Bill Gates net worth: Bill Gates is an American business magnate, chairman of Microsoft, philanthropist, and author who has a net worth of $111 billion. Bill Gates has spent much of the last 20 years as the richest person in the world, though he has slipped to #2 on a handful of occasions. As you probably know, Bill Gates co-founded the software company Microsoft with Paul Allen, and is known as one of the premiere entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution.
Early Life: William Henry Gates III wad born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington. Gates was small for his age and was bullied as a child. He preferred to stay in his room where he would shout "I'm thinking" when his mother asked what he was doing. At 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school and he wrote his first software program. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers' Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School's rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and he was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine, an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. After the Mothers Club donation of time on the terminal was exhausted, he and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC) which banned Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Gates' best friend and first business collaborator Kent Evans for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.
The four students formed the Lakeside Programmers Club to make money. At the end of the ban, they offered to find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for extra computer time. Rather than use the system remotely via Teletype, Gates went to CCC's offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970 when the company went out of business.
The following year, a Lakeside teacher enlisted Gates and Evans to automate the school's class-scheduling system, providing them computer time and royalties in return. The two friends wrote the school's student information system software to schedule students in classes, and Gates modified the code so that he was placed in classes with "a disproportionate number of interesting girls." The duo worked diligently in order to have the program ready for their senior year. Towards the end of their junior year, Evans was killed in a mountain climbing accident, which Gates has described as one of the saddest days of his life. Gates then turned to Allen who helped him finish the system for Lakeside.
At 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen called Traf-O-Data to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In 1972, he served as a congressional page in the House of Representatives. He graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and enrolled at Harvard in the autumn of 1973. He chose a pre-law major but took mathematics and graduate-level computer science courses. While at Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer. Gates left Harvard after two years.
Career: With the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, Gates and Allen saw this as the opening they needed to create their own computer software company. The creators of the new microcomputer, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), formed a partnership with Gates and Allen using their Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The trade name Microsoft was registered on November 26, 1976. During the first five years of the Microsoft company, Gates personally reviewed every line of code the company shipped, often rewriting code as needed. On November 20, 1985, Microsoft launched its first retail version of Microsoft Windows. Microsoft went public in 1986. Gates announced on June 15, 2006, that he would transition out of his day-to-day role at Microsoft over the next two years in order to dedicate more time to philanthropy.
Personal Life: Gates married Melinda French on a golf course on the Hawaiian island of Lanai on January 1, 1994. They have three children.
Gates purchased the Codex Leicester, a collection of scientific writings by Leonardo da Vinci, for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994.
Gates and his wife combined three family foundations to create the charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, the largest transparently operated charitable foundation in the world.
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.
Bill Gates Net Worth details: Bill Gates has sold about $40 billion in Microsoft stock and collected over $12 billion in dividends since the company's IPO in 1986. He used that money to create the holding company Cascade Investment which has continued to grow and includes investments in companies such as Canadian National Railway and AutoNation. Gates is quite a philanthropist and donated a $3.3 billion payout he received in 2004 to his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He still has a 1.3 percent stake in Microsoft.
Real Estate: The Gates family resides in Xanadu 2.0, a mansion in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. In 2009, property taxes on the mansion were reported to be $1.063 million, on an assessed value of $147.5 million. The 66,000 square-foot estate has a 60-foot swimming pool with an underwater music system, as well as a 2,500 square-foot gym and a 1,000square-foot dining room. 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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