Bill Gates :
Birth Details – October 28, 1955 | Seattle, United States
Nationality – American
League – Entrepreneur
Education – Harvard University (Drop out)
Net Worth- $106.4 billion (as of May 19, 2020)
BILL GATES’ ASSETS:
- Microsoft
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- Branded Entertainment Network
- TerraPower
- ResearchGate
- Gates Ventures
BILL GATES’ JOURNEY SO FAR …
- Bill Gates first got to use a computer while attending Lakeside School in Seattle and was instantly hooked to it
- While in school, he, along with some other students, created a software solution to computerise the school’s payroll system. A collaboration with fellow student Paul Allen resulted in a traffic- counting system — Traf-O-Data — which earned them $20,000
- Gates enrolled into Harvard University in 1973 but dropped out in his junior year to follow his entrepreneurial calling, along with Allen
- In 1975, the duo developed a software for the first microcomputer — Altair 8800 — and ‘Micro-Soft’ was formed with its office in Albuquerque, New Mexico
- The company was officially renamed Microsoft the following year
- Business grew, and now, their clients included start-ups such as ‘Apple’
- They moved the company to Seattle in 1979 and it was there that Microsoft earned high praise
- During that time, IBM was looking for an operating system (OS) for their personal computer — IBM PC — and Gates presented them the solution with MS-DOS
- The PC released in 1981 and soon the market was exploding with several manufacturers doing a copy
- Though built for IBM, Microsoft still had the rights to sell their software to other PC manufacturers and so they did
- Most of the manufacturers adopted MS-DOS for their systems, and, in 1981, their sales more than doubled in comparison to the previous year
- Windows 1.0 was launched in 1985 following the release of Apple’s Macintosh PC
- Microsoft went public in 1986, making Gates one of the richest persons in the country
- The following year, at the age of 31, he became the world’s youngest billionaire — a title which he held on to until Mark Zuckerberg came into the picture
- By the mid-90s, Windows had become the standard operating system for most of the PCs running on the planet and the riches continued to follow
- Soon, they began rolling out other utility and enterprise software, and in 1995, Bill Gates became the richest person in the world
- Gates stepped down as the CEO of Microsoft in 2000
- The same year, he along with his wife, Melinda, established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- He left his daily job at Microsoft in 2008 while still retaining his position as chairman of the board
- In 2010, the couple launched the Giving Pledge along with Warren Buffet to encourage the wealthiest people of the world to commit most of their wealth to philanthropic causes
- In 2014, he relinquished his designation as chairman and assumed the role of technical advisor to support the newly- appointed CEO Satya Nadella
- He finally resigned from the public boards of both Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway in March 2020
- Till date, he has donated around $35 billion worth of his Microsoft stocks to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- Currently, he holds around 1.3% shares of Microsoft and is one of the richest persons in the world