Bill Gates- Biography

Bill Gates is an American business entrepreneur, philanthropist, and author. He is the founder and former chairman and CEO of Microsoft. His net worth is $138 billion as of this writing.

He has been the richest man on the planet for much of the last two decades. When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos overtook him as the world’s richest person in July 2017, he fell to second place. He is now consistently ranked among the world’s top five wealthiest persons.

He as you surely know, co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen and is regarded as one of the first entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. In today’s Microsoft, he owns less than 1.3 percent of the company.

Over the years, he has sold tens of billions of dollars worth of Microsoft stock. Cascade Investment LLC, which Gates uses to invest in hundreds of other firms, is supported by the revenues of his sales.

Net Worth and Salary of Bill Gates

Bill Gates is net worth $138 billion dollars. As of this writing, he is one of the world’s wealthiest persons.

His net worth has risen from $250 million to well over $100 billion since Microsoft’s initial public offering in 1986.

After accounting for inflation, that equates to about $153 billion in today’s money.

Facts of Bill Gates

Birth, Parents, Siblings & Education of Bill Gates

On October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, William Henry Gates III was born.

As a child, Gates was bullied. When his mother questioned what he was doing, he preferred to stay in his room and shout “I’m thinking.”

He joined the exclusive Lakeside prep school at the age of 13 and built his first software program.

During his first year at Lakeside, he was in eighth grade, and the school’s Mother’s Club used funds raised from a fundraiser to purchase a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and time on a GE computer for the children.

Gates grew interested in using BASIC to program the GE computer. On this computer, he built his first program, a tic-tac-toe game.

The game pitted players against the computer. After being detected abusing flaws in the operating system to gain free time on the machine, Gates and his buddies Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans were eventually barred from using the school’s computer.

To raise money, the four students founded the Lakeside Programmers Club.

After their suspension was lifted, the guys promised to seek problems in the software in exchange for more computer time.

Gates began learning the code for computer programs, such as Fortran, Lisp, and machine language.

A Lakeside teacher approached Gates and Evans in 1971 and urged them to automate the school’s class scheduling system.

The friends built software with one difference: Gates altered the programming to put him in classes with more attractive girls.

By senior year, Gates and Evans hoped to have the new system up and operating.

Evans died in a mountain climbing accident at the end of their junior year. Gates turned to Allen for assistance in completing the Lakeside project.

During their senior year, Gates and Allen founded Traf-O-Data, a firm that created traffic counters for the Intel 8008 processor.

In the fall of 1973, he enrolled at Harvard after graduating from Lakeside School.

Gates studied math and graduate-level computer science at Harvard.

At Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer. At the end of his sophomore year, Gates dropped out of college.

Professional Career of Bill Gates

Gates and Paul Allen saw the advent of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU as the opportunity they needed to start their own computer software company.

Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the company behind the new microcomputer, developed a collaboration with Gates and Allen, using their Altair emulator, which operated on a minicomputer, and later the BASIC interpreter.

On November 26, 1976, Microsoft was registered as a trademark.

During the first five years of Microsoft’s existence, Bill Gates personally evaluated every piece of code the business released, altering code as necessary.

Microsoft released the first retail version of Windows on November 20, 1985.

In 1986, Microsoft went public. The initial share price was $21. The shares closed at $27.75 at the end of the trading day, making Bill’s 45 percent worth $350 million.

He became a billionaire less than a year later after the stock soared. He was 31 years old at the time.

On June 15, 2006, Gates said that he would step down from his day-to-day position at Microsoft for the next two years in order to devote more time to philanthropy.

The main home alone is 66,000 square feet and sits on the slope of a hill overlooking Lake Washington near Medina, Washington.

The 66,000-square-foot home has a 60-foot swimming pool with an underwater music system, a 2,500-square-foot gym, and a 1,000-square-foot dining room, as well as six kitchens and a 200-person dining hall.

Gates is a keen reader, and a quote from The Great Gatsby is etched on the ceiling of his vast home library.

The library houses precious works by Da Vinci and others.

The mansion’s annual property taxes are believed to be $1.063 million, based on a $150 million assessed valuation.

The Gates family spent $18 million bought a 228-acre ranch property in Rancho Santa Fe, California, in October 2014. (near San Diego).

Jenny Craig, the weight loss magnate, sold them the land. The property is a horse ranch known as “Rancho Paseana.”

Jennifer Gates, Gates’ daughter, is an avid rider. A racetrack, orchard, five barns, and even a room for a full-time veterinarian are all on the site.

Bill and Melinda bought a beautiful coastal mansion in Del Mar, California, for $43 million in April 2020, about 15 minutes from their Rancho Santa Fe estate.

They bought the house from the widow of T. Boone Pickens, a late oil magnate, and investor.

Gates purchased a second horse property, this one in Wellington, Florida, for $8.7 million in 2013.

When the family was in town for Jennifer Gates’ competitions, they had rented the mansion several previous times.

They were so taken with the house that they decided to purchase it.

Gates purchased a 492-acre ranch in Cody, Wyoming, for an undisclosed sum in 2009.

The ranch, which previously belonged to William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, was marketed for $12 million at first.

Just before Bill bought it, it was listed for $8.9 million. In the last 150 years, the ranch has only had three owners.

Gates owns stakes in a number of well-known hotels through his Cascade investment vehicle.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, he owns a portion of the Charles Hotel.

He owns over half of the Four Seasons hotels worldwide. The Ritz Carlton in San Francisco is owned by him and a group of investors.

Relationship Status of Bill Gates

Melinda French started working at Microsoft in the product development branch in 1987.

She and Bill were sitting next to one other at a work dinner at some time. Bill was soon calling Melinda to ask her out after they hit it off.

Melinda progressed through the ranks to become the General Manager of Information Products. She worked for Microsoft from 1986 to 1996.

On January 1, 1994, Bill and Melinda married on a golf course on the Hawaiian island of Lanai.

Phoebe Adele, Rory John, and Jennifer Katharine are their three children.

At an auction in 1994, Gates paid $30.8 million for the Codex Leicester, a collection of scholarly writings by Leonardo da Vinci.

In 2000, he and his wife merged three family foundations to form the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s biggest publicly governed charitable foundation.

On December 9, 2010, Bill and Melinda Gates, as well as billionaire Warren Buffett, signed the Giving Pledge, which commits all three to donate at least half of their wealth to charity over the course of their lives.

Since Microsoft’s IPO in 1986, he has sold at least $40 billion in stock and received over $12 billion in dividends.

He put the money into Cascade Investment, a holding firm that has grown to include interests in companies including Canadian National Railway and AutoNation.

Gates is a generous donor who gave his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation a $3.3 billion grant in 2004. He still owns 1.3 percent of the company.

The Gates family has a variety of remarkable properties around the United States.

He most likely has properties in other countries as well, albeit little is known about these transactions.

The Gates family lives in a breathtaking estate in Washington, dubbed “Xanadu 2.0.”

Bill spent seven years and $63 million building what is undoubtedly the most beautiful private mansion in the world after purchasing the lakefront property for $2 million in 1988.

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Quick Facts of Bill Gates

• Over much of the last 20 years, Bill Gates has been the richest person in the world.
• Today he owns less than 1.3% of Microsoft.
• The Gates family owns a number of impressive properties around the US.
• He has a net worth of $138 billion.