What is the net worth of Bill's gates?

                     Bills Gates

This article is about the co-founder of Microsoft. For other people of the same name, see Bill Gates (disambiguation).

William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate, software developer, investor, author, and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft Corporation, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen.[3][4] During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014.[5] He is considered one of the best known entrepreneurs of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.

Bill Gates

Head and shoulders photo of Bill Gates

Gates in 2017

Born

William Henry Gates III

October 28, 1955 (age 65)

Seattle, Washington, U.S.

Education

Harvard University (dropped out)

Occupation

Software developerinvestorentrepreneur

Years active

1972–present

Known for

Co-founder of Microsoft and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Title

Co-chairperson of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Chairman and founder of Branded Entertainment Network

Chairman and founder of Cascade Investment

Chairman and co-founder of TerraPower

Founder of Breakthrough Energy

Technology advisor of Microsoft[1]

Board member of

Berkshire Hathaway

Microsoft (former, both)

Spouse(s)

Melinda French

​

​(m. 1994; div. 2021)​[2]

Children

3

Parent(s)

Bill Gates Sr.

Mary Maxwell

Awards

Presidential Medal of Freedom (ribbon).svg Presidential Medal of Freedom (2016)

Website

www.gatesnotes.com

Signature

Gates's signature

Gates was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. In 1975, he and Allen founded Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It became the world's largest personal computer software company.[6][a] Gates led the company as chairman and CEO until stepping down as CEO in January 2000, succeeded by Steve Ballmer, but he remained chairman of the board of directors and became chief software architect.[9] During the late 1990s, he was criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive. This opinion has been upheld by numerous court rulings.[10] In June 2008, Gates transitioned to a part-time role at Microsoft and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the private charitable foundation he and his then-wife, Melinda Gates, established in 2000.[11] He stepped down as chairman of the board of Microsoft in February 2014 and assumed a new post as technology adviser to support the newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella.[12] In March 2020, Gates left his board positions at Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to focus on his philanthropic efforts including climate change, global health and development, and education.[13]

Since 1987, Gates has been included in the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people.[14][15] From 1995 to 2017, he held the Forbes title of the richest person in the world every year except from 2010 to 2013.[16] In October 2017, he was surpassed by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who had an estimated net worth of US$90.6 billion compared to Gates's net worth of US$89.9 billion at the time.[17] As of May 2021, Gates had an estimated net worth of US$144 billion, making him the fourth-richest person in the world.[18]

Later in his career and since leaving day-to-day operations at Microsoft in 2008, Gates has pursued many business and philanthropic endeavors. He is the founder and chairman of several companies, including BEN, Cascade Investment, bgC3, and TerraPower. He has given sizable amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, reported to be the world's largest private charity.[19] Through the foundation, he led an early 21st century vaccination campaign which significantly contributed to the eradication of the wild poliovirus in Africa.[20][21] In 2010, Gates and Warren Buffett founded The Giving Pledge, whereby they and other billionaires pledge to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropy.[22]

              Eearly life

Bill Gates was born in Seattle, Washington, on October 28, 1955.[4] He is the son of William H. Gates Sr.[b] (1925–2020) and Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994).[23] His ancestry includes English, German, and Irish/Scots-Irish.[24] His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way of America. Gates's maternal grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has an older sister Kristi (Kristianne) and a younger sister Libby. He is the fourth of his name in his family but is known as William Gates III or "Trey" (i.e., three) because his father had the "II" suffix.[25][26] The family lived in the Sand Point area of Seattle in a home that was damaged by a rare tornado when Gates was seven years old.[27]

Early in his life, Gates observed that his parents wanted him to pursue a law career.[28] When he was young, his family regularly attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed denomination.[29][30][31] Gates was small for his age and was bullied as a child.[26] The family encouraged competition; one visitor reported that "it didn't matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock; there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing".[32]

Gates (right) with Paul Allen at Lakeside School in 1970

At 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school,[33][34] where he wrote his first software program.[35] When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers' Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the students.[36] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and he was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine, an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly.[37] After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, Gates and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC) which banned Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Gates's best friend and first business partner Kent Evans, for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.[38][26]

The four students formed the Lakeside Programmers Club to make money.[26] At the end of the ban, they offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for extra computer time. Rather than using the system remotely via Teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970 when the company went out of business.

