Bill Gates is an American business entrepreneur, philanthropist, and author who founded and was the former chairman and CEO of Microsoft. Bill Gates’ net wealth is $114 billion as of this writing. Bill Gates has been the world’s richest individual for much of the last two decades. In July 2017, he was surpassed as the world’s second richest person by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Today, he is routinely ranked among the top five wealthiest persons on the globe.
As you may know, Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen and is regarded as a pioneering entrepreneur of the personal computer revolution. He now owns less than 1.3% of Microsoft. Over the years, he has sold tens of billions of dollars in Microsoft stock. The earnings from his sales have been used to support Cascade Investment LLC, the company through which Gates invests in hundreds of other firms.
Early Life
William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955. As a youngster, Gates was bullied. When his mother questioned what he was doing, he chose to stay in his room and yell “I’m thinking.” He joined in the exclusive Lakeside prep school at the age of 13 and built his first software application. During his first year at Lakeside, he was in eighth grade, and the school’s Mother’s Club utilized the funds from a fundraiser to purchase a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and time on a GE computer for the pupils. Gates grew interested in BASIC programming for the GE computer. On this computer, he built his first program, a tic-tac-toe game.
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Players played the game against the computer. Eventually, Gates and his friends Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans were banned from using the school’s computer after they were caught exploiting bugs in the operating system to get free time on the machine. The four students formed the Lakeside Programmers Club to make money.
When their prohibition was lifted, the lads promised to seek for problems in the program in return for more computer usage. Gates began researching code for computer programs such as Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. A Lakeside instructor approached Gates and Evans in 1971, asking them to automate the school’s class scheduling system. The pals created software with one exception: Gates altered the programming to place him in classrooms with a greater proportion of attractive girls. Gates and Evans hoped to get the new system operational by their final year. Evans was died in a mountain climbing accident at the conclusion of their junior year. Gates went to Allen for assistance in completing the Lakeside project.
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During their senior year, Gates and Allen founded Traf-O-Data and developed traffic counters for the Intel 8008 processor. In the autumn of 1973, he enrolled to 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 second year, Gates dropped out of college.
Career
Gates and Paul Allen regarded the advent of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU as the opportunity they needed to start their own computer software firm. Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the designers of the new microcomputer, collaborated with Gates and Allen by utilizing their Altair emulator, which operated on a minicomputer, and subsequently the BASIC interpreter. On November 26, 1976, the trademark Microsoft was registered. During Microsoft’s first five years, Gates personally inspected every piece of code the business released, frequently altering code as required. Microsoft released the first retail version of Microsoft Windows on November 20, 1985.
In 1986, Microsoft went public. The initial share price was $21. The stock concluded the day at $27.75, and Bill’s 45% stake was worth $350 million. He became a billionaire less than a year later, as the stock skyrocketed. He was 31 years old at the time.
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On June 15, 2006, Gates said that he will step down from his day-to-day position at Microsoft over the following two years to devote more time to charity. Gates announced his resignation as Chairman of Microsoft on March 13, 2020.
Personal Life
Melinda French joined Microsoft’s product development branch in 1987. She and Bill were sitting next to one other at a business dinner at some time. They clicked, and Bill immediately called Melinda to ask her out. Melinda later became the General Manager of Information Products. She worked with Microsoft until 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 Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific works.
In 2000, Gates and his wife united three family foundations to become the nonprofit Bill & Melinda Gates Organization, the world’s biggest publicly administered charity foundation.
On December 9, 2010, Bill and Melinda Gates, together with financier Warren Buffett, signed the Giving Pledge, which commits all three to donating at least half of their fortune to charity over time.
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