1. William Henry Gates III was born on October 28,1955 and is an American businessman and philanthropist.
97 Facts About Bill Gates
1. 2.
Bill Gates became the first centibillionaire in 1999, when his net worth briefly surpassed $100 billion.
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Bill Gates served as its CEO for the next 25 years and became president and chairman of the board when the company incorporated in 1981.
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Bill Gates stepped down as chairman of the board in 2014 and became technology adviser to CEO Satya Nadella and other Microsoft leaders, a position he still holds.
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Bill Gates is founder and chairman of several other companies, including BEN, Cascade Investment, TerraPower, Bill Gates Ventures, and Breakthrough Energy.
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William Henry Gates III was born on October 28,1955, in Seattle, Washington, as the only son of William H Gates Sr.
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Bill Gates's father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors of First Interstate BancSystem and United Way of America.
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Bill Gates has an older sister Kristi and a younger sister Libby.
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When Bill Gates was young his parents wanted him to pursue a career in law.
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Bill Gates was small for his age and was bullied as a child.
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Bill Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and he was excused from math classes to pursue his interest.
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Bill Gates wrote his first computer program on this machine, an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer.
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Bill Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly.
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Towards the end of their junior year, Evans was killed in a mountain climbing accident, which Bill Gates described as one of the saddest days of his life.
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Bill Gates then turned to Allen who helped him finish the system for Lakeside.
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At age 17, Bill Gates formed a venture with Allen called Traf-O-Data to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.
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Bill Gates was a national merit scholar when he graduated from Lakeside School in 1973.
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Bill Gates scored 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973.
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Bill Gates did not stay at Harvard long enough to choose a concentration, but took mathematics and graduate level computer science courses.
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Bill Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by professor Harry Lewis.
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Bill Gates's solution was formalized and published in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.
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Bill Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen and joined him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974.
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Bill Gates's parents were supportive of him after seeing how much he wanted to start his own company.
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Bill Gates read the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics which demonstrated the Altair 8800, and contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.
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MITS hired Allen, and Bill Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard to work with him at MITS in November 1975.
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Microsoft's Altair BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Bill Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked out and was being widely copied and distributed.
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Bill Gates moved from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington on January 1,1979.
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Bill Gates said he personally reviewed and often rewrote every line of code that the company produced in its first five years.
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IBM, the leading supplier of computer equipment to commercial enterprises at the time, approached Microsoft in July 1980 concerning software for its upcoming personal computer, the IBM PC, after Bill Gates's mother mentioned Microsoft to John Opel, IBM's then CEO.
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IBM representative Jack Sams mentioned the licensing difficulties during a subsequent meeting with Bill Gates and asked if Microsoft could provide an operating system.
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Bill Gates had not offered to transfer the copyright on the operating system to IBM because he believed that other personal computer makers would clone IBM's PC hardware.
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Bill Gates oversaw Microsoft's company restructuring on June 25,1981, which re-incorporated the company in Washington state and made Bill Gates the president and chairman of the board, with Paul Allen as vice president and vice chairman.
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Later in the decade, Bill Gates repaired his relationship with Allen and together the two donated millions to their childhood school Lakeside.
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Microsoft and Bill Gates launched their first retail version of Microsoft Windows on November 20,1985, in an attempt to fend off competition from Apple's Macintosh GUI, which had captivated consumers with its simplicity and ease of use.
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Windows XP was released one year after Bill Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO.
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Windows 8.1 was the last version of the OS released before Gates left the chair of the firm to John W Thompson on February 5,2014.
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Bill Gates has not officially been on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100, but he wrote code that shipped with the company's products as late as 1989.
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In June 2006, Bill Gates announced that he would transition out of his role at Microsoft to dedicate more time to philanthropy.
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Bill Gates gradually divided his responsibilities between two successors when he placed Ray Ozzie in charge of management and Craig Mundie in charge of long-term product strategy.
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Since leaving day-to-day operations at Microsoft, Bill Gates has continued his philanthropy and works on projects.
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Bill Gates stepped down as chairman of Microsoft in February 2014 to become technology advisor at the firm to support newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella.
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Bill Gates provided his perspective on a range of issues in an interview that was published in the March 2014 issue of Rolling Stone magazine.
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In March 2018, Bill Gates met at his home in Seattle with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia to discuss investment opportunities for Saudi Vision 2030.
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In June 2019, Bill Gates admitted that losing the mobile operating system race to Android was his biggest mistake.
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Bill Gates stated that it was within their skill set of being the dominant player, but partially blames the antitrust litigation during the time.
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That same year, Bill Gates became an advisory board member of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum.
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In March 2020, Microsoft announced Bill Gates would be leaving his board positions at Berkshire Hathaway and Microsoft to dedicate himself to philanthropic endeavors such as climate change, global health and development, and education.
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Bill Gates considers climate change and global access to energy to be critical, interrelated issues.
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Bill Gates has urged governments and the private sector to invest in research and development to make clean, reliable energy cheaper.
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Bill Gates envisions that a breakthrough innovation in sustainable energy technology could drive down both greenhouse gas emissions and poverty, and bring economic benefits by stabilizing energy prices.
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Bill Gates spearheaded two initiatives that he announced at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris.
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Bill Gates has been criticized for holding a large stake in Signature Aviation, a company that services emissions-intensive private jets.
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Bill Gates supported the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
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Bill Gates tried to convince Joe Manchin to support a climate bill starting in 2019, and especially in the months leading up to the adoption of the bill.
