Bill Gates Set To Resign As Chairman, Will Work Very Closely With New CEO

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Vida Hubbert

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Jul 11, 2024, 4:19:42 AM7/11/24

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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - Microsoft announced Thursday that chairman and co-founder Bill Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role at the company, effective July 2008, to spend more time working on his charitable foundation.

Gates will then work part-time at Microsoft (up $0.19 to $22.07, Charts) as chairman and technical adviser and will work full time for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the organization he founded with his wife, which focuses on global health and education.

Bill Gates Set to Resign As Chairman, Will Work Very Closely With New CEO

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"I believe with great wealth comes great responsibility - the responsibility to give back to society and make sure those resources are given back in the best possible way, to those in need," he said. Gates added, "It's not a retirement, it's a reordering of my priorities."

The company's chief technical officer, Ray Ozzie, will immediately assume the title of chief software architect and begin working side by side with Gates on all technical architecture and product oversight responsibilities. Ozzie became chief technical officer of Microsoft in April 2005, when Microsoft bought Groove Networks, the company Ozzie founded.

Craig Mundie, the current chief technical officer, will take the new role of chief research and strategy officer, also effective immediately. Mundie will work closely with Gates to assume his responsibility for the company's research and incubation efforts, Microsoft said. Mundie also will partner with the company's general counsel Brad Smith to guide Microsoft's intellectual property and technology policy efforts. Mundie, 56, joined Microsoft in 1992.

"They really did give a very long lead time in terms of prepping investors for his departure, and it's only a partial departure at that," said Michael Cohen, director of research at Pacific American Securities. "I think that was good in terms of muting the effect on the stock."

"It's been my privilege to work shoulder to shoulder with a true visionary... who has now headed, in my opinion, one of the greatest philanthropies of all time," said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer during the conference.

Gates co-founded Microsoft, which makes the ubiquitous Windows operating system, with Paul Allen in 1975, and took the company public in 1986. He remained CEO of the company until 2000, when Ballmer took the reins.

That year, Gates formed his charitable foundation, which now has $29.1 billion in assets. For their work with the foundation, Gates and his wife were chosen, along with rock singer Bono, as one of Time Magazine's Persons of the Year in 2005.

Gates himself is ranked as the world's richest man by Forbes magazine, which estimated his net worth at $50 billion in its 2006 ranking. That was up an estimated $46.5 billion net worth a year earlier. He owned just over 1 billion shares of Microsoft, as of Sept. 9, 2005, according to the company's most recent filing detailing those ownerships. That amounts to 9.6 percent of shares outstanding.

QUESTION: Okay. And then the United Nations said on Wednesday that the amount of humanitarian aid entering the enclave has dropped by two-thirds since Israel began its military operation in the southern Rafah region this month. What is the U.S. doing about this?

QUESTION: Stacy Gilbert, a State Department employee of more than 20 years, said she resigned after the administration released the NSM report this month, which she said was wrong. She said a draft of the report had said clearly that Israel was blocking humanitarian assistance but that subject matter experts were removed, and it was edited at a higher level before being published with the conclusion that Israel was not blocking assistance. What was the reason for the change to this conclusion, and do you have any comment on this?

And I will also just say is that we stand by the National Security Memorandum 20 report. We are not an administration or a department that twists the facts, and allegations that we have are unfounded. But this is, as any report and as any process that is undertaken in a policymaking process, these processes are deliberative and they involve inputs from people at a variety of seniority and expert levels.

To put it more candidly, a military operation here we have never felt is enough. We of course support and encourage every effort to defeat Hamas, but without some plans for some broader or greater diplomacy, we will continue to find ourselves in this endless cycle of violence.

QUESTION: Can you confirm some of these reports that U.S. and Israel and Egypt will be meeting next week to discuss opening the Rafah crossing and securing the border between Egypt and Gaza? And what does the U.S. hope to see as far as who would be administering the Gaza side of the border?

