Bill Gates may have stopped using his Facebook profile. Now he's planning to join LinkedIn, according to Beyond Binary. On Thursday, Gates will use LinkedIn Answers to ask "how technology can be better utilized for charitable causes." Charming. But since LinkedIn is said to be planning a "notable advertising announcement" for the same day, our guess is that the real news will be a Microsoft-LinkedIn ad-serving deal.

*Paul Boutin, our local heterosexual, told me I had to say it like that to avoid sounding gay. Apparently "charismatic dorkiness" is the verbal equivalent of a punch on the shoulder. Did it work?

Microsoft will spend $40 billion on Yahoo for its people, Bill Gates told an audience at Stanford yesterday. "Yes, the advertisers and the number of end users is good," Gates said, "but we'd put the people and the engineering as the key thing." Well, if that's the case, Mr. Gates, here's the good news: Yahoo just laid off a portion of its engineers. They need jobs. And the rest? Their 2006 retention packages just vested. Your shareholders would prefer you make them an offer directly. (Photo by cackhanded)

Microsoft hasn't upped its offer to buy Yahoo and isn't negotiating behind closed doors, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said. "We sent them a letter and said we think that's a fair offer. There's nothing that's gone on other than us stating that we think it's a fair offer," Gates told the AP. "They should take a hard look at it." Microsoft's offer continues to hover around $29 dollars a share, down from $31 — though anyone who wants $31 a share in cash can take the money and run.

In the Yahoo-Microsoft takeover battle, Yahoo's 40 percent stake in Yahoo Japan is treated as an afterthought: Spare goods to be sold off to boost shareholder returns. But Yahoo Japan, in its home country, is Google, eBay, and Yahoo rolled into one. It's worth $29 billion — more than Yahoo itself was worth before the Microsoft bid. Which raises the question: Why isn't Yahoo Japan the one buying Yahoo? Before you dismiss it, consider the precedents.

Missed earnings, recession fears, and dodgy deals are eviscerating the stock portfolios of tech titans like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt. Here's the damage.

Click to viewA tipster is friends with Bill Gates's Facebook profile — the one Gates claims to have stopped using. The skinny on the Microsoft cofounder: "The friends list is short (110 friends) and yes, there are a bunch of teenagers on it BUT all key internal people that I know work with him closely are friends with that profile." On the list:

The public story is that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has quit Facebook "after getting more than 8,000 friend requests a day, and [spotting] weird fan sites about him." We don't doubt it, but a tipster tells us that BillG has a secret profile only visible from within Facebook's Microsoft network. Surely some Microsoftie Valleywag readers are friends with him. Do tell: Are there frenzied poking wars in Redmond's C-suite? Message us.

Rupert Murdoch loves to make trouble for other moguls. Could he stop Microsoft's bid for Yahoo? Wall Street analysts have been asking Murdoch if he would buy Yahoo outright. Never mind that the News Corp. chief doesn't have the cash to outbid Microsoft. Such a straightforward deal would be far too boring for Murdoch to contemplate. Instead, here's a scenario bruited about by Silicon Alley Insider.

You've probably seen that Bill Gates wants the world to embrace a kinder form of capitalism. But have you seen fired Connected Ventures cofounder and "burgeoning music entrepreneur" Jakob Lodwick's rebuttal? It's Objectivism in all its glory! Lodwick tells Gates to stop justifying capitalism by saying it serves to better others.

Google.org, Google's for-profit charity, announced all kinds of new initiatives today. The short version: health, climate change, good government. The basic idea, as MarketWatch notes in a video report about the project, is to approach "giving" like a venture capitalist. Thing is, Google's only "investing" about 3 percent as much as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. No matter, says Google's Larry Brilliant in this clip.

