AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

BusinessWeek

For the outgoing Microsoft president, heading the $37.3 billion philanthropic organization will be “a dream job”

It didn’t take long for Microsoft President Jeff Raikes to figure out his second career. Just four months after announcing plans to retire (BusinessWeek.com, 1/10/08) as president of Microsoft’s business software operations, Raikes said on May 12 that he would become chief executive of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, starting Sept. 2. “This is truly a dream job,” Raikes says. When the Gateses dropped by his office in early May to offer him the post, “It took me a nanosecond to accept,” he says.

The foundation has been looking for a CEO since the current job holder, Patty Stonesifer, a former Microsoftie herself, announced plans in February to step down as chief executive. Stonesifer will continue to work for the foundation in an as-yet-undetermined role. In the intervening months, the foundation hired executive search firm Russell Reynolds Associates and considered more than 150 candidates. But Melinda Gates makes it clear that she and her husband settled on Raikes in large part because of their familiarity with him. “We have a shared passion, and we share the same values,” she says.

Raikes’s ties to the Gateses run deep. He joined Microsoft in 1981 and, in many ways, grew up with Bill Gates in the succeeding decades. He attended Gates’s wedding, just as Gates was a guest at his. The two occasionally golf together. And Raikes owns a vacation home next door to the Gates compound on Hood Canal in western Washington State.

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