MR PATEL: We support efforts to defeat Hamas, and we have supported those efforts since October 7th. Of course, at every measure we have continued to stress the moral and strategic imperative to make sure that these military operations are conducted in a way that minimize civilian casualties. Obviously, just based on imagery, the events of this past weekend failed to meet that mark. That being said, we do continue to support efforts to take out Hamas terrorists, which our partners in the IDF indicated that they did over the course of the operation this past weekend. So again, we support efforts to take out Hamas; we, of course, also continue to stress that they need to be conducted in ways that do not impede humanitarian aid access, that do not put undue risk at civilians, Palestinian civilians within Gaza.

And we are continuing to work around the clock to do what we can to make sure that this pier and the overall maritime corridor can be re-anchored to Gaza as swiftly as possible. Simultaneously, we continue to have warehouses in Cyprus and other components of the maritime corridor that can be used for humanitarian aid commodities, and we are looking into what might be feasible in those aspects as well.

MR PATEL: Nick, any kind of aerial object, certainly, we would find destabilizing and provocative, and we continue to consult closely with the Republic of Korea and Japan against these kinds of malign and destabilizing behaviors.

QUESTION: Czech Republic is working on the extradition of Nikhil Gupta to the U.S. Gupta, as you know, accused of involvement in the plot to kill Khalistani leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in New York. He was named in an indictment by the U.S. prosecutors. Do you have any details on that?

QUESTION: Thank you very much, Vedant. Only two. Matt Miller had called milestone to this chief minister of Punjab. She just introduced these laws which are condemned by the International Federation of Journalists and almost every single media union in Pakistan. Do you condemn that, or do you want to take maybe that milestone statement back from her?

MR PATEL: So I think it goes without saying that threatening anybody on U.S. soil is intolerable and something that we have taken very seriously throughout this administration, and we will continue to work across the government to respond to any threats on U.S. soil. Representatives of authoritarian regimes cannot openly threaten or attack citizens without facing consequences. And citizens and civil society groups here in the United States are protected in their rights of expression and their rights of free speech without facing any consequences.

QUESTION: Germany and other EU countries have been pushing for the larger EU to designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization. What is the U.S. position on this? Are you urging your European partners to take this step?

MR PATEL: Well, let me just say unequivocally that the IRGC is a menace to the world. We absolutely support efforts to designate the IRGC a terrorist organization, and we support those efforts worldwide. As you know, this is something that the United States has done, already designating the IRGC, and it is a terrible purveyor of terrorism that we believe affects the entire world.

MR PATEL: So we understand that the high commission requires a delay in order to implement some recent changes to the allotment of seats in the Iraqi Kurdistan parliament, and we urge the parties to reach an agreement quickly to schedule free, fair, and transparent elections as soon as feasible.

Earlier today, Israel announced the results of a preliminary investigation and said that this strike was carried out using the smallest bomb in their arsenal, targeting terrorists 1.7 kilometers away from the al-Mawasi area where this fire took place. The IDF is continuing to investigate this matter and has promised that its investigation will be swift, comprehensive, and transparent. We will be watching those results closely. And we will continue to emphasize to Israel their obligation to comply fully with international humanitarian law, minimize the impact of their operations on civilians, and maximize the flow of humanitarian assistance to those in need.

MR MILLER: So what we expect Israel to do is the same thing that we expect of our own military, and the same thing that we expect of all our democratic allies and partners. We expect when people inside their military make mistakes or when they operate outside of compliance with their rules of engagement, their own rules of engagement, or they operate outside of compliance with international humanitarian law, we expect them to fully investigate what happened; we expect them to make changes to policy, if changes to policy need to be made; and we expect them to hold people accountable if accountability is appropriate.

QUESTION: Thank you, Matt. I have two quick questions. I have to leave within the hour. One, you have called behind this podium many times for the protection of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Can you tell us where are these safe zones? Can you just name them, identify where are safe zones in Gaza that people can go to?