Roman Abramovich
November 9th, 2008
In 2003, Abramovich was named Person of the Year by Expert, a Russian business magazine. He shared this title with Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He is known outside Russia as the owner of Chelsea Football Club, an English Premier League football team, and for his wider involvement in European football.
His parents were Jewish, so Roman's paternal grandparents were exiled to Siberia from Lithuania by the Soviets after the occupation of Lithuania in 1940. His mother Irina Vasilevna was a musician and his father worked as a supplier at a construction trust in Syktyvkar. His mother, Irina Ostrowski Abramovich, died from bacteremia as a result of a back-alley abortion when Roman was one year old. His father Arkady Abramovich was killed in an incident on a construction site when Roman was three years old. Abramovich grew up in his uncle's family in Ukhta and with his grandmother, Tatyana Semenovna, in Moscow. Before moving to Moscow he and his sister lived in Syktyvkar, the capital city of the Komi Republic.
In 1973, Abramovich went to first grade at Ukhta School No. 2. In 1974, Abramovich and his grandmother moved in with his second uncle Abram Nakhimovich in Moscow. Abramovich studied at School No. 232, which stressed the performing arts. After graduating from school and botching his university studies, he moved to his relatives in Komi. In 1984, Abramovich went to the army (artillery regiment in Kirach in the Vladimirsk region).
Abramovich attended the Industrial Institute in Ukhta before being drafted into the Soviet Army in 1984. After military service in an artillery regiment in Kirach, Vladimirsk region, he studied briefly at the Moscow State Auto Transport Institute before taking a leave of absence from academics to go into business. He later earned a correspondence degree from the Moscow State Law Academy.
The Times has reported that he was a market trader selling black market toys before his association with Boris Berezovsky.
A 2,000-rouble wedding present from Olga's (Abramovich's first wife) parents (about £1,000) was invested by Abramovich in black-market goods such as perfume, deodorants, tights and toothpaste to sell on in Moscow in or around December 1987. Abramovich soon doubled, then tripled, the investment, his confidence growing with each business success. "I think he enjoyed the thrill of it," says Olga. "When he returned from trips selling the goods, he was flushed with joy. In 1988, as Perestroika opened up opportunities for entrepreneurs in the Soviet Union, he and Olga set up a company making dolls. "It brought success almost immediately," says Olga, "but I don't think Roman ever imagined that he would become as rich as he is now." Abramovich started his commercial activity in the late 1980s when Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms permitted the opening of small private businesses, known as co-operatives. Mr Abramovich began his business career selling plastic ducks from a Moscow apartment, but within a few years his wealth spread from oil conglomerates to pig farms. In 1992 to 1995 Abramovich founded five companies that conducted resale and acted as intermediaries, eventually specializing in the trading of oil and oil products. In 1992 he was arrested in a case of theft of government property - AVEKS-Komi sent a train containing 55 cisterns of diesel fuel, worth 3.8 million roubles, from the Ukhtinsk Oil Production Factory; Abramovich met the train in Moscow and resent the shipment to the Kaliningrad military base under a fake agreement, but the fuel arrived in Riga. Abramovich co-operated with the investigation, and the case was closed after the oil production factory was compensated by the diesel's buyer, the Latvian-US concern, Chikora International. In 1995 Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky, an associate of President Boris Yeltsin acquired the controlling interest in the large oil company Sibneft. The deal was within the controversial loans-for-shares program and each partner paid $100 million for half of the company, below the stake's stock market value of $150 million at the time. The fast-rising value of the company led many observers, in hindsight, to suggest that the real cost of the company should have been in the billions of dollars.
In June 2003, he became the owner of the companies that control Chelsea Football Club in the United Kingdom.
The club also embarked on an ambitious programme of commercial development, with the aim of making it a worldwide brand, and announced plans to build a new state-of-the-art training complex in Cobham, Surrey. Chelsea finished their first season after the takeover in second place in the Premiership, from fourth the previous year, and reached the semi-finals of the Champions League. A new manager, José Mourinho, was recruited, and Chelsea ended the following season as league champions. In the four years since the takeover the club have won five major trophies, more than any other English club in the same period.
