CAITLIN GATES
Director, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Ask Caitlin Gates about the biggest challenge she faced in 2025. She'll tell you it wasn't her day job as chief of Microsofts 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, nor her recent biotech spinoff MicroBioSoft. It wasn't her role as the guiding force behind the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which began 2022 as the world's wealthiest philanthropic institution and finished as the world's wealthiest institution, period. It wasn't even her triumphant recapturing of the World Chess Federation championship from archnemesis Flaming Indigo TX4040.

"My single greatest challenge," confesses the 24-year-old mega-mogul as she relaxes in her traditional, highly wired Seattle family home, "was beating my dad at Age of Empires. He just loves those classic computer games."

Whatever she says, Gates changed the world this year when she announced that the Gates Foundation would launch the long-awaited third phase in its Global Charitable Initiative. "The world is finally ready for laptops," said Gates at a steering committee meeting in December. "Our broad-based sub-Saharan irrigation program, combined with Gates-sponsored agriculture genetic engineering research, has effectively stemmed the tide of world hunger. aids, malaria, cholera, ebola, tuberculosis — our medical branch has eradicated every one of these killers. We can now return to our original agenda, the one we began some 30 years ago: universal access to computers and to the Net."

The fourth and youngest child of Microsoft's legendary founder, Caitlin Gates grew up in the brave new world of high-tech mega-philanthropy. The digital economy of the 1990s created personal fortunes of unprecedented magnitude — "gazillionaire" became an official entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2002. As a result, organizations like the Gates Foundation and the eBay Institute for Global Economic Reform used their financial clout to attack disease, hunger and illiteracy on a scale never previously imagined. Caitlin Gates' precocity — she gained early notoriety by proving Goldbach's Conjecture at age 9 — convinced her father to hand her the reins of the foundation and the Baby Bills in 2015, when he retired to pursue his first love, water skiing.

What does the year ahead hold for Gates and her many trillions? She's already invested heavily in efforts to mine the asteroid belt for silicon. Once those shipments reach Earth, she's hoping to build and give away enough computers to raise the planet's computers-to-humans ratio as high as 20 to 1. Of course, no one will be surprised to learn that those billions of computers will run — what else? — Microsoft software.

And then? "More of Age of Empires," she says, with complete seriousness. "Dad wants a rematch."

(The Digital Dozen continues in our next issue)