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Bill Gates thanked both Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer for their efforts in a guest essay in The New York Times, where he said "Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 may be the single most important piece of climate legislation in American history" given its potential to spur development of new technologies.
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Bill Gates gave further insights on climate change in his commencement address at Northern Arizona University on May 6,2023, where he was bestowed an honorary doctorate.
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In October 2024, The New York Times reported Bill Gates had recently donated $50 million to Future Forward USA Action, a 501 organization supporting Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential campaign.
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In 1998, Bill Gates rejected the need for regulation of the software industry in testimony before the United States Senate.
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Bill Gates has credited the generosity and extensive philanthropy of David Rockefeller as a major influence.
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Bill Gates delivered his thoughts in a fireside chat moderated by journalist and news anchor Shereen Bhan virtually at the Singapore FinTech Festival on December 8,2020, on the topic, "Building Infrastructure for Resilience: What the COVID-19 Response Can Teach Us About How to Scale Financial Inclusion".
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Melinda Bill Gates suggested that people should emulate the philanthropic efforts of the Salwen family, who sold their home and gave away half of its value, as detailed in their book, The Power of Half.
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Gates and his wife invited Joan Salwen to Seattle to speak about what the family had done, and on December 9,2010, Bill and Melinda Gates and investor Warren Buffett each signed a commitment they called the "Giving Pledge", which is a commitment by all three to donate at least half of their wealth, over the course of time, to charity.
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In June 2018, Bill Gates offered free ebooks, to all new graduates of US colleges and universities, and in 2021, offered free ebooks, to all college and university students around the world.
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Federer and Bill Gates played against John Isner, the top-ranked American player for much of this decade, and Mike McCready, the lead guitarist for Pearl Jam.
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In 1989, Bill Gates wrote the foreword to the Microsoft Press book Learn BASIC Now, by Michael Halvorson and David Rygmyr, reflecting on the growth of the BASIC language and its use in most of the era's personal computers.
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Bill Gates sketched out plans for BASIC's use as a universal language to embellish or alter the performance of a range of software applications.
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In 2021 he published How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, which presents what Bill Gates learned in over a decade of studying climate change and investing in innovations to address climate problems.
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The first of Bill Gates's planned three memoirs, Source Code was published in February 2025.
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Bill Gates is an avid reader, and the ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby.
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Bill Gates's days are planned for him on a minute-by-minute basis, similarly to the US president's schedule.
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On May 10,2022, Bill Gates said that he tested positive for COVID-19 and was experiencing mild symptoms.
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In 2025, in Source Code, Bill Gates wrote that he believed he was autistic.
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In 1987, at a trade fair in New York, Bill Gates met Melinda French, then a recent graduate of Duke University who had begun working at Microsoft around four months earlier.
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Bill Gates has two granddaughters, born to Jennifer Bill Gates in March 2023 and October 2024.
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In February 2023, Bill Gates confirmed that he was dating Paula Hurd, widow of former Oracle Corporation and Hewlett-Packard chief executive Mark Hurd.
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Bill Gates's image morphed from "tyrannical technocrat to saintly savior" to a "huggable billionaire techno-philanthropist", celebrated on magazine covers and sought after for his opinions on major issues like global health and climate change.
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Investigative journalist Tim Schwab has accused Bill Gates of using his contributions to the media to shape their coverage of him in order to protect his public image.
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Bill Gates has been implausibly accused of attempting to depopulate the world, distributing harmful or unethical vaccines, and implanting people with privacy-violating microchips.
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Bill Gates was ranked first on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans from 1993 to 2007, in 2009, and from 2014 to 2017.
80.
In May 2006, Bill Gates remarked that he wished that he was not the richest man in the world, because he disliked the attention that it brought.
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In March 2010, Gates was the second wealthiest person after Carlos Slim, but regained the top position in 2013, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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In October 2017, Bill Gates was surpassed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the richest person in the world.
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Bill Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of US$616,667 and a bonus of US$350,000, for a total of US$966,667.
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Worse, many of the technology chief's denials and pleas of ignorance were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of e-mail that Bill Gates both sent and received.
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Bill Gates later said that he had simply resisted attempts by Boies to mischaracterize his words and actions.
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Bill Gates had primary responsibility for Microsoft's product strategy from the company's founding in 1975 until 2006.
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Bill Gates had studied the game until he solved it.
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Allen would recall that Bill Gates was prone to shouting episodes.
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Bill Gates met regularly with Microsoft's senior managers and program managers, and the managers described him as being verbally combative, berating them for perceived holes in their business strategies or proposals that placed the company's long-term interests at risk.
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Bill Gates said in 2011 about Epstein: "His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me".
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However, in an interview in 2019 Bill Gates completely denied any connection between Epstein and the Bill Gates Foundation or his philanthropy generally.
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Also in attendance were representatives of the International Peace Institute which has received millions in grants from the Bill Gates Foundation, including a $2.5 million "community engagement" grant in October 2013.
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In 2023, it was reported that Epstein threatened to expose an alleged affair Bill Gates had with a Russian bridge player.
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Bill Gates was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs on January 31,2016, in which he talked about his relationships with his father and Steve Jobs, meeting Melinda Ann French, the start of Microsoft and some of his habits.
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Bill Gates made a guest appearance as himself on the TV show The Big Bang Theory, in an episode titled "The Gates Excitation".
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Bill Gates appeared in a cameo role in 2019 on the series finale of Silicon Valley.
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In 2023, Gates was the interviewee in an episode of the Amol Rajan Interviews series on BBC Two, and was the subject of an episode of the UK Channel 4 series The Billionaires Who Made Our World.