The following year, a Lakeside teacher enlisted Gates and Evans to automate the school's class-scheduling system, providing them computer time and royalties in return. The duo worked diligently in order to have the program ready for their senior year. Towards the end of their junior year, Evans was killed in a mountain climbing accident, which Gates has described as one of the saddest days of his life. Gates then turned to Allen who helped him finish the system for Lakeside.[26]

At 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen called Traf-O-Data to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.[39] In 1972, he served as a congressional page in the House of Representatives.[40][41] He was a National Merit Scholar when he graduated from Lakeside School in 1973.[42] He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973.[43][44] He chose a pre-law major but took mathematics and graduate level computer science courses.[45] While at Harvard, he met fellow student Steve Ballmer. Gates left Harvard after two years while Ballmer stayed and graduated magna cum laude. Years later, Ballmer succeeded Gates as Microsoft's CEO and maintained that position from 2000 until his resignation in 2014.[46][47]

Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems[48] presented in a combinatorics class by professor Harry Lewis. His solution held the record as the fastest version for over 30 years, and its successor is faster by only 2%.[48][49] His solution was formalized and published in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.[50]

Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen and joined him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974.[51] In 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 was released based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw the opportunity to start their own computer software company.[52] Gates dropped out of Harvard that same year. His parents were supportive of him after seeing how much he wanted to start his own company.[53] He explained his decision to leave Harvard: "if things hadn't worked out, I could always go back to school. I was officially on leave."[54]

Microsoft

Main articles: History of Microsoft and Microsoft § History

BASIC

MITS Altair 8800 Computer with 8-inch (200 mm) floppy disk system, of which the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, the Altair BASIC

Gates read the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics which demonstrated the Altair 8800, and he contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.[55] In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demonstration, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration was held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, New Mexico; it was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. MITS hired Allen,[56] and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with him at MITS in November 1975. Allen named their partnership "Micro-Soft", a combination of "microcomputer" and "software", and their first office was in Albuquerque. The first employee Gates and Allen hired was their high school collaborator Ric Weiland.[56] They dropped the hyphen within a year and officially registered the trade name "Microsoft" with the Secretary of the State of New Mexico on November 26, 1976.[56] Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his studies.

Microsoft's Altair BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked out and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, he wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter in which he asserted that more than 90% of the users of Microsoft Altair BASIC had not paid Microsoft for it and the Altair "hobby market" was in danger of eliminating the incentive for any professional developers to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software.[57] This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to demand payment. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems.[56] The company moved from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979.[55]

Gates said he personally reviewed and often rewrote every line of code that the company produced in its first five years. As the company grew, he transitioned into a manager role, then an executive.[58]

DONKEY.BAS, is a computer game written in 1981 and included with early versions of the PC DOS operating system distributed with the original IBM PC. It is a driving game in which the player must avoid hitting donkeys. The game was written by Gates and Neil Konzen.[59][60]

IBM partnership

IBM, the leading supplier of computer equipment to commercial enterprises at the time, approached Microsoft in July 1980 concerning software for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC,[61] after Bill Gates's mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, mentioned Microsoft to John Opel, IBM's CEO.[62] IBM first proposed that Microsoft write the BASIC interpreter. IBM's representatives also mentioned that they needed an operating system, and Gates referred them to Digital Research (DRI), makers of the widely used CP/M operating system.[63] IBM's discussions with Digital Research went poorly, however, and they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing difficulties during a subsequent meeting with Gates and asked if Microsoft could provide an operating system. A few weeks later, Gates and Allen proposed using 86-DOS, an operating system similar to CP/M, that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had made for hardware similar to the PC.[64] Microsoft made a deal with SCP to be the exclusive licensing agent of 86-DOS, and later the full owner. Microsoft employed Paterson to adapt the operating system for the PC[65] and delivered it to IBM as PC DOS for a one-time fee of $50,000.[66]

The contract itself only earned Microsoft a relatively small fee. It was the prestige brought to Microsoft by IBM's adoption of their operating system that would be the origin of Microsoft's transformation from a small business to the leading software company in the world. Gates had not offered to transfer the copyright on the operating system to IBM because he believed that other personal computer makers would clone IBM's PC hardware.[66] They did, making the IBM-compatible PC, running DOS, a de facto standard. The sales of MS-DOS (the version of DOS sold to customers other than IBM) made Microsoft a major player in the industry.[67] The press quickly identified Microsoft as being very influential on the IBM PC. PC Magazine asked if Gates was "the man behind the machine?".[61]

