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Statistics of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Number of employees: approximately 543 Asset trust endowment: $37.3 billion Total grant commitments since inception: $16.5 billion Total 2007 grant payments: $2.007 billion Supports work in: more than 100 countries. * As of March 31, 2008

BILL Gates, Sir William Gates as he is, believes that things can be cured. Not all things, but some, and they can be cured with technology. Vaccines, new drugs, water purifiers, injections. His is a technology-led paternalism. You have the problem; technology has the answer; I have the money.

But he is not like Princess Diana or Bill Clinton. He does not do emotion, he listens and notes and goes back to his $37.3 billion foundation and tries to work out an answer.

At one point in 2006 in Africa, he caught up with the Clinton cavalcade in Lesotho and watched nervously as the other Bill made children and grown-ups alike feel the most important people in the world. Bill G said little; sometimes he makes the Queen seem almost loquacious.

He doesn't do charm, doesn't do politics and doesn't bleed in public. He sees people more as complicated computers, fascinating because our biped system is far more complex than any computer Bill has yet made.

Not surprisingly, his preferred conversation is about population trends, technological changes, and upstream science rather than gossip about people.

This Friday, he stepped down from the Microsoft company that he and Paul Allen founded nearly 33 years ago. It has already become one of the most powerful companies in the world, and has produced a greater change in society than any company since Ford created the motor car.

In doing that Bill became the richest man in the world and stayed that way for 10 years. How much he is worth depends on the price of the Microsoft stock today, but net worth is certainly $46.5 billion. It is obviously more money than anyone will ever need.

He once said that he already had enough in the bank to spend $3 million a day for the next 50 years, and there wasn't truthfully anything he actually wanted.

He has his private jet; he has his magnificent 48,000 sq.ft house on Lake Washington, and he has his Porsche. In fact he has two, but neither of them new. His convertible 911 is nine years old; his rare 959 coupe nearly 20 years old.

So, he is now using his wealth to save the world. At the age of 45 in 2000, together with his wife Melinda, he set up the Gates Foundation, with some $30 billion to spend. In June 2006 that figure was doubled, when Warren Buffet, the second richest man in the world, decided to hand over another $30 billion for Bill to use.

Bill Gates now has the incredible sum of $60,000,000,000 to give away. By US law, at least 5% of a charity's assets must be donated each year, which means that Bill now has to give away just under $3 billion a year. Which works out at some $6000 every minute of the year.

How do you begin to work out what to do? This is what Bill is good at it. Planning, revising, getting key staff, and isolating the priorities. An early priority was that everyone should have access to the internet.

When he and Paul Allen started Microsoft the computer was the size of a refrigerator, and their dream was of a small computer on every desk and in every home. That has nearly come to pass, but for those still lacking internet access he started to put computers into every public library in the US. He has now moved into Mexico and Chile with the same programme.

His second priority became the prevention of the diseases that strike mainly in the Third World. AIDS, polio, diphtheria, measles, yellow fever, whopping cough. He is an optimist. If money can save the Third World, he is going to try. He becomes almost emotional when he talks of the millions living in sick poverty, of the millions who die daily from diseases that are easy to stop and treat in our world.

He is backing research to develop new drugs and vaccines against tuberculosis that kills two million people a year; against AIDS that kills more than three million a year; against malaria that kills more than a million children a year. And the fight continues to ensure more children get basic immunisations each year, so that the early cull is reduced. At the moment 11 million children die before they reach age five in the developing countries.
 
Within a few years Bill has become a major influence on world health. In 2005, for instance, his Foundation spent $1.5 billion, the same as the United Nations WHO, and nearly as much as the US government's contribution to fight infectious diseases. Each year he donates more cash to Africa than the whole of the UK aid budget.

The American tax system encourages the rich to become benefactors and generous donators to charities. Americans have been giving away hundreds of billions of dollars, but this philanthropy is now expected to grow. Bill's comment that he is not enthusiastic about dynastic wealth, 'so long as six billion people have a poorer life than we have, yet could be saved with our financial support', has struck home.  
  
Not that the rich are ungenerous in the UK. Many have their own private schemes and allocate 5-10 per cent of their wealth each year into philanthropic projects. For those uncertain how to start giving, the Institute for Philanthropy opened its first school a few years ago, then charging £6000 for a week's course.

America's rich have no need of such a school; they have set up their Foundations for a couple of centuries. The richest of them all was probably John D Rockefeller. Next comes Andrew Carnegie, who gave away some $35 billion over his lifetime, with much of it to Scotland. Third was Cornelius Vanderbilt who founded universities; fourth was probably John Jacob Astor, who concentrated on better homes for workers.

These set the pattern for the rich to become philanthropists after they had made their billions. Except that Gates has set himself a more difficult task. The earlier billionaires set up universities, founded libraries and scholarships, built housing for the poor, supported the Arts, bought famous paintings for the national galleries, all worthy but all tangible.

Bill is different. He follows in that tradition with, for example, $210m for Cambridge Scholarships, but he also wants to use his billions to solve the world problem of hunger and disease. Gates sees no reason why his money can't cure the top 20 diseases this decade.

 And he's in a hurry, like he always was. Don't forget that this is the boy with the tousled hair and large glasses, wearing green clothes, and surviving on Diet Coke and burgers, who gave up Harvard to join Paul Allen to write a new computer language for the Altair 8800 computer.

This is the man who earned a Time cover at the age of 29, and turned Microsoft Windows into the world's dominating operating system only six years later.

This is the man who realised in '93 that he had underestimated the power of the Web, but within a year produced Windows 95 with internet compatibility.

Now, at the age of 53, Bill is probably the most famous non-politician on the earth. His old friends in Time magazine name him each year as one of the most influential people in the world. Forbes magazine regularly places him No.1 on their famous Forbes 400 listing. And he now runs the world's largest philanthropic foundation.

Oh, and he also has the most expensive house in the world, worth $125 million, where he, Melinda and their three children live, and where he keeps his private collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci and a rare Gutenberg Bible.

So electronically controlled is the house that Bill, driving home in his Porsche, can click his remote to start filling his bath. Of course, he could have servants do it, like the other rich folk, but he confesses to it being 'kinda fun', the fun of a child who still believes that technology can save the world.
Courtesy Planet Syndication