It is argued that Abramovich's involvement with Chelsea has distorted the football transfer market throughout Europe, as his wealth often allows the club to purchase players virtually at will (frequently at inflated prices), without regard for the effects on the club's financial outturn, as was seen in the year 2005 when Abramovich allegedly offered AC Milan a world record fee of £89.8 million for the then European Footballer of the Year, striker Andriy Shevchenko. Shevchenko did eventually join Chelsea in 2006 for a British record transfer fee of around £30 million.
The spending has, to some extent, seen wealth re-distributed throughout the game, with the combined fee of £12.5 million paid to West Ham United for Glen Johnson and Joe Cole helping to avert administration. In the year ending June 2005, Chelsea posted record losses of £140 million and the club is not expected to record a trading profit before 2010, though this did decrease to reported losses of £80.2 million year ending June 2006.
In a December 2006 interview Abramovich stated that he expected Chelsea's transfer spending to fall in years to come, although he subsequently seemed to move away from this position. He is also present at almost every game Chelsea play and shows visible emotion during matches, a sign taken by supporters to indicate a love for the sport, and usually visits the players in the dressing room following each match, although this stopped for a time in early 2007 as rumours of a feud between Abramovich and Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho appeared in the press which was due to various arguments between the two men regarding the appearances of certain players, notably Andriy Shevchenko. In the early hours of 20 September 2007, Jose Mourinho announced his exit as Chelsea manager by mutual consent with the club following a meeting with the board. Former Israel coach and Chelsea's director of football, Avram Grant, was named as his replacement. Ever since Grant had joined Chelsea (in the summer of 2007) there had been friction between him and Mourinho. Mourinho reportedly told Grant not to interfere in team affairs but with Abramovich's backing, Grant's profile at the club rose after he was made a member of the board. This event apparently did not go down well with Mourinho and may have contributed to his surprise exit. On 24 May Avram Grant was sacked as manager by Abramovich. On 11 June 2008, it was announced that Luiz Felipe Scolari would be taking over as manager on 1 July 2008. As of May 2008, Abramovich has spent approximately £600 million on the club since arriving in 2003.
Abramovich also played a large role in bringing Guus Hiddink to Russia to coach the Russia national football team. Piet de Visser, a former head scout of Hiddink's club PSV Eindhoven and now a personal assistant to Abramovich at Chelsea, recommended Hiddink to the Chelsea owner.
Abramovich has been married twice, to Olga Yurevna Lysova in December 1987 (divorced 1990), and to Irina Vyacheslavovna Malandina in October 1991 (divorced 2007). He and Irina have five children.
On 15 October 2006, the News of the World reported that Irina had hired two top UK divorce lawyers, following reports of Abramovich's close relationship with the 26-year old Daria Zhukova, the former girlfriend of tennis player Marat Safin and daughter of a prominent Russian oligarch based in London. It was speculated that a future divorce settlement (amounting to a conjectured £5.5 billion) might be the highest ever on record. The Abramoviches replied that neither had consulted attorneys at that point. The divorce cost him approx 300million dollars.
Although Roman Abramovich is one of the most richest people on the planet, still there are a lot of reports, saying that his official income is nowhere near to what he really makes.
Bill Gates
July 14th, 2008
At thirteen he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the school's students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and 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. When he reflected back on that moment, he commented on it and said, "There was just something neat about the machine." After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, he 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 four Lakeside students—Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans—for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.
At the end of the ban, the four students offered to debug CCC's software in exchange for free computer time. Rather than use the system 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 it went out of business. The following year, Information Sciences Inc. hired the four Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them computer time and royalties. After his administrators became aware of his programming abilities, Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success." At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.
