William Henry Gates III was born on 28 October 1955 in Seattle, Washington, the son of an attorney and a schoolteacher who served on the boards of First Interstate Bank and the United Way. At age 13 he enrolled at Lakeside School in Seattle, where he met Paul Allen. The two spent every available hour on the school's computer terminal, running up $3,400 in computing fees — roughly $27,000 in 2024 dollars — within months of access. Gates enrolled at Harvard in 1973, studying pre-law while spending most of his time in the computer lab. In December 1974 Paul Allen showed him a Popular Electronics cover story about the Altair 8800 microcomputer kit. Gates called the manufacturer, MITS in Albuquerque, claimed to have a BASIC interpreter ready, and wrote one — with Allen — in eight weeks. The demonstration worked, and Micro-Soft (as it was then spelled) was born. Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 and relocated to Albuquerque with Allen. The partnership's decisive moment came in 1980, when IBM chose Microsoft to supply the operating system for its forthcoming Personal Computer. Microsoft did not have one, so Gates bought QDOS — Quick and Dirty Operating System — from Seattle programmer Tim Paterson for $50,000, retaining IBM rights but licensing the OS back to IBM non-exclusively. The IBM PC shipped in August 1981 with Microsoft's PC-DOS; every clone manufacturer who followed — Compaq, Dell, HP, and hundreds of others — needed MS-DOS, and Microsoft held the license. It was the most lucrative non-exclusive software deal in business history. Windows 1.0 launched in 1985; Windows 3.0 (1990) and Windows 95 (released to enormous fanfare on 24 August 1995, with a Rolling Stones soundtrack and 40 million copies sold in a year) turned Microsoft into one of the most profitable corporations on Earth. Gates was 31 when Microsoft went public in March 1986; by 1987 he was the youngest self-made billionaire in history. Microsoft Office, Excel, Word, and the Internet Explorer browser (bundled with Windows from 1995) made the company dominant across enterprise and consumer software. The Department of Justice antitrust case, filed in May 1998 and resolved in 2001, judged that Microsoft had illegally maintained its monopoly but stopped short of a break-up. Gates married Melinda French in January 1994 in Hawaii; they have three children. In June 2000, they founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with an endowment that grew to over $75 billion, focusing on global health, poverty alleviation, and education. The foundation's work on polio eradication and malaria prevention — including the development and deployment of the RTS,S malaria vaccine — has been credited with saving millions of lives. Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO in January 2000 and as chairman in 2014. He publicly issued The Giving Pledge in 2010 alongside Warren Buffett, committing to donate more than half of their respective fortunes to philanthropy — and rallying over 200 other billionaires to similar commitments. He and Melinda announced their divorce in May 2021 after 27 years. Gates has continued philanthropic and climate-technology investment through Breakthrough Energy, a fund he launched in 2015.
All Figures
Co-founder of Microsoft · Philanthropist · Co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Bill Gates
1,955 CE
The Harvard dropout who co-founded Microsoft, put a personal computer running his software on every desk and in every home, became the world's wealthiest person, then gave most of it away.
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