Gates oversaw Microsoft's company restructuring on June 25, 1981, which re-incorporated the company in Washington state and made Gates the president and chairman of the board, with Paul Allen as vice president and vice chairman. In early 1983, Allen left the company after receiving a Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, effectively ending the formal business partnership between Gates and Allen, which had been strained months prior due to a contentious dispute over Microsoft equity.[55][68] Later in the decade, Gates repaired his relationship with Allen and together the two donated millions to their childhood school Lakeside.[26] They remained friends until Allen's death in October 2018.[69]

Windows

Microsoft and Gates launched their first retail version of Microsoft Windows on November 20, 1985, in an attempt to fend off competition from Apple's Macintosh GUI, which had bewitched consumers with its simplicity and ease of use.[70] In August of the following year, the company struck a deal with IBM to develop a separate operating system called OS/2. Although the two companies successfully developed the first version of the new system, the partnership deteriorated due to mounting creative differences.[71] The operating system grew out of DOS in an organic fashion over a decade, until with Windows 95 the DOS text screen was relegated to the closet. Windows XP, released one year after Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO, reportedly was the first to not be based on DOS.[72] Windows 8.1 was the last version of the OS released before Gates left the Chair of the firm to John W. Thompson on February 5, 2014.[73] As of 2020, the latest release is known as Windows 10.

Management style

Gates delivers a speech at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, January 2008

Gates had primary responsibility for Microsoft's product strategy from the company's founding from 1975 until 2006. He gained a reputation for being distant from others; an industry executive complained in 1981 that "Gates is notorious for not being reachable by phone and for not returning phone calls."[74] An Atari executive recalled that he showed Gates a game and defeated him 35 of 37 times. When they met again a month later, Gates "won or tied every game. He had studied the game until he solved it. That is a competitor".[75]

In the early 1980s, while business partner Paul Allen was undergoing treatments for cancer, Gates — according to Allen — conspired to reduce Allen's share in Microsoft by issuing himself stock options.[76][77][78] In his autobiography, Allen would later recall that Gates was "scheming to rip me off. It was mercenary opportunism plain and simple".[76] Gates says he remembers the episode differently.[77] Allen would also recall that Gates was prone to shouting episodes.[78]

Gates met regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers, and the managers described him as being verbally combative. He also berated them for perceived holes in their business strategies or proposals that placed the company's long-term interests at risk.[79][80] He interrupted presentations with such comments as "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard"[81] and "why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?"[82] The target of his outburst would then have to defend the proposal in detail until Gates was fully convinced.[81] When subordinates appeared to be procrastinating, he was known to remark sarcastically, "I'll do it over the weekend."[83][84][85] Gates has been accused of bullying Microsoft employees.[86]

During Microsoft's early years, Gates was an active software developer, particularly in the company's programming language products, but his primary role in most of the company's history was as a manager and executive. He has not officially been on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100,[87] but he wrote code that shipped with the company's products as late as 1989.[84] Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1985 when Gates announced Microsoft Excel: "Bill Gates likes the program, not because it's going to make him a lot of money (although I'm sure it will do that), but because it's a neat hack."[88]

On June 15, 2006, Gates announced that he would transition out of his role at Microsoft to dedicate more time to philanthropy. He gradually divided his responsibilities between two successors when he placed Ray Ozzie in charge of management and Craig Mundie in charge of long-term product strategy.[89] The process took two years to fully transfer his duties to Ozzie and Mundie, and was completed on June 27, 2008.[90]

Antitrust litigation

Further information: United States Microsoft antitrust case and European Union Microsoft competition case

Gates giving his deposition at Microsoft on August 27, 1998

Gates approved of many decisions that led to antitrust litigation over Microsoft's business practices. In the 1998 United States v. Microsoft case, Gates gave deposition testimony that several journalists characterized as evasive. He argued with examiner David Boies over the contextual meaning of words such as "compete", "concerned", and "we". Later in the year, when portions of the videotaped deposition were played back in court, the judge was seen laughing and shaking his head.[91] BusinessWeek reported:

