Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder
Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder
Marc Andreessen, Netscape founder
Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web inventor
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Correct Answer: Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder

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During the 2004 World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Bill Gates, then Microsoft's chief software architect, predicted the end of email spam within two years through several potential means.

Two of the ideas involved solving puzzles while a third, and the most promising according to Gates, would have allowed email recipients to charge the sender a small fee akin to postage stamps, or waive the fee for family and friends.

"In the long run, the monetary (method) will be dominant," he predicted.

Despite Gates foreseeing a spam-free world by 2006, 2007 brought a record level of unwanted emails, with spam messages totaling 10.8 trillion for the year compared to 10.5 trillion legit ones. Thanks in part to better filtering, however, the percentage of spam to legit emails has gradually improved over the years.

After reaching record levels in 2008, the amount of spam started a decline from about 92% of all email traffic being spam, it's down to less than 30% as of 2019, according to Statista. Another different report by Kaspersky estimates that spam comprises around 47% of all emails as of 2020.