Oil company Cleveland, Ohio and New York City), Leland Stanford (railroads Sacramento, California and San Francisco, California), and Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroads, shipping New York City)

William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington to William H. Gates, Jr., a prominent lawyer, and Mary Maxwell Gates who served on the board of directors for First Interstate Bank and the United Way and whose father, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. His wealthy family obviously inculcated robber baron values into Bill, for by hook and crook, he has become the quintessential robber baron of all time.

When he was in the eighth grade in the Lakeside School, Seattle's most exclusive preparatory school, he and other students were banned for the summer after they were caught using an ASR-33 teletype terminal attached to a General Electric computer exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.

After reading an issue of Popular Electronics that described the Altair 8800, Gates contacted the creators of the new microcomputer to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform when, in fact, they had not written a single line of code for it. But, over a few weeks, they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer and a BASIC interpreter, which became popular with computer hobbyists. When Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked into the community and was being widely copied and distributed he wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter saying that MITS could not continue to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software without payment. This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to demand payment, even though he was one of the students banned for stealing free computer time from General Electric and after telling a bald-faced lie to the people at Altair.

In 1980, IBM approached Microsoft to make the BASIC interpreter for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC. When IBM's representatives mentioned that they needed an operating system, Gates referred them to Digital Research (DRI). When IBM did not reach a licensing agreement with DRI, Gates, who knew of 86-DOS (QDOS), an operating system similar to CP/M that Seattle Computer Products had made for hardware similar to the PC, bought the rights to it for $50,000, keeping the IBM deal a secret (nice guy, huh?).

Many of Microsoft's business practices have led to antitrust litigation. In the 1998 United States v. Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony that was evasive. Early rounds of his deposition show him saying 'I don't recall' so many times that even the presiding judge chuckled. Worse, many of the technology chief's denials and pleas of ignorance were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of e-mail Gates both sent and received.

So here you have him, Bill Gates, the guy who goes after people who pirate Microsoft software, a guy who as a ridiculously rich teenager stole computer time, who has lied to the makers of the Altair 8800, who was less than completely honest with Seattle Computer Products, and who told bald-faced lies in Federal Court.

What a nice guy! Don't we want everyone to be just like him? A robber baron of the first order whose life demonstrates conclusively that in America, immorality, if not actual crime, pays; it pays very well.  And that's just one of the reasons people the world over hate us. (4/20/2007)