Bill Gates

About Bill Gates

Bill Gates, ranked \#765 for historical importance by MIT's Pantheon project, is primarily recognized as the co-founder of Microsoft. His contribution lies in spearheading the personal computing revolution, making software accessible to the masses, and profoundly shaping the modern digital landscape across business, technology, and philanthropy. As a living figure born in 1955, his influence remains contemporary, yet the HPI seeks to measure his long-term global cultural impact across diverse fields and time.

The internet's attention in 2025, however, shows a significant over-indexing on Gates. He accrued 3.4 million Wikipedia views last year, resulting in an "Attention Gap" score indicating an overattention of +10x relative to his historical importance ranking. This level of digital engagement means he attracts significantly more contemporary attention than a figure like Denis Diderot (\#491 importance, 218K views), who is judged to be historically more influential but receives only a fraction of the annual pageviews.

This intense focus appears to be waning, though. The annualized 2025 view count marks a -16.2% year-over-year decline, and his early-to-late year momentum shows a sharp -25% drop between Q1 and Q3, suggesting that while current attention is high, the trajectory suggests a deceleration of interest in this business leader.