Early rounds of his deposition show him offering obfuscatory answers and saying "I don't recall" so many times that even the presiding judge had to chuckle. Worse, many of the technology chief's denials and pleas of ignorance were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of e-mail that Gates both sent and received.[92]

Gates later said that he had simply resisted attempts by Boies to mischaracterize his words and actions. "Did I fence with Boies? … I plead guilty… rudeness to Boies in the first degree."[93] Despite Gates's denials, the judge ruled that Microsoft had committed monopolization, tying and blocking competition, each in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.[93]

Post-Microsoft

Since leaving day-to-day operations at Microsoft, Gates has continued his philanthropy and works on other projects.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Gates was the world's highest-earning billionaire in 2013, as his net worth increased by US$15.8 billion to US$78.5 billion. As of January 2014, most of Gates's assets are held in Cascade Investment LLC, an entity through which he owns stakes in numerous businesses, including Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, and Corbis Corp.[94] On February 4, 2014, Gates stepped down as chairman of Microsoft to become "technology advisor" at the firm, alongside CEO Satya Nadella.[12][95]

Gates provided his perspective on a range of issues in a substantial interview that was published in the March 27, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. In the interview, Gates provided his perspective on climate change, his charitable activities, various tech companies and people involved in them, and the state of America. In response to a question about his greatest fear when he looks 50 years into the future, Gates stated: "... there'll be some really bad things that'll happen in the next 50 or 100 years, but hopefully none of them on the scale of, say, a million people that you didn't expect to die from a pandemic, or nuclear or bioterrorism." Gates also identified innovation as the "real driver of progress" and pronounced that "America's way better today than it's ever been."[96]

Gates has expressed concern about the potential harms of superintelligence; in a Reddit "ask me anything", he stated that:

First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned.[97][98][99][100]

In an interview that was held at the TED conference in March 2015, with Baidu's CEO, Robin Li, Gates said he would "highly recommend" Nick Bostrom's recent work, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.[101] During the conference, Gates warned that the world was not prepared for the next pandemic, a situation that would come to pass in late 2019 when the COVID-19 pandemic began.[102] In March 2018, Gates met at his home in Seattle with Mohammed bin Salman, the reformist crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia to discuss investment opportunities for Saudi Vision 2030.[103][104] In June 2019, Gates admitted that losing the mobile operating system race to Android was his biggest mistake. He stated that it was within their skill set of being the dominant player, but partially blames the antitrust litigation during the time.[105] That same year, Gates became an Advisory Board Member of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum.[106]

On March 13, 2020, Microsoft announced Gates would be leaving his board positions at Berkshire Hathaway and Microsoft to dedicate his efforts in philanthropic endeavors such as climate change, global health and development, and education.[13]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Gates has widely been looked at by media outlets as an expert on the issue, despite him not being a public official or having any prior medical training.[107] His foundation did, however, establish the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator in 2020 to hasten the development and evaluation of new and repurposed drugs and biologics to treat patients for COVID-19,[108] and, as of February 2021, Gates expressed that he and Anthony Fauci frequently talk and collaborate on matters including vaccines and other medical innovations to fight the pandemic.[109]

Business ventures and investments (partial list)

Gates has a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio with stake in various sectors[110] and has participated in several entrepreneurial ventures beyond Microsoft, including:

AutoNation, automotive retailer that Gates has a 16% stake in trading on the NYSE.[citation needed]

bgC3 LLC, a think-tank and research company founded by Gates.[citation needed]

Canadian National Railway (CN), a Canadian Class I freight railway. As of 2019, Gates is the largest single shareholder of CN stock.[111]

Cascade Investment LLC, a private investment and holding company incorporated in the United States, founded and controlled by Gates and headquartered in Kirkland, Washington.[citation needed]

Gates is the top private owner of farmland in the United States with landholdings owned via Cascade Investment totalling 242,000 acres across 19 states.[112][113] He is the 49th largest private owner of land in the US.[114]

Carbon Engineering, a for-profit venture founded by David Keith, which Gates helped fund.[115][116][117] It's is also supported by Chevron Corporation and Occidental Petroleum.[118]

