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.

有个小伙子，他住在占地66000平方英尺，价值9700万美元的房子里。他雇佣了300个工人，房子里有游泳池，私人码头，8球洞的高尔夫练球场，甚至还有一个用来制作名贵鱼子酱的三文鱼孵卵场。这真是一个有钱的小伙子。事实上，他是美国最有钱的小伙子。
 
Well, Bill Gates started his rich life style when he was about 14. Wouldn't you like to be that rich?

比尔盖茨14岁就开始了他的富豪生活。你难道不想像他一样有钱吗？
 
Lesson1: Choose Your Grandparents Carefully 小心投胎，挑个好祖父母
 
"There are three ways to make money. You can inherit it. You can marry it. You can steal it." --conventional sisdom in Italy.

有句意大利民谚说得好：“挣钱的办法有三种：第一靠继承，第二靠婚姻，第三靠偷窃。”
 
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·盖茨第三（他的绰号叫比尔）出生了。詹姆斯·威拉德·马克斯韦尔是他的外曾祖父。1906年，马克斯韦尔在西雅图创建了美国城市银行。马克斯韦尔的儿子詹姆斯·威拉德·马克斯韦尔也成为一个银行家，并且为他们的外孙子比尔盖茨留下了100万美元的托管基金。
 
Lesson2 : Choose Your Parents Carefully 小心投胎，挑个好父母
 
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."

曾经有个年轻人问老富翁是怎么发家的。这个老头说：“哦孩子，那还是在大萧条最严重的1932年，我身上只剩下五美分了。我用这五美分买了一个苹果。我花了一整天的时间把苹果擦得亮亮的，然后在晚上，我以十美分的价钱卖了这个苹果。我就这样干了一个月。月底的时候，我一共攒了1.37美元。之后，我的岳父去世了，他留给我们200万美元的遗产。”
 
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.

盖茨的父母均为西雅图的社会名流和金融精英。他父亲是一名杰出的律师，母亲是第一洲际银行和太平洋西北部地区贝尔公司的董事。
 
Lesson 3: Acquire Research Results by Hiring and Buying 通过购买或者雇人获取科研成果
 
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.

根据传统经济学的经验，垄断者应不惜重金搞科研。但是如果你想成为和比尔盖茨一般的富人，你就必须记得买小公司研发出来的好东西比自主研发所花的成本要更为低廉。过去，反垄断法禁止垄断大户收购其潜在竞争者。但是今非昔日。当微软的产品受到来自网络计算机和基于网络的软件的威胁时，微软采取的仅仅是购买了互联网传输流媒体技术以及电子邮件系统技术的策略。
 
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.

另一个成功的策略就是雇佣了正确的一批人。好些替微软视窗卖命的年轻人原先都效命于施乐公司帕洛阿尔托研究中心。所以说，这个研究中心支付了微软系统的研发费用，而微软仅仅支付了这套系统的改良费用。
 
Lesson 4: Let Other People Do the Programming 让其他人去做编程工作
 
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.

如果你是一个出色的编程人员，那么依靠他人来完成你的程序设计构想称得上是件令人沮丧的事情。然而，你需要牢记的是：仅仅当个电脑程序员是不能成为富人的。比尔盖茨所做的是改进代码质量和确认设计方案，而非编写代码。
 
Lesson 5: Train Your New CEO 培养下一个首席执行官

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.

对于许多人来说，管理一个50人以上的公司是件叫人头疼的事情。你要花费更多的时间去应付恼人的会议，去阅读明知有错，却不知错误有多严重的冗长的法律文件。所以，只要一有合适的“职业经理人”，人们就想把手中的缰绳交出去。这就是一般的风险资本家所遵循的模式。但是比尔盖茨不是这样做的。他1980年就开始雇佣史蒂夫·巴尔默，但是过了20年，他才宣布首席执行官的职务由后者接任。