Bill Gates

Lore & Background

Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Gates was privately educated at Lakeside School, where he befriended Allen and developed his computing interests. In 1973, he enrolled at Harvard University, where he took classes including Math 55 and graduate-level computer science courses, but he dropped out in 1975 to co-found and lead Microsoft. He served as its CEO for the next 25 years and also became president and chairman of the board when the company was incorporated in 1981. Succeeded as CEO by Steve Ballmer in 2000, he transitioned to chief software architect, a position he held until 2008. He stepped down as chairman of the board in 2014 and became technology adviser to CEO Satya Nadella and other Microsoft leaders, a position he still holds. He resigned from the board in 2020. Over time, Gates reduced his role at Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private charitable organization, which he and his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, co-chaired from 2000 until 2024. Focusing on areas including health, education, and poverty alleviation, Gates became known for his efforts to combat transmissible diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and polio. After French Gates resigned as co-chair following the couple's divorce, the foundation was renamed the Gates Foundation, with Gates as its sole chair. Gates is the founder and chairman of several other companies, including BEN, Cascade Investment, TerraPower, Gates Ventures, and Breakthrough Energy. In 2010, he and Warren Buffett founded the Giving Pledge, whereby they and other billionaires pledged to give at least half their wealth to philanthropy. Named as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century by Time magazine in 1999, he has received numerous other honors and accolades, including a Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded jointly to him and French Gates in 2016 for their philanthropic work. The subject of several documentary films, he published the first of three planned memoirs, Source Code: My Beginnings, in 2025.

Reader's Guide

William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, as the only son of Bill Gates Sr. (1925–2020) and his first wife, Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994). His ancestry includes English, German, and Irish/Scots-Irish. His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors of First Interstate BancSystem and United Way of America. Gates's maternal grandfather, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. Gates also has an older sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and a younger sister, Libby. He is the fourth of his name in his family, but is known as William Gates III or 'Trey' (i.e., three) because his father had the 'II' suffix. The family lived in the Sand Point area of Seattle in a home that was damaged by a rare tornado when Gates was 7. When Gates was young, his parents wanted him to pursue a career in law. During his childhood, his family regularly attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed denomination. Gates was small for his age and was bullied as a child. The family encouraged competition; one visitor reported that 'it didn't matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock; there was always a reward for winning, and there was always a penalty for losing'. At age 13, Gates enrolled in the private Lakeside Prep School. 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 was exhausted, Gates 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's best friend and first business partner, 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 Lake

Did You Know?

• Gates scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT.
• He devised an algorithm for pancake sorting that held the record as the fastest version for over 30 years.
• Gates served as a congressional page in the House of Representatives in 1972.
• He was a national merit scholar when he graduated from Lakeside School in 1973.
• Gates's first computer program was a tic-tac-toe game that allowed users to play against the computer.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"If something is expensive to develop, and somebody's not going to get paid, it won't get developed. So you decide: Do you want software to be written, or not?" — Bill Gates "Interview with Dennis Bathory-Kitsz in 80 Microcomputing (1980) Clips from the interview can be found on "No Money (Lullaby for Bill)" by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz." — Bill Gates "It's not manufacturers trying to rip anybody off or anything like that. There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of." — Bill Gates "Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we've rolled almost everything back into the company." — Bill Gates