I want to transmit you that I am preparing to walk away from the business that made me the man that I am now, I want to concentrate on using my fortune ($US 50 billion) into a good cause.
I think there's more to life. I am leaving my day-to-day role at the software company Microsoft and will instead be devoting my time to helping the poor.
Smart, committed people with the right support and vision can have a huge impact. It's about using technology, not just for the privileged few, but for everyone.
I will be running the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a charity I set up with my wife which is devoted to providing health and education to the world's poor.
The change we're announcing is not a retirement, it's a reordering of my priorities.
My health and education foundation currently has assets of $30 billion. That's more than the gross domestic product of many of the African countries it helps.
The greatest inequity in the world is that children are dying whose lives could be saved for a few hundred dollars and that should be changed.
Many of you are concerning about my children and their heritance. Well, the first thing was the decision that it probably wouldn't be good for my kids for it to go to them, and so then a question of…
How much will they get?
They'll get something, but not substantial percentage. Then the question is how to give it back to society to have the best impact.
There's about 20 diseases that don't exist here in the United States that are killing millions of people in poor countries. The worst of those are malaria and AIDS. So we've made those a particular focus.
About Microsoft I can say that no longer are individual applications and operating systems as important as they were. We're now in the age of kind of collaborative computing and mobility and services.
So Microsoft is in a bit of a transition, and it means that it is going to have to be more agile and adaptive.
Keep an eye on all this changes and take care.
Greetings.
William Henry III Gates