From college dropout to the world's richest man, follow the amazing journey of the sultan of software.
He dropped out of Harvard to build a software business. The company he founded is one of the biggest in the world, and his programs now run on 95% of computers.
Bill Gates is an American icon for the silicon age, a tech nerd who turned his genius into the world's largest personal fortune, an entrepreneur who built a dominant company from the ground up according to his vision. From his privileged childhood to his recent battles with the Justice Department, BIOGRAPHY® profiles the "Sultan of Software" through interviews with those who know him best, including his mother and father. Get a glimpse of Gates the businessman through the eyes of Microsoft Co-Chairman Steven Ballmer, while childhood and college friends offer a more personal portrait.
From the birth of MS-DOS to his increasing ventures beyond the world of computing, this is a compelling profile of one of the most influential businessmen of the century.
Twenty seasons in, "Secrets d'histoire" can still surprise its audience. The Season 20 finale aired on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, at 9:10 p.m. on France 3, and Stéphane Bern closed the season with one of the most notorious women of antiquity: Messalina, the third wife of Emperor Claudius. If you watched it, you already know it was more than a parade of Roman scandal. It was a careful re-examination of a woman whose name has been shorthand for depravity for almost two thousand years. If you haven't caught up yet, this debrief shows why the episode, and the whole season, deserves a place in your watchlist.
A finale that puts history's verdict on trial
The question at the centre of the finale was simple: does Messalina deserve the brutal nickname history gave her? Roman writers handed down a woman driven by insatiable desire and a hunger for power. Bern's team took that portrait apart piece by piece. They asked who wrote the story, why they wrote it, and what they gained from it. This is the series at its best. It doesn't simply retell a legend. It looks into how the legend was made. Messalina's world gave the episode plenty of drama: Caligula, Nero, Agrippina and the freedman Narcissus all appear, each with their own agenda in the deadly politics of the Julio-Claudian court. Without spoiling anything for latecomers, the finale's real emotional pull comes from the gap between the caricature and the young woman caught up in a machine much bigger than she was.