Bill Gates

Birthname

William Henry Gates III

Birthdate

October 28, 1955

Birthplace

Seattle, Washington, U.S.

Height

5' 10" (1.78 m)

Education

Dropout, Harvard University

Profession

Tech Mogul

Net worth

$125,900,000,000

Source of Wealth

Microsoft

Nationality

United States

Country

United States

Marital Status

Married (Melinda Gates)

Children

3 (Jennifer Katharine, Phoebe Adele, Rory John)

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Bill Gates is a software developer, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and investor who has a net worth of $125.9 billion. He is a co-founder of Microsoft Corporation and also owns Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, TerraPower, Branded Entertainment Network, ResearchGate, and Gates Ventures. Since 1987, he has been included in the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people. From 1995 to 2017, he held the Forbes title of the richest person in the world all but four of those years.

To date, Bill's most profitable company is Microsoft, which he co-founded with Paul Allen. With its headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the pair developed software for the first microcomputer in 1975. In the years that followed, the company was formally renamed Microsoft. As the company grew, its clients expanded to include start-ups such as Apple. In 1979, they relocated the company to Seattle, where it received widespread recognition. IBM was searching for an operating system (OS) for their personal computer, the IBM PC, at the time, and Gates provided them with MS-DOS as a solution. Despite the fact that it was made for IBM, Microsoft had the right to license their software to other PC manufacturers, which they did. The majority of manufacturers switched to MS-DOS for their systems, and sales more than doubled in 1981 compared to the previous year.

Gates became one of the country's richest people when Microsoft went public in 1986. The initial share price was $21. The stock closed at $27.75 at the end of the trading day, making Bill's 45 percent worth $350 million. He became the world's youngest billionaire the following year, at the age of 31. Bill Gates became the world's richest man in 1995.

In the year 2000, Bill Gates resigned as CEO of Microsoft. He and his wife, Melinda, founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation the same year. In 2017, it was announced that Gates was donating 64 million Microsoft shares worth $4.6 billion, taking his interest in the company down to just over 1%. According to Business Insider, Gates' remaining 1% stake is still worth $7 billion. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given millions of dollars to charities, including $300 million for the creation of a low-cost Covid-19 vaccine. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has over $40 billion in assets. Gates manages his personal fortune through a company called Cascade Investment. Despite the fact that Cascade is not a public entity, it is required to report some of its investment operations to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Coca-Cola, Canadian National Railway, Deere & Company, among other companies are among the company's investments. Gates is said to own 47% of the Four Seasons hotel chain and interest in Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway through his Cascade asset class. He resigned from the public boards of both Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway in March 2020.

Bill Gates is married to Melinda Gates, they wed in the Hawaiian island of Lanai on January 1, 1994, and currently have three children together Phoebe Adele, Rory John, and Jennifer Katharine. According to reports, he intends to leave just $10 million to each of his three children. Melinda met Bill while working for Microsoft in the software development division in 1987 long before their relationship began.  She worked for Microsoft from 1986 to 1996.

Gates' real estate holdings are estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. His house, dubbed Xanadu 2.0 after the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane, is worth more than $154 million on its own. Bill Gates began construction on his high-tech dream home in 1988, spending $2 million to purchase the plot of land and employ all of the technicians who would carry out his designs. The mansion now boasts seven suites, 24 baths, six kitchens, a 60-foot pool, a sauna, and a well-equipped gym, among other amenities. There is also a locker room at the pool. He is an avid reader, and a quote from The Great Gatsby is painted on the ceiling of his massive home library. The library houses priceless works by Da Vinci and others. They live in an automated, electronic house with sensors, cameras, and a computerized garden system. The program as a whole is estimated to be worth a whopping $80,000 million.

Reports say he recently purchased a private jet worth around $40 million. Bill and his wife are also art collectors; in 1994, they paid $30.8 million for Leonardo da Vinci's "Codex Leicester" collection. Gates is believed to have owned a $25 million island in Belize.  Gate's automotive collection is worth more than $5.1 million, including vehicles such as the Porsche Taycan ($185,000), Maybach 62S Landaulet ($1.4 million), Tesla Model X ($145,000), Audi R8 ($250,000), Lamborghini Aventador ($600,000), and Bugatti Veyron ($1.7 million), to name a few.

He is passionate about closing the global wealth gap and promoting renewable energy, and he does so through his charities and businesses. Bill and Melinda Gates, along with their friend Warren Buffet, initiated the Giving Pledge in 2010 to inspire other billionaires around the world to donate the majority of their money to philanthropic causes.  The pledge has 211 signatories from 23 countries as of August 2020. The majority of the pledge's signatories are billionaires, with pledges totaling $600 billion as of 2016.

Sources: Forbes, Economic Times, Business Insider, News week, HotCars.com, Investopedia, The Giving Pledge

This article was updated on March 25th, 2021 by Vanessa Shumbanhete

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