SHOCK: Bill Gates to Leave Microsoft
Matt Drudge is headlining this Reuters story:
Microsoft’s Gates says to reduce role
Thu Jun 15, 2006 4:54pm ET
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. said on Thursday that chairman Bill Gates will stop taking a day-to-day role in the software giant he founded in order to do more work with his charitable foundation.
Gates said that by July 2008 he will work full-time for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation he started to promote health and education projects around the world.
“Obviously, this decision was a very hard one for me to make,” Gates told a news conference. “The change we’re seeing today is not a retirement, it’s a reordering of my priorities.”
In July 2008, Bill Gates will be 52 years old.
That sounds like a retirement to me. By my definition, retirement doesn’t mean you do nothing, it means you collect the benefits of years of working — and philanthropy counts as that, since he’ll be spending the money he spend the previous 30 years earning.
By the way, I’d like to be a philanthropist, too. So far, I’m still stuck on step 1: “Make a lot of money.” 