SCoPEx, Keith's academic venture in "sun-dimming" geoengineering, which Gates provided most of the $12 million for.[119]

Corbis (originally named Interactive Home Systems and now known as Branded Entertainment Network), a digital image licensing and rights services company founded and chaired by Gates.[120]

EarthNow, Seattle-based startup company aiming to blanket the Earth with live satellite video coverage. Gates is a large financial backer.[121]

Eclipse Aviation, a defunct manufacturer of very light jets. Gates was a major stake-holder early on in the project.[citation needed]

Impossible Foods, a company that develops plant-based substitutes for meat products. Some of the $396 million Patrick O. Brown collected for his business came from Gates around 2014 to 2017.[122][123][124]

Ecolab, global provider of water, hygiene and energy technologies and services to the food, energy, healthcare, industrial and hospitality markets. Gates increased his stake of 10.8% in Ecolab to 25% in 2012.[citation needed]

ResearchGate, a social networking site for scientists. Gates participated in a $35 million round of financing along with other investors.[125]

TerraPower, a nuclear reactor design company co-founded and chaired by Gates, which is developing next generation traveling-wave reactor nuclear power plants in an effort to tackle climate change.[126][127][128][129][130]

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a closed fund for wealthy individuals who seek ROI on a 20-year horizon (see next section), which "is funding green start-ups and a host of other low-carbon entrepreneurial projects, including everything from advanced nuclear technology to synthetic breast milk." It was founded by Gates in 2015.[131]

Ginkgo Bioworks, a biotech startup that received $350 million in venture funding in 2019, in part from Gates's investment firm Cascade Investment.[132]

Luminous Computing, a company that develops neuromorphic photonic integrated circuits for AI acceleration.

Mologic, British diagnostic technology company that Gates purchased, along with the Soros Economic Development Fund, "which has developed 10-minute Covid lateral flow tests that it aims to make for as little as $1."[133]

Climate change and energy

Gates considers climate change and global access to energy to be critical, interrelated issues. He has urged governments and the private sector to invest in research and development to make clean, reliable energy cheaper. Gates envisions that a breakthrough innovation in sustainable energy technology could drive down both greenhouse gas emissions and poverty, and bring economic benefits by stabilizing energy prices.[134] In 2011, he said: "If you gave me the choice between picking the next 10 presidents or ensuring that energy is environmentally friendly and a quarter as costly, I'd pick the energy thing."[135]

In 2015, he wrote about the challenge of transitioning the world's energy system from one based primarily on fossil fuels to one based on sustainable energy sources. Global energy transitions have historically taken decades. He wrote, "I believe we can make this transition faster, both because the pace of innovation is accelerating, and because we have never had such an urgent reason to move from one source of energy to another."[136] This rapid transition, according to Gates, would depend on increased government funding for basic research and financially risky private-sector investment, to enable innovation in diverse areas such as nuclear energy, grid energy storage to facilitate greater use of solar and wind energy, and solar fuels.[137]

Gates spearheaded two initiatives that he announced at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. One was Mission Innovation, in which 20 national governments pledged to double their spending on research and development for carbon-free energy in over five years’ time .[134] Another initiative was Breakthrough Energy, a group of investors who agreed to fund high-risk startups in clean energy technologies. Gates, who had already invested $1 billion of his own money in innovative energy startups, committed a further $1 billion to Breakthrough Energy.[137] In December 2020, he called for the U.S. federal government to create institutes for clean energy research, analogous to the National Institutes of Health.[138] Gates has also urged rich nations to shift to 100% synthetic beef industries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food production.[139]

Gates has been criticised for holding a large stake in Signature Aviation, a company that services emissions-intensive private jets.[140] In 2019, he began to divest from fossil fuels. He does not expect divestment itself to have much practical impact, but says that if his efforts to provide alternatives were to fail, he would not want to personally benefit from an increase in fossil fuel stock prices.[141] After publishing his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, parts of the climate activist community criticized Gate's approach as technological solutionism.[142]

In June 2021, Gates's company TerraPower and Warren Buffett's PacifiCorp announced the first Sodium nuclear reactor in Wyoming. Wyoming Governor Mike Gordon hailed the project as a step toward carbon-negative nuclear power. Wyoming Senator John Barrasso also said that it could boost the state's once active uranium mining industry.[143]