Bill Gates with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico. 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 into the community and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, Gates wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter in which he asserted that more than 90 percent of the users of Microsoft Altair BASIC had not paid Microsoft for it and by doing so the Altair "hobby market" was in danger of eliminating the incentive for
Business magnate as well as newspaper publishing. Their dominance was known as the Second Industrial Revolution, the Gilded Age, or the Robber Baron Era. Examples of well-known business magnates in the western world include historical figures such as oilman John D. Rockefeller, automobile pioneer Henry Ford, shipping and railroad veterans Aristotle Onassis, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and James J. Hill, steel innovator Andrew Carnegie, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, retail merchant Sam Walton, and banker J. P. Morgan. Contemporary industrial tycoons include e-commerce entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, real estate developer Donald Trump, investor Warren Buffett, computer programmer Bill Gates, technology innovator Steve Jobs,