Bill Gates

• 1. Introduction

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  Bill Gates was born on the 28th of October, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, and by age 31 he had become the world's youngest-ever billionaire. That milestone came in 1987, one year after Microsoft's first public offering sent the stock price soaring. But the more revealing number may be this: Forbes ranked him the wealthiest person on earth for 18 out of 24 years between 1995 and 2017. In 1999, his net worth briefly crossed $100 billion, making him the first person in history to reach that threshold.

  How did a thirteen-year-old from a Seattle prep school get there? And what did he do with the fortune once he had it? Those questions carry more weight than the headline numbers. The same drive that made Gates a near-monopolist in the software industry also pushed him to read 500-page technical specifications overnight and corner Nobel Committee chairs in Strasbourg to chase philanthropic donations. The man who once yelled at employees for perceived failings eventually pledged to give away virtually all his wealth. His first memoir, Source Code, arrived in February 2025 and opened yet another chapter in a life that has never sat still.

• 2. Lakeside and the Machine

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  At age 13, Gates enrolled in the private Lakeside School in Seattle, and it was the school's Mothers' Club that changed the course of his life. The club used proceeds from a rummage sale to purchase a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric system. Gates started programming that GE machine in BASIC, writing his first program there: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that let users play against the computer. He was excused from math class to pursue the interest. He later recalled being fascinated by how the machine would always execute software code perfectly.

  After the Mothers' Club donation ran out, Gates and his friends sought time on other machines, including DEC PDP minicomputers. One PDP-10 belonged to Computer Center Corporation, and the company banned Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans for an entire summer after it caught them exploiting bugs to obtain free computer time. Rather than accept the punishment quietly, the four formed the Lakeside Programmers Club and eventually negotiated a deal: they would find bugs in CCC's software in exchange for extra machine time. Gates personally went to CCC's offices to study source code in Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. That arrangement lasted until 1970, when CCC went out of business.

  In 1971, a Lakeside teacher enlisted Gates and Evans to automate the school's class-scheduling system, offering computer time and royalties. Toward the end of their junior year, Evans died in a mountain climbing accident. Gates later described it as one of the saddest days of his life. He turned to Allen to finish the project. At 17, Gates and Allen formed a venture called Traf-O-Data to build traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor, an early signal of where their collaboration was heading. Gates graduated in 1973 as a national merit scholar, scoring 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT.

• 3. The Altair Gamble

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  The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured the MITS Altair 8800, a computer based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates read it with the attention of someone who had been waiting for exactly this moment. He and Allen contacted MITS to say they were building a BASIC interpreter for the machine. The catch: they had no Altair and had not written a single line of code for it. They wanted to gauge interest first. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to a demonstration, and in the weeks that followed, Gates and Allen built an Altair emulator on a minicomputer and then wrote the interpreter itself. The demo ran without a hitch at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and resulted in a deal to distribute the software as Altair BASIC.

  MITS hired Allen, and Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard in November 1975 to join him. Allen named their partnership "Micro-Soft", a blend of "microcomputer" and "software". The first person they brought on was Ric Weiland, their collaborator from Lakeside. Within a year they dropped the hyphen, and on the 26th of November, 1976, they registered the trade name "Microsoft" with the Secretary of the State of New Mexico. Gates never went back to Harvard.

  Altair BASIC caught on with hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-release copy had leaked and was being freely copied. In February 1976, he wrote An Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter, asserting that more than 90% of users had not paid for the software. The letter was unwelcome in the hobbyist community, but it reflected a conviction Gates never abandoned: that software developers deserved to be paid. Microsoft became independent of MITS in late 1976, and on the 1st of January, 1979, the company relocated from Albuquerque to Bellevue, Washington.

• 4. The IBM Deal and Its Consequences

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  IBM approached Microsoft in July 1980 looking for software for its upcoming personal computer, and the introduction came through an unexpected channel: Gates's mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, mentioned Microsoft to IBM's then-CEO John Opel. IBM first asked Microsoft to write a BASIC interpreter, then mentioned it also needed an operating system. Gates referred IBM to Digital Research, makers of the widely used CP/M operating system. Those talks collapsed without a licensing deal.

  IBM representative Jack Sams came back to Gates and asked if Microsoft could supply an operating system instead. Gates and Allen proposed 86-DOS, a system Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products had built for hardware similar to the IBM PC. Microsoft acquired the exclusive licensing rights to 86-DOS and eventually full ownership. Paterson was hired to adapt it, and Microsoft delivered the system to IBM as PC DOS for a one-time fee of $50,000. The fee was modest; what Gates kept was the copyright. He believed other manufacturers would clone IBM's PC hardware, and they did, making the IBM-compatible PC running DOS a de facto standard. Sales of MS-DOS, the version licensed to customers other than IBM, turned Microsoft from a small business into the dominant force in the industry. PC Magazine asked at the time whether Gates was "the man behind the machine."

  Gates oversaw a formal restructuring of Microsoft on the 25th of June, 1981, re-incorporating the company in Washington state and taking the titles of president and chairman of the board, with Allen as vice president and vice chairman. In early 1983, Allen left after receiving a Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis. The partnership had already been strained by a dispute over Microsoft equity; Allen later wrote in his autobiography that Gates had been "scheming to rip me off" by issuing himself stock options while Allen was undergoing treatment. Gates remembered the episode differently. They repaired the friendship later in the decade, and together donated millions to Lakeside. Allen died in October 2018.