· Was anyone else watching Vh1 last night from, say, 11pm to 11:06pm? They debuted a bite-sized pop culture rundown ("Best Night Ever") starring the lovely, talented and wholly underrated Jessica St. Clair. We've been repeating her hilariously awkward outgoing sign-off all day. Edward R. Murrow, eat your heart out.
· Speaking of Best Week Ever, their listmaster supreme (aka Dan Hopper) ran down the Ten Least Sexy Nude Scenes in Movie History. Yes, chubby chasers, Kathy Bates made the list.
· Rachel Bilson wearing a star-spangled bikini = newsstand gold. Mark your calendars, this will be the first time we've bought GQ this millenium.
· The Soup has a rare, behind-the-scenes look of how Harvey Levin's pitch meetings at TMZ really go down.
· Garfield sure had a bad day back on January 26, 1995.
· Our favorite line in the HD-DVD viral vid that made the rounds today was "BLADES OF GLORY? Are you FUCKING kidding me?" Also, in the context of this video, is Hitler supposed to be Bill Gates?

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's efforts to fight AIDS, malaria and measles in Africa is working. Millions of vaccinated children are now safe from malaria and measles. In many parts of the continent, AIDS deaths are no longer on the rise. But now Africa has other problems, thanks to the charity's focused generosity. A recent Los Angeles Times exposé. It's all Bill's fault:

Gizmodo found this clip of 60 Minutes interviewing Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. Gates barely gets started explaining precisely how smart he is before a panhandler taps on the window of Dick's Drive-In Restaurant, the Seattle burger joint where Gates has just ordered a $1.70 "deluxe." Can Gates spare some change? Nah. $36 billion, maybe, but not some change.

Thank you for seeing me, doctor. Right here on the couch, turned away from you? I read that doctors do that to eliminate the burden of eye contact. Ha, or in case they don't like your face, good one. Actually I don't like my face much either. That's what I'm here about.

When I read Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's deposition in one of his pending lawsuits with the founders of ConnectU, who claim he stole the idea for the social network from them, my first thought was, "Did anyone at Microsoft read these before investing $240 million in Facebook?" Zuckerberg is at his worst in these transcripts — by turns arrogant, befuddled, condescending, and obfuscating. And then it hit me.

John Markoff at the New York Times is reporting that Microsoft will be making a product announcement Tuesday in San Francisco. As far as announcements go, this one looks to be a snoozer — Bill Gates will be on hand to announce "unified communications" — which is corporatespeak for "we upgraded our IM client." To make the announcement more palatable, it seems that Gates is taking a cue from Steve Jobs's Apple keynotes and bringing in some musical accompaniment. Want to know the difference between Microsoft and Apple? Bill Gates's idea of cool is 62-year-old guitar hero Eric Clapton. Sad when the "surprise" of your "surprise performer" is that he's still alive.

Why, in this age of lightning-fast publishing, do members of prestigious national publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal still agree to embargoes? Microsoft, it seems, has placed an embargo on its new Zune models, but Gizmodo already has photos, and the Silicon Alley Insider, too, has already scooped its much-larger business-news rivals, with reports that Microsoft will introduce new Zunes with flash-memory storage, competing with Apple's iPod Nano line. Jay Greene from BusinessWeek, Jeff Leeds, music reporter at the Times, and Nick Wingfield of the Journal, we hear, were among the reporters scribbling away at the Microsoft launch event in the Seattle area today. And what did they get in exchange for agreeing to sit on the news?

Microsoft has lost its appeal with the European Court of First Instance, upholding the European Commission's antitrust ruling against the Seattle-area software maker for abusing its dominant position in the operating system, media player and server markets. The Court only overruled one minor provision regarding trustee oversight. While the American antitrust settlement was considered toothless, primarily imposing some minor business restrictions, the European decision is far more significant. It imposes technological restrictions on Microsoft's business, including Bill Gates's sacred cow — the right to provide "integrated products," something he fought for tooth and nail with the Department of Justice. It's a precedent that could have wide effects on other software makers. Microsoft's lawyers, while still reviewing the decision, are playing contrite: "We'll study this decision carefully, and if there are additional steps that we need to take in order to comply with it, we will take them."