Everyone knows Bill Gates, or at the very least, recognizes him as one of the richest men in the world. Many know him as the father of Windows, and his name is synonymous with his company, Microsoft
Bill Gates is a great visionary, entrepreneur and philanthropist. Gates is one of the most influential technological titans. Here are some amazing facts about Bill Gates you would love to know.
It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
Bill Gates
Facts #1 Bill Gates
Bill Gates’s full name is William Henry Gates III. Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955. He is the son of William H. Gates Sr and Mary Maxwell Gates.
His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way. He is the fourth of his name in his family but is known as William Gates III or “Trey” because his father had the “II” suffix.
Fact #2 Coding Genius
At Lakeside Prep School, he wrote his first computer program on a General Electric computer. It was a version of tic-tac-toe, where you could play against the computer. The private school he attended as a child was one of the only schools in the US with a computer.
At the age of 17, Gates sold his first computer program, a timetable system for his high school for which he pocketed $4,200
Once his school realized Gates’ fondness for coding, they let him write the school computer program for scheduling students in classes. He even trickily altered the code so he was placed in classes with mostly female students.
Fact #3 College Drop Out
Like many famous Information Technology visionaries such as Apple’s Steve Jobs and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, he founded his company Microsoft without graduating from college.
What’s more amazing is that he founded Microsoft when he was 20 years old. He left Harvard University in 1975 to fully devote himself to Microsoft. College is still important for the rest of us who have no big plans for the world.
In 1975, Gates dropped out of Harvard and joined his childhood friend Paul Allen to form a company which they named “Micro-Soft.” The hyphen fell off within a year.
Interestingly enough, Microsoft wasn’t Bill and Paul Allen’s first venture. They had come together earlier to create Traf-O-Data, a company that made traffic counters built on the Intel 8008 processor
Fact #4 Bill Gates and Melinda Gates
Melinda began dating CEO Bill Gates in 1987, after meeting him at a trade fair in New York. In 1994, she married Gates in a private ceremony held in Lanai, Hawaii.
The couple have three children: daughters Jennifer Katharine Gates (born 1996) Phoebe Adele Gates (born 2002), and son Rory John Gates (born 1999). The family resides in an estate on the shore of Lake Washington near Seattle.
Bill Gates despite his riches, will only allow his children to inherit 10 million dollars each since he believes and has taught his children the values of education and self-reliance. The rest, apparently goes to charity. His kids often sing the song Bruno Mars’ song Billionaire to tease him.
Fact #5 Gates makes 15,000 Dollars Per Minute
Bill Gates is an ambitious person. While in college, he told his professors that he’d be a millionaire by the age of 30. He became a billionaire by the age of 31. He may have been ambitious but he’s humble enough to fly coach until he could afford his jet or he may have just been eccentric.
There’s this rumour running around that Bill can’t afford to stoop down and pick up a hundred dollars lying on the street. That single second could cost him 250 dollars. The man makes 15,000 dollars per minute, about 20 million dollars a day. His property taxes alone are more than a million dollars per year.
At a spending rate of $1 million a day, it would take Bill Gates 218 years to spend all his money.
Fact #6 Got Arrested in New Mexico
Gates was a bad boy during his college years and he has a mug shot to prove it. In 1997, he was arrested in New Mexico for beating the red light and driving without a license.
Fact #7 Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire
Call him Sir Bill as he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2005. He became a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He may also be called Senor Bill for being awarded the Placard of the Order of the Aztec Eagle in 2006.
Fact #8 Pirates of Silicon Valley
You may have seen the Steve Jobs movie, Jobs and the Mark Zuckerberg movie, The Social Network but Bill Gates came first in Pirates of Silicon Valley, which also featured Steve Jobs.
Read More: Top 18 Interesting Facts about Steve Jobs
Fact #9 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
We all know that Bill is now invested in charity work. So far the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has saved 6 million lives with vaccines and better healthcare through the 28 billion dollars they’ve donated so far.
Bill Gates Foundation spends more on global health each year than the World Health Organization of the United Nations.
In 2010, Gates and his friends Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett signed the “Gates Giving Pledge,” promising to give half of their wealth to charity.
Fact #10 Forbes Worlds Richest Man for 17 Years
Bill Gates would be the 63rd richest in the world if he were a country. Everyone knows that he’s one of the richest men in the world and at times earned the top spot. He’s been number one on Forbes’ list since 1995 up to 2017.
