William Henry Gates III or better known as Bill Gates is an American entrepreneur, inventor, and philanthropist. He is one of the co-founders of the Microsoft Corporation, an American conglomerate in the computer industry that has produced products including Microsoft Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer in addition to some of the most important inventions in the development of modern computers and the internet.
As he grew richer in his later years, Bill Gates started working with Melinda French, his ex-wife, to support charitable causes. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was established by the two, and it has given billions of dollars to charitable causes all across the world. Bill Gates has held the title of the richest man in the world for 20 years. When Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, passed him in July 2017, he fell to the position of second-richest man in the world. He consistently ranks among the top five richest people on the earth today.
Bill Gates Biography:
Net Worth $124.9 Billion |
Full Name William Henry Gates III |
Birth Date October 28. 1955 |
Birthplace Seattle, Washington, U.S. |
Age 66 years |
Source of Wealth Co-founder of Microsoft and Bill & |
Melinda Gates Foundation |
Ex. Wife Melinda French |
Bill Gates Early Life
On October 28, 1955, in Seattle Washington, William Henry Gates aka Bill Gates III was born. Young Gates experienced bullying. He attended the Lakeside prep school when he was 13 and created his first piece of software. During his first year at Lakeside, he was in the eighth grade, and the school’s Mother’s Club utilized the funds from a fundraiser to purchase a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and computer time for the students. Gates developed an interest in using BASIC to program the GE computer. On this computer, he created his first program, a tic-tac-toe game.
Gates enrolled at Harvard in 1973 to study computer science and mathematics. Gates left Harvard without completing his course because he was more interested in developing his own coding and jumping at the chance to start his own business.
Bill Gates Career
Gates and Paul Allen saw the introduction of the MITS Altair 8800, based on the Intel 8080 CPU, as the opportunity, they were required to start their own computer software company. Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the company that developed the new microcomputer, teamed up with Gates and Allen utilizing the BASIC interpreter and an Altair emulator that operated on a minicomputer. On November 26, 1976, the trademark Microsoft was filed. Every line of code that Microsoft shipped during its first five years was personally examined by Gates, who frequently rewrote code as necessary. The world Famous Microsoft released its first retail version of Windows on November 20, 1985.
In 1986, Microsoft went public and the stock’s opening price was $21. The shares completed the trading day at $27.75, making Bill’s 45 percent worth $350 million. After the stock increased, he became a billionaire in less than a year at the age of 31.
On June 15, 2006, Gates declared that he would leave his day-to-day position at Microsoft over the following two years in order to devote more time to philanthropy.
Gates made the announcement that he would step down as chairman of Microsoft on March 13, 2020.
Bill Gates Family
His mother Mary worked as an executive for a significant bank, and his father, William Gates Sr., was a senior lawyer. Although the family was wealthy, they taught their kids to work hard and never take anything for granted because they remembered the difficulties of the Great Depression. He has two sisters: Libby, who is younger than him, and Kristianne, also known as Kristi.
Bill Gates’s Wife and children
In 1994, Gates wed Melinda French, who is now his ex-wife. While they were both employed by Microsoft, they became friends.
All three of Bill Gates’ children, Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe, were born during his marriage to Melinda. According to rumors, Bill Gates’ involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, an American businessman who was detained and found guilty of numerous sex offenses, was one of the reasons for conflict in their marriage.
Bill Gates’s Net Worth
Gates was the fourth richest person in the world as of June 2022, with an estimated net worth of US$123 billion. Gates has appeared on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people every year since 1987. With the exception of the years 2010 to 2013, he consistently held the Forbes title of the richest person in the world from 1995 to 2017. He was eclipsed in wealth in October 2017 by Jeff Bezos, the founder, and CEO of Amazon, who at the time had an estimated net worth of US$90.6 billion as opposed to Gates’s US$89.9 billion. He overtook Bezos as the richest person in the world on November 15, 2019, thanks to a 48% surge in Microsoft shares.
The “Xanadu 2.0” house that Bill Gates owns in Washington is quite incredible. Bill spent seven years and $63 million building what would become one of the most beautiful private residences in the world after purchasing the lakefront property in 1988 for $2 million. In order to increase privacy, he additionally spent $14 million purchasing adjacent homes.