Bill Gates Biography – Age, Education, Personal Life, Career, Net Worth, Assets and Awards

Bill Gates and his family

Bill Gates was born William Henry Gates, III, on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. Bill Gates grew up in an upper-middle-class family with two sisters: Kristianne, older, and Libby, who is younger. Their father, William H. Gates, Sr., was a promising, if somewhat shy, law student when he met his future wife, Mary Maxwell. She was an athletic

Bill Gates had a very close relationship with his mother, Mary, who, after a brief career as a teacher, devoted her time to helping raise the children and working on civic affairs and charities. She also served on several corporate boards: First Interstate Bank in Seattle (founded by her grandfather), the United Way, and International Business Machines (IBM).

Personal Life

In 1987, Melinda French went to work in the product development division of Microsoft. At some point, she and Bill Gates were seated next to each other at a work dinner. They hit it off, and Bill soon called Melinda to ask her out. Melinda eventually rose to the position of General Manager of Information Products. She stayed with Microsoft until 1996.

Bill Gates and Melinda married on a golf course on the Hawaiian island of Lanai on January 1, 1994. They have three children; Phoebe Adele, Rory John, and Jennifer Katharine.

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 Gates 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 to the course of time charity.

Education

Bill Gates was doing well in school, but he seemed bored and withdrawn at times. His parents worried he might become a loner. Though they were firm believers in public education, when Bill Gates turned 13, they enrolled him in Seattle’s Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school. While at Lakeside School, a Seattle computer company offered to provide computer time for the students. He blossomed in nearly all his subjects, excelling in math and science and doing very well in drama and English.

Early Life

William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. Gates was bullied as a child. He preferred to stay in his room to shout “I’m thinking” when his mother asked what he was doing. When he was 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school and wrote his first software program. He was in eighth grade during his first year at Lakeside, and the school’s Mother’s Club used proceeds from a fundraiser to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and time on a GE computer for the school’s students. Gates became interested in programming the GE computer in BASIC. He wrote his first program — a tic-tac-toe game, on this computer. 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 ban was over, the boys offered to look for bugs in the software in exchange for extra time on the computer. Gates began studying code to the programs that ran on the computer, including Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. In 1971, a Lakeside teacher asked Gates and Evans to automate the school’s class-scheduling system. The friends wrote software with one twist–Gates changed the code to be in classes with more attractive girls. Gates and Evans wanted to have the new system up and running by senior year. Then, Evans was killed in a mountain climbing accident at the end of their junior year. Gates turned to Allen to help him finish the project for Lakeside.

Career

With the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, Gates and Paul Allen saw this as the opening they needed to create their own computer software company. The new microcomputer, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), partnered 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. The opening stock price was $21. After the trading day, the stock closed at $27.75, and Bill’s 45% was worth $350 million. Less than a year later, after the stock surged, he was a billionaire. He was 31 years old.

On June 15, 2006, Gates announced that he would transition out of his day-to-day role at Microsoft over the next two years to dedicate more time to philanthropy.

On March 13, 2020, Gates announced he would step down as Microsoft’s Chairman.

Net Worth

Gates co-founded Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker. The Redmond, Washington-based company had revenue of $168 billion in 2021. The rest of his fortune is managed through closely held Cascade Investment, which has stakes in dozens of publicly traded companies, including Canadian National Railway, Deere and Ecolab.

Bill Gates has a net worth of $138 billion. As of this writing, that makes him one of the wealthiest people in the world. Since Microsoft’s 1986 IPO, Bill Gates has seen his net worth grow from $250 million to over $100 billion. In 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom, Gates’ fortune briefly topped $99 billion. After adjusting for inflation, that’s the same as around $153 billion in today’s dollars.

Assets

The Gates family owns many impressive properties around the US. He likely owns residences abroad, though less is known about these purchases.

In Washington, the Gates family resides in an unbelievably fantastic mansion nicknamed “Xanadu 2.0”. After acquiring the lake-front property in 1988 for $2 million, Bill Gates spent seven years and $63 million constructing what became arguably the most impressive private residence in the world.

Located on the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington, the main house alone is 66,000 square feet. The 66,000 square-foot estate has a 60-foot swimming pool with an underwater music system, a 2,500 square-foot gym, a 1,000 square-foot dining room, six kitchens, and a dining hall that can seat 200 people. Gates is an avid reader, and the ceiling of his extensive home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby. The library features priceless works, including pieces by Da Vinci.

Awards

• In January 2006, he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Prince Henry by the President of Portugal Jorge Sampaio
• In November 2006, he was awarded the Placard of the Order of the Aztec Eagle, together with his wife Melinda, who was awarded the Insignia of the same order, both for their philanthropic work around the world in the areas of health and education, particularly in Mexico, and specifically in the program “Un país de lectores“.
• Gates received the 2010 Bower Award for Business Leadership from The Franklin Institute for his Microsoft achievements and philanthropic work.
• Also, in 2010, he was honoured with the Silver Buffalo Award by the Boy Scouts of America, its highest award for adults, for his youth service.
• Also, in 2010, he was honoured with the Silver Buffalo Award by the Boy Scouts of America, its highest award for adults, for his youth service.
• In 2002, Bill Gates and Melinda Gates received the Jefferson Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged.
• He was given the 2006 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award from the Tech Awards.
• In 2015, Gates and his wife Melinda received the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian award for its social work.
• In 2016, Barack Obama honoured Bill Gates and Melinda Gates with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their philanthropic efforts.
• In 2017, François Hollande awarded Bill Gates and Melinda Gates with France’s highest national order, the Commander of the Legion of Honour, for their charity efforts.
• Entomologists named Bill Gates’ flower fly, Eristalis gates, in his honour in 1997. · In 2021, Bill Gates was nominated at the 11th annual Streamy Awards for the crossover for his personal YouTube channel.

Car Collection

Car Names	Price
1979 Porsche 911	$66,000
Ford Focus	$25,170
Porsche 959 Sport	$225,000
Ferrari 348	NA
Chevrolet Suburban	$51,700
Porsche Taycan	$150,000

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