On July 27, 2017, he was surpassed by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
Bill Gates’s net worth is 4.5 times as large as North Korea’s estimated GDP
Bill’s been Forbes World’s richest man for 17 years – he has not always been the richest, but he has been on that list more than anyone else.
As of 2016, Bill Gates could give US$10 to every human being on Earth and still keep US$3 billion for himself
Fact #11 Xanadu 2.0
The 66,000 sq ft. Gates estate in Washington took seven years and $63 million to build. It is named “Xanadu 2.0” after the fictional home of Charles Foster Kane, the title character of “Citizen Kane.”
Half a million board feet of lumber went into the construction of the opulent property, which features a trampoline room with a 20-foot ceiling, a reception hall to accommodate up to 200 guests, 24 bathrooms, six kitchens and more.
Bill Gates pays over US$1 million per year in property taxes for his house.
Fact #12 Steve Jobs Accused Bill Gates
When Steve Jobs accused Bill Gates of stealing from Apple, Gates said, “I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it. Bill Gates wrote rival Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed
Read More: 6 Things Steve Jobs Would Hate about Apple Today
Fact #13 Next Generation Condoms
Bill had once promised to give $100k to whoever invents the next generation condom. In 2014, from 812 applicants 11 winners were chosen, and each of these winners was granted $100k. And further up to $1 Million of funding if they made it happen.
Fact #14 Codex Leicester
One of Gates’ biggest splurges, besides his plane, was the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci. He acquired the codex at a 1994 auction for $30.8 million.
He then distributed them for free as desktop wallpapers, and themes. He made it openly available on Windows Vista.
In 1997, a comprehensive CD was released
Read More: Top 12 Interesting Facts about Leonardo da Vinci
Fact #15 Awards
Time magazine named Gates one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th century, as well as one of the 100 most influential people of 2004, 2005, and 2006
In 2015 Gates, along with his wife Melinda, received the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian award for their social work in the country.
Barack Obama honoured Bill and Melinda Gates with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their philanthropic efforts in 2016, and François Hollande awarded Bill and Melinda the following year with France’s highest national award – the Legion of Honour for their charity efforts
In 2002, Bill and Melinda Gates received the Jefferson Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged
If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.
Bill Gates
Some More Fun Facts about Bill Gates
- Gates doesn’t know any foreign languages and it is his biggest regret in life so far.
- Gates earned an honorary degree from Harvard in 2007, thirty-two years after dropping out.
- He scored a 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT.
- During the first five years of the company, Gates reviewed every single line of code the company shipped.
- His net worth briefly surpassed $101 billion in 1999, causing the media to call him “centibilionaire.”
- In 2004, Gates predicted that the problem of spam email would be gone within two years
- The only thing left on Bill Gates’ bucket list is not to die
- Bill Gates Sponsors a Machine That Turns Poop Into Drinking Water
- Bill Gates is a tough competitor, an Atari executive recalled that he showed Gates a game and defeated him 35 of 37 times. When they met again a month later, Gates “won or tied every game. He had studied the game until he solved it.
- During a TED talk about Malaria, Bill Gates opened a jar full of mosquitoes on stage so the audience would be able to empathize better
- Bill Gates and other investors have secured a ‘doomsday seed vault’ to preserve a wide variety of plant seeds in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago
- Bill Gates once said that he always gives the laziest people the hardest jobs, because they’ll find the easiest way to do it
- In 2013, Bill Gates admitted that the Ctrl+Alt+Delete command was a mistake, and should have been a single button
- Bill Gates has a McDonald’s Gold Card for unlimited free fast food.
- Gates says he reads 50 books a year.
- The ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby
- Gates days are planned for him on a minute-by-minute basis, similar to the U.S. President’s schedule.
- Gates says if Microsoft hadn’t worked out, he probably would have been a researcher for artificial intelligence.
- Gates has quite the Porsche collection. The headliner is his Porsche 959 sports car, which he bought 13 years before the car was approved by the US Environmental Protection Agency or the US Department of Transportation.
- His favourite band is the American Rock band Weezer. He also calls U2 a “favourite” and says he’s still “waiting for Spinal Tap to go back on tour.”
