Microsoft company's shares reach its highest value since December 1999. In 2018, Microsoft surpassed Apple as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world after being dethroned by the tech giant in 2010. Childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen sought to make a business utilizing their shared skills in computer programming. In 1972 they founded their first company, named Traf-O-Data, which sold a rudimentary computer to track and analyze automobile traffic data. While Gates enrolled at Harvard, Allen pursued a degree in computer science at Washington State University, though he later dropped out of school to work at Honeywell.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation The Gates Foundation received 5% (500,000) of the shares in July 2006 and will receive 5% of the "remaining" earmarked shares in the July of each following year (475,000 in 2007, 451,250 in 2008). In July 2018, Buffet announced another donation of his company's Class B stock, this time worth $2 billion, to the Gates Foundation. To maintain its status as a charitable foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation must donate funds equal to at least 5 percent of its assets each year. As of April 2014, the foundation is organized into four program areas under chief executive officer