I’ve often wondered if he or Paul had any idea of the hundreds of billions they would make for themselves and many, many others.
He certainly didn’t see the Internet coming or he wouldn’t have posed like that I hope.
I don't doubt it. Gates was a brilliant young man with incredible ambition. I'm sure you've read his early articles and posts to the tech mags in the 1970's -- he had every intention of crushing the "free-and-open-source-software" movement (then known as the "hobbyist" movement) and founding the "non-free-and-proprietary-software" movement. His goal was to change the model by which software was created, developed, and sold. He said so many years before IBM gave him the leg up with the request for a DOS for the new IBM-PC. And he succeeded wildly.
"Hundreds of billions"? Maybe not in exactly those terms. But I don't doubt for a minute he dedicated his life's-work to making as much money as he could. That a lot of other people would get rich on his coattails, and indirectly from his company's products, may have not been explicit, but knowing Gates (by reputation, I've never met him) I would bet he thought about that too.
I have a grudging admiration for the man. Grudging, only because I was one of the "hobbyists" he vowed to crush. He's rich, I'm not. Oh well... ;-)