With a net worth of approximately $78.9 billion, Microsoft cofounder
Bill Gates is the wealthiest man in the world.Gates has been a public
fixture ever since he and Paul Allen started a computer revolution in
the 1980s. He has all of the toys you would expect from the world’s
richest man, from a private jet to a 66,000-square-foot home he
nicknamed Xanadu 2.0.Yet as his wealth has grown, Gates has done more
and more philanthropy work, donating billions of dollars to charity
projects through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington. Son
of a lawyer and a schoolteacher, he was an argumentative but brilliant
child. As a teenager, his appetite for knowledge was so great that he
read the entire World Book Encyclopedia series from start to finish.
His parents enrolled him at the Lakeside School, a rigorous Seattle
private high school that future Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen also
attended. Gates often credits his discovery of computers to the tools he
gained at Lakeside. “The experience and insight Paul Allen and I gained
here gave us the confidence to start a company based on this wild idea
that nobody else agreed with—that computer chips were going to become so
powerful that computers and software would become a tool that would be
on every desk and in every home,” he said in a 2005 speech at the
school.
After graduating from Lakeside in 1973, Gates headed to Harvard.
Though he entered as a pre-law major, he soon changed course and quickly
worked his way through the university’s upper-level math and computer
science classes.
Harvard is where Gates met Steve Ballmer, whom he would later bring
to Microsoft and eventually promote to CEO of the company. Although they
lived down the hall from each other in Currier House, they met during a
graduate-level economics class. The pair remain good friends today.
Two years later, Gates dropped out of school to found Microsoft with
Paul Allen. Though he never earned his bachelor’s degree, Harvard
awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2007. “I’m a bad influence. That’s
why I was invited to speak at your graduation,” he said at the
commencement ceremony. “If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of
you might be here today.”
While he was still in school, Gates started developing software for
MITS Altair, the world’s first personal computer. In 1977, Gates and
Allen moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where MITS was based, to set up
their young software company. Pictured here are the 11 original
Microsoft employees.
In 1979, Gates and Allen relocated Microsoft to their hometown of
Seattle, first setting up shop in the suburb of Bellevue and later
moving to Redmond.
Microsoft released Windows in 1985 and went public in 1986. By 1987, 31-year-old Gates was a billionaire.
In 1995, Gates became the richest man in the world, with an estimated
fortune of $12.9 billion. He’s been at or near the top of the list of
the world’s richest ever since.
In 1998, Microsoft was brought to court on charges that the company
was abusing its power as a software monopoly. Gates had a very mixed
public reputation at the time.
Gates met his future wife, Melinda, at a press event in 1987. She was
a Microsoft employee and later moved up to become an executive of
interactive content. They married in 1994, and she eventually left the
company to pursue charity work.
Bill, Melinda, and their three children live in this massive,
high-tech home in Medina, Washington. The home has some incredibly
futuristic features, including an underwater sound system in the pool
and computerized pins that the house can read to customize music,
temperature, and lighting. The house has an astonishing 24 bathrooms,
plus a garage that can accommodate up to 23 cars. It’s worth an
estimated $121 million.
Included in his mansion’s many rooms is a huge domed library filled
with books. Gates is an avid reader, and he reportedly hired a
rare-books dealer to stock his library for him. Among his possessions is
Leonardo da Vinci’s “Codex Leicester,” a 15th-century manuscript that
Gates bought at auction for $30.8 million in 1994.
Gates has an extensive art collection as well. In 1998 he set a
record for American art when he paid $36 million for Winslow Homer’s
“Lost on the Grand Banks.” He also owns pieces by American artists
Andrew Wyeth and William Merritt Chase.
Last year, Gates paid $8.7 million for a Mediterranean-style home in
Wellington, Florida. The family had previously rented the house while
they were in Florida for daughter Jennifer’s equestrian competitions.
The home includes several horse-friendly features, like a 20-stall barn
and a show-jumping arena.
Gates likes to take educational trips with his son. They’ve toured
mines, electric plants, and missile solos, and they’ve even taken a trip
to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. “He likes learning
along with me,” Gates said to Quartz.
He’s also been known to spend some time at Apussuit Adventure Camp, a
remote ski center in Greenland. The resort has no lifts and few people.
Gates has always had a thing for fast cars. Over the years, he’s
owned a Porsche 930 Turbo, a Mercedes, a Jaguar XJ6, a Carrera Cabriolet
964, and a Ferrari 348. In the early years of Microsoft, he bought a
1979 Porsche 911 that he used to race around the desert.
Paul Allen had to bail him out of jail after one such incident in 1977. The Porsche 911 was auctioned off for $80,000 in 2012.
When he bought his Porsche 959 in the late ’90s, the car was held up
at customs because it had not yet met EPA standards. Gates, along with
several other wealthy Porsche owners, put up such a fight that the
Clinton administration passed the “Show and Display” law, which allows
certain imported vehicles to be exempt from Federal Motor Safety
Standards if the car is historically or technologically significant.
Playing tennis is one of Gates’ favorite hobbies. Here he high-fives Jeff Bezos during a 2001 charity match.
He counts legendary investor Warren Buffett among his close friends.
When Gates wanted to propose to Melinda in the early 1990s, Buffett
helped the couple pick out a ring. They’ve taken many trips together,
and have even competed in bridge and table tennis tournaments. Gates
sits on the board of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s investment firm, and
Buffett has donated billions to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Here they attend a basketball game with rapper Ludacris.
Gates stepped down from his position as CEO of Microsoft in 2000,
taking on a more limited role as chairman. Nowadays, he serves as
technology advisor to current CEO Satya Nadella. When he’s not working
on something with Microsoft, Gates and wife Melinda travel to do charity
work through their foundation.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has had its hand in a number
of projects, from eradicating diseases in remote corners of the world to
developing richer sources of food for impoverished people.
Gates reportedly paid $21 million for his private jet back in 1997.
It has definitely come in handy as he travels to far-flung places for
his charity work. “Owning a plane is a guilty pleasure,” he said during
an AMA on Reddit. “I do get to a lot of places for Foundation work I
wouldn’t be able to go to without it.”
In 2010, Bill and Melinda teamed up with Warren Buffett to start a
campaign called “The Giving Pledge,” which encouraged fellow
billionaires to donate at least half of their wealth to philanthropy.
Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, Steve Case, and Mark Zuckerberg are among
those who have signed the pledge so far.
Gates has made a number of investments in startups like Hampton
Creek, which aims to find plant replacements for eggs. He is also
backing several projects developing next-generation condoms, in the
hopes that they could help stop the spread of HIV and AIDS.
