To be a guy who lives a house that costs $97 million and has 66,000 square feet of living space, employing 300, a pool, boat dock, an 8 hole putting range, and even a salmon hatchery, you must have to be a pretty rich guy. In fact, the richest guy in America.

有個小伙子，他住在占地66000平方英尺，價值9700萬美元的房子里。他雇傭了300個工人，房子里有游泳池，私人碼頭，8球洞的高爾夫練球場，甚至還有一個用來制作名貴魚子醬的三文魚孵卵場。這真是一個有錢的小伙子。事實上，他是美國最有錢的小伙子。
 
Well, Bill Gates started his rich life style when he was about 14. Wouldn't you like to be that rich?

比爾蓋茨14歲就開始了他的富豪生活。你難道不想像他一樣有錢嗎？
 
Lesson1: Choose Your Grandparents Carefully 小心投胎，挑個好祖父母
 
"There are three ways to make money. You can inherit it. You can marry it. You can steal it." --conventional sisdom in Italy.

有句意大利民諺說得好：“掙錢的辦法有三種：第一靠繼承，第二靠婚姻，第三靠偷竊。”
 
William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxell 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 Henry Gates III.

1955年10月28日的晚上，威廉·亨利·蓋茨第三（他的綽號叫比爾）出生了。詹姆斯·威拉德·馬克斯韋爾是他的外曾祖父。1906年，馬克斯韋爾在西雅圖創建了美國城市銀行。馬克斯韋爾的兒子詹姆斯·威拉德·馬克斯韋爾也成為一個銀行家，并且為他們的外孫子比爾蓋茨留下了100萬美元的托管基金。
 
Lesson2 : Choose Your Parents Carefully 小心投胎，挑個好父母
 
A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money. The old guy 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. 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."

曾經有個年輕人問老富翁是怎么發家的。這個老頭說：“哦孩子，那還是在大蕭條最嚴重的1932年，我身上只剩下五美分了。我用這五美分買了一個蘋果。我花了一整天的時間把蘋果擦得亮亮的，然后在晚上，我以十美分的價錢賣了這個蘋果。我就這樣干了一個月。月底的時候，我一共攢了1.37美元。之后，我的岳父去世了，他留給我們200萬美元的遺產。”
 
William Henry Gates, Jr. and Mary Maxwell were among Seattle's social and financial elite. William Henry Gates, Jr. was a prominent corporate lawyer while Mary Maxwell was a board member of First Interstate Bank and Pacific Northwest Bell.

蓋茨的父母均為西雅圖的社會名流和金融精英。他父親是一名杰出的律師，母親是第一洲際銀行和太平洋西北部地區貝爾公司的董事。
 
Lesson 3: Acquire Research Results by Hiring and Buying 通過購買或者雇人獲取科研成果
 
Conventional economic wisdom holds that monopolies should spend heavily on research. But if you want to become as rich as Bill Gates, you have to remember that it is cheaper to wait for a small company to come up with something good and then buy them. In the old days, antitrust laws kept monopolies from buying potential competitors. But not anymore. When Microsoft products were threatened by network computers and Wed-based applications, they simply bought WebTV and Hotmail.

根據傳統經濟學的經驗，壟斷者應不惜重金搞科研。但是如果你想成為和比爾蓋茨一般的富人，你就必須記得買小公司研發出來的好東西比自主研發所花的成本要更為低廉。過去，反壟斷法禁止壟斷大戶收購其潛在競爭者。但是今非昔日。當微軟的產品受到來自網絡計算機和基于網絡的軟件的威脅時，微軟采取的僅僅是購買了互聯網傳輸流媒體技術以及電子郵件系統技術的策略。
 
Another good strategy is to hire the right people. Some of the guys who wrote Microsoft Windows had previous worked on window systems at Xerox PAPC. So Xerox paid for the research; Microsoft paid only for development.

另一個成功的策略就是雇傭了正確的一批人。好些替微軟視窗賣命的年輕人原先都效命于施樂公司帕洛阿爾托研究中心。所以說，這個研究中心支付了微軟系統的研發費用，而微軟僅僅支付了這套系統的改良費用。
 
Lesson 4: Let Other People Do the Programming 讓其他人去做編程工作
 
If you're a great engineer, it can be frustrating to rely on other people to translate your ideas into reality. However, keep in mind that you're not going to get rich being "just a coder." Bill Gates does code reviews, not coding.

如果你是一個出色的編程人員，那么依靠他人來完成你的程序設計構想稱得上是件令人沮喪的事情。然而，你需要牢記的是：僅僅當個電腦程序員是不能成為富人的。比爾蓋茨所做的是改進代碼質量和確認設計方案，而非編寫代碼。
 
Lesson 5: Train Your New CEO 培養下一個首席執行官

For many it can be painful to run a company of more than 50 people. You spend more time than you'd like sitting in boring meetings, skimming over long legal documents in which you know there are errors but aren't sure how serious, etc. The temptation is to hand over the reins to the first "professional manager" who comes along. And that's what the standard venture capitalist formula dictates. But Bill Gates didn't do that. He hired Steve Ballmer in 1980 and gave him the CEO job 20 years later.

對于許多人來說，管理一個50人以上的公司是件叫人頭疼的事情。你要花費更多的時間去應付惱人的會議，去閱讀明知有錯，卻不知錯誤有多嚴重的冗長的法律文件。所以，只要一有合適的“職業經理人”，人們就想把手中的韁繩交出去。這就是一般的風險資本家所遵循的模式。但是比爾蓋茨不是這樣做的。他1980年就開始雇傭史蒂夫·巴爾默，但是過了20年，他才宣布首席執行官的職務由后者接任。