Bill Gates

Lore & Background

Gates was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, and educated at Lakeside School, where he befriended Paul Allen and developed his computing interests. In 1973, he enrolled at Harvard University, taking classes including Math 55 and graduate-level computer science courses, but dropped out in 1975 to co-found and lead Microsoft. He served as its CEO for 25 years, and also became president and chairman of the board when the company was incorporated in 1981. He was succeeded as CEO by Steve Ballmer in 2000, transitioned to chief software architect until 2008, stepped down as chairman in 2014, and resigned from the board in 2020.

Over time, Gates reduced his role at Microsoft to focus on philanthropic work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private charitable organization, which he and his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, co-chaired from 2000 until 2024. After French Gates resigned as co-chair following the couple's divorce, the foundation was renamed the Gates Foundation, with Gates as its sole chair. He is also founder and chairman of several other companies, including BEN, Cascade Investment, TerraPower, Gates Ventures, and Breakthrough Energy. In 2010, he and Warren Buffett founded the Giving Pledge.

Reader's Guide

Bill Gates's significance lies in his role as a central figure in the microcomputer revolution, co-founding Microsoft, which became a dominant software company. Following Microsoft's initial public offering in 1986, Gates became the world's then-youngest billionaire in 1987, and Forbes ranked him as the world's wealthiest person for 18 out of 24 years between 1995 and 2017. He became the first centibillionaire in 1999. His later shift to philanthropy through the Gates Foundation, focusing on health, education, and poverty alleviation, including efforts against tuberculosis, malaria, and polio, has had a global impact. Named one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century by Time magazine in 1999, he received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. His legacy includes both his business achievements and his large-scale charitable work.

Did You Know?

• Gates scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT.
• He devised an algorithm for pancake sorting that held the record as the fastest version for over 30 years.
• Gates was a congressional page in the House of Representatives in 1972.
• He published the first of three planned memoirs, Source Code: My Beginnings, in 2025.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"If something is expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?" — Bill Gates "Interview with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz in 80 Microcomputing (1980) Clips from the interview can be found on "No Money (Lullaby for Bill)" by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz." — Bill Gates "It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of." — Bill Gates "Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company." — Bill Gates