Microsoft’s employee No. 105 will soon become the No. 1 employee at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest foundation in the world.

Alberto Ibarguen, CEO of the Knight Foundation and former publisher of the Miami Herald, joined the board of directors of AMR and American Airlines in January. There wasn’t much of a honeymoon.

On the spectrum of freedom, Charles Overby pretty much has the full range covered. He heads the Freedom Forum, which opens its new $450 million Newseum Friday in Washington, D.C. And, in his free time, he’s a director at the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the nation’s largest privatized prison system.

Noting that as he gets older, he gets more tolerant, the once anti-religious Ted Turner has joined two religious organizations to reduce malaria in Africa.

The Osmond family, once cited by a Mormon elder for setting “the greatest example of missionary work,” has helped raise billions of dollars for children’s hospitals over the years.

Cosmetics magnate Leonard A. Lauder has made the biggest gift the Whitney Museum has ever received.

Some might call it good timing for Anne V. Farrell, who is leaving the Washington Mutual board of directors because she has reached the mandatory retirement age of 72. Washington Mutual, the embattled Seattle lender, is facing lawsuits, more big lending losses, and is the subject of takeover speculation.

G. Wayne Clough, the president of Georgia Tech, will become head of the Smithsonian Institution July 1, more than a year after the previous chief, Lawrence Small, resigned over accountability issues.

“This is a treasure of our country, and it needs to move forward,” Clough, 66, said Saturday.

Little-known philanthropist Chuck Feeney has patterned his life on an Irish proverb: “There are no pockets in a shroud.”

As Margot Roosevelt of the Los Angeles Times reported in a rare profile yesterday, Feeney plans to give away $8 billion in the next 8 years.

Feeney, co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers, which was bought by Bernard Arnault in 1997, put most of his fortune into Atlantic Philanthropies eight years ago. He gave the foundation leadership an usual mission: Spend every dollar by 2016.

James H. Simons keeps putting his money where his mind is.

The billionaire former mathematics professor and his wife, Marilyn Hawrys Simons, have given $60 million to Stony Brook University.