How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates a strange offshoot of the Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock by Philip Greenspun

As a graduate student in computer science at MIT earning a $1600/month research stipend, I feel amply qualified to instruct the entire Internet on the art of becoming as rich as Bill Gates (check the Wealth Clock to see how much he has right now). I get my confidence from Dr. Leo Buscaglia, author of Love, Born for Love : Reflections on Loving, Living, Loving and Learning, and Bus 9 to Paradise. Dr. Buscaglia, our nation's most prominent lecturer on the subject of love, turns out to be divorced ("it was a very loving divorce"). Lesson 1: Choose Your Grandparents Carefully "There are three ways to make money. You can inherit it. You can marry it. You can steal it." -- conventional wisdom in Italy William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III.

In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. Lesson 2: Choose Your Parents Carefully "A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money. The old guy fingered his worsted wool vest and said, "Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel. I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for ten cents. The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5 pm for 20 cents. I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I'd accumulated a fortune of $1.37. Then my wife's father died and left us two million dollars." William Henry Gates, Jr. and Mary Maxwell were among Seattle's social and financial elite. Bill Gates, Jr. was a prominent corporate lawyer while Mary Maxwell was a board member of First Interstate Bank and Pacific Northwest Bell. She was also on the national board of United Way, along with John Opel, the chief executive officer of IBM who approved the inclusion of MS/DOS with the original IBM PC.

Remind your parents not to send you to public school. Bill Gates went to Lakeside, Seattle's most exclusive prep school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1760). Typical classmates included the McCaw brothers, who sold the cellular phone licenses they obtained from the U.S. Government to AT&T for $11.5 billion in 1994. When the kids there wanted to use a computer, they got their moms to hold a rummage sale and raise $3,000 to buy time on a DEC PDP-10, the same machine used by computer science researchers at Stanford and MIT.
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