Asimov wrote a short story called “If”, in which a man sitting on a train with his wife was enabled to see what would have happened if one little incident that led to meeting his wife had been different. In the story, the man would have married someone else, taken a different job, etc. At the end, he gets to see where he would have been at that exact moment: sitting on the same train he was on with his original wife. The point was that some things will happen with or without luck. I think the same is true for Bill Gates. If Walter Gates had made DOS and Windows first, Bill would have made something else and still ended up a billionaire.
As a follow on. I’m hoping that as terrible as Obama will be for the country, he serves the full four years without impeachment or some other interruption. The 2008 election proved that we needed to learn what socialism is like or we’ll just vote for another socialist in 2012 or 2016. Even without Obama, we would still have elected a socialist. The $9T extra debt he’s going to leave for our children is a horribly cruel burden to leave them, but it’s worth the price if it protects them from something even worse - a permanent socialist government.