Gates graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on his SATs, the standardized test for college admissions in the United States, and subsequently enrolled at Harvard College in the fall of 1973. While at Harvard, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer, whom he later appointed as CEO of Microsoft. He also met computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou at Harvard, with whom he collaborated on a paper about algorithms. He did not have a definite study plan while a student at Harvard, and eventually took a leave of absence in 1975. After Intel released the Intel 8080 CPU, Gates realized that this was the first computer chip which cost less than $200 that could run BASIC, making it the most affordable chip at the time to run inside a personal computer. He figured that this was the only chance he would get to take advantage of the timing, and decided to start a computer software company with Paul Allen. He had talked this decision over with his parents, who were supportive of him after seeing how much Gates wanted to start a software company.
After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. 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 demo, 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, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC. Paul Allen was hired into MITS, and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with Allen at MITS in Albuquerque in November 1975. They named their partnership "Micro-soft" and had their first office located in Albuquerque. Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the USPTO.
Microsoft's 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 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. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and it continued to develop programming language software for various systems. The company moved from Albuquerque to its new home in Bellevue, Washington on January 1, 1979.
During Microsoft's early years, all employees had broad responsibility for the company's business. Gates oversaw the business details, but continued to write code as well. In the first five years, he personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, and often rewrote parts of it as he saw fit.
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), makers of the widely used CP/M operating system. IBM's discussions with Digital Research went poorly, and they did not reach a licensing agreement. IBM representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing difficulties during a subsequent meeting with Gates and told him to get an acceptable operating system. A few weeks later Gates proposed using 86-DOS (QDOS), an operating system similar to CP/M that Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products had made for hardware similar to the PC. Microsoft made a deal with SCP to become the exclusive licensing agent, and later the full owner, of 86-DOS. After adapting the operating system for the PC, Microsoft delivered it to IBM as PC-DOS in exchange for a one-time fee of $80,000. Gates insisted that IBM let Microsoft keep the copyright on the operating system, because he believed that other hardware vendors would clone IBM's system. They did, and the sales of MS-DOS made Microsoft a major player in the industry.
Gates oversaw Microsoft's company restructuring on June 25, 1981, which re-incorporated the company in Washington and made Gates President of Microsoft and the Chairman of the Board. Microsoft launched its first retail version of Microsoft Windows on November 20, 1985, and in August, 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, mounting creative differences undermined the partnership. Gates distributed an internal memo on May 16, 1991 announcing that the OS/2 partnership was over and Microsoft would shift its efforts to the Windows NT kernel development.
Gates married Melinda French from Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. They have three children: Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). Bill Gates' house is a 21st century earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. According to King County public records, as of 2006, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is $991,000. Also among Gates's private acquisitions is the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci, which Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994. Gates is also known as an avid reader and the ceiling of his large, home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby.
Gates was number one on the "Forbes 400" list from 1993 through to 2007 and number one on Forbes list of "The World's Richest People" from 1995 to 2007. In 1999, Gates's wealth briefly surpassed $101 billion, causing the media to call him a "centibillionaire". Since 2000, the nominal value of his Microsoft holdings has declined due to a fall in Microsoft's stock price after the dot-com bubble burst and the multi-billion dollar donations he has made to his charitable foundations. In a May 2006 interview, Gates commented that he wished that he were not the richest man in the world because he disliked the attention it brought. Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of $616,667, and $350,000 bonus totalling $966,667. He founded Corbis, a digital imaging company, in 1989. In 2004 he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by long-time friend Warren Buffett. He is a client of Cascade Investment Group, a wealth management firm with diverse holdings.
Gates has received honorary doctorates from Nyenrode Business Universiteit, Breukelen, The Netherlands in 2000, the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan in 2005, Harvard University in June 2007, and from Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, in January 2008. Gates was also made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) from Queen Elizabeth II in 2005, in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor.
In November 2006, he and his wife were awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle for their philanthropic work around the world in the areas of health and education, particularly in Mexico, and specifically in the program "Un país de lectores".