• 5. The Manager Behind the Code

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  Jerry Pournelle wrote in 1985, when Gates announced Microsoft Excel, that Gates liked the program "not because it's going to make him a lot of money, although I'm sure it will do that, but because it's a neat hack." That observation captures something essential: Gates never fully separated the executive from the engineer. He told people he personally reviewed and often rewrote every line of code the company produced in its first five years. He had not been officially on a development team since working on the TRS-80 Model 100, but he continued writing code that shipped with Microsoft's products as late as 1989.

  Meetings with Gates followed a predictable pattern. He would read technical specifications overnight, sometimes 500 pages of them, and arrive ready to challenge every assumption. Joel Spolsky recalled being told: "Bill doesn't really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you've got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared." Managers described him as verbally combative, given to remarks like "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard" and "why don't you just give up your options and join the Peace Corps?" An anecdote circulated in which someone was assigned to count the number of times Gates used profanity during a review meeting; when the count came in at four, those present agreed Gates was getting mellow in his old age, even though he was 36.

  He was also capable of complete reversals when shown to be wrong. An Atari executive recalled showing Gates a game and defeating him 35 of 37 times. A month later Gates returned and "won or tied every game. He had studied the game until he solved it." A Microsoft observer summed up the culture in Computerworld in 1987: "Bill personifies Microsoft, and hotshots want to work for him."

  Gates stepped down as CEO in 2000, handing the position to Steve Ballmer, whom he had met at Harvard. He shifted to the title of chief software architect and held that role until 2008, when he transferred his duties to Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie. He left the chairmanship in February 2014 and resigned from the board entirely in 2020.

• 6. The Foundation and Its Reach

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  Gates had studied Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller before donating Microsoft stock in 1994 to create the William H. Gates Foundation. In 2000, he and Melinda French Gates combined three family foundations and donated stock valued at $5 billion to create the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, later identified as the world's largest private charitable organization, with assets reportedly valued at more than $34.6 billion. In a 2025 BBC interview, Gates said his charitable donations had totalled $100 billion, with $60 billion going to the foundation itself.

  The foundation is organized into five program areas covering global development, global health, United States programs, and global policy and advocacy. It funds vaccine programs to eradicate polio, grants to fight AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, and supports the International Rice Research Institute in developing Golden Rice, a genetically modified rice variant aimed at combating vitamin A deficiency. It also established a water, sanitation, and hygiene program for poor countries, and in 2014 Gates drank water produced from human feces via a sewage sludge treatment process called the Omni Processor to raise awareness for the sanitation challenge.

  In November 2017, Gates pledged $50 million to the Dementia Discovery Fund and an additional $50 million to start-ups working on Alzheimer's research. On the 9th of December, 2010, Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett signed the Giving Pledge, committing to donate at least half their wealth to philanthropy over their lifetimes. By July 2022, Gates announced plans to give virtually all his wealth to charity and eventually move off the list of the world's richest people. Gates and Melinda have stated that each of their three children will receive $10 million as an inheritance; in 2025 he reiterated that his children will inherit less than 1% of his wealth, meaning the remainder is directed to charitable causes.

  After Melinda French Gates resigned as co-chair following the couple's divorce, which was finalized on the 2nd of August, 2021, the foundation was renamed the Gates Foundation, with Gates as its sole chair.

• 7. Climate, Controversy, and the Long View

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  Gates has called climate change and global access to energy "critical, interrelated issues", and he has tried to act on that belief at significant personal cost. He told an audience in 2011 that if given the choice between selecting the next ten presidents or ensuring energy was environmentally friendly and a quarter as costly, he would choose the energy option. At the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, he helped launch two initiatives: Mission Innovation, in which twenty national governments pledged to double spending on clean energy research over five years, and Breakthrough Energy, a group of investors committing funds to high-risk clean energy startups. Gates, who had already invested $1 billion of his own money in energy startups, pledged a further $1 billion to Breakthrough Energy.

  His company TerraPower and Warren Buffett's PacifiCorp announced in June 2021 the first sodium nuclear reactor in Wyoming. Wyoming Governor Mike Gordon described the project as a step toward carbon-negative nuclear power. Gates also supported the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, having worked to persuade Joe Manchin to back climate legislation starting in 2019. In a guest essay in The New York Times he called the act "the single most important piece of climate legislation in American history."

  In October 2025, Gates issued a memo stating that climate change does not pose an existential threat to civilization and arguing that other causes such as poverty and healthcare deserved more funding. Climate scientists responded sharply: Katharine Hayhoe said climate change is "not a separate bucket" and that it is the cause underlying problems in every other area Gates cited. Michael E. Mann called it "all backwards." The memo landed on the same day that Hurricane Melissa, intensified by climate change, struck Caribbean islands with damage calculated as costing Jamaica alone 30 to 250 percent of its annual GDP. Donald Trump reacted on social media, declaring he had won "the War on the Climate Change Hoax." Gates told Axios that Trump had made "a gigantic misreading of the memo" and said he would actually increase his spending on climate and health.

  Gates's public image has traveled a long arc. He was once characterized as a "nerd-turned-tycoon" and a "robber baron." After stepping back from Microsoft and building the foundation, he shifted in public perception toward what one account described as a "huggable billionaire techno-philanthropist." Then came the 2021 divorce proceedings, which surfaced reporting about romantic relationships with Microsoft employees, a long-term extramarital affair, and his years of contact with Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein files unsealed in January 2026 contained draft emails alleging extramarital affairs by Gates; a Gates spokesperson called the allegations "absolutely absurd and completely false." In February 2026, Gates cancelled a planned keynote at the India AI Impact Summit hours before it was scheduled, amid renewed scrutiny over the Epstein association. His first memoir, Source Code, in which he also wrote that he believes he is autistic, reached readers in February 2025, just as that scrutiny was intensifying.