The Fabulous Life Of The World’s Richest Man Worth $79 Billion (PHOTOS)
Microsoft
Chairman Bill Gates (L) looks on during a news conference at company
headquarters in Redmond, Washington June 15, 2006. Microsoft announced
that effective July 2008 Gates will transition out of a day-to-day role
in the company to spend more time on his global health and education
work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. After July 2008, Gates
will continue to serve as the companyÕs chairman and an advisor on key
development projects. Robert Sorbo/Microsoft/Handout
Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955 in
Seattle, Washington. Son of a lawyer and a schoolteacher, he was an
argumentative but brilliant child. As a teenager, his appetite for
knowledge was so great that he read the entire World Book Encyclopedia
series from start to finish.
His parents enrolled him at the
Lakeside School, a rigorous Seattle private high school that future
Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen also attended. Gates often credits his
discovery of computers to the tools he gained at Lakeside. “The
experience and insight Paul Allen and I gained here gave us the
confidence to start a company based on this wild idea that nobody else
agreed with—that computer chips were going to become so powerful that
computers and software would become a tool that would be on every desk
and in every home,” he said in a 2005 speech at the school.
After graduating from Lakeside in
1973, Gates headed to Harvard. Though he entered as a pre-law major, he
soon changed course and quickly worked his way through the university’s
upper-level math and computer science classes.
Harvard is where Gates met Steve
Ballmer, whom he would later bring to Microsoft and eventually promote
to CEO of the company. Although they lived down the hall from each other
in Currier House, they met during a graduate-level economics class. The
pair remain good friends today.
Two years later, Gates dropped out of
school to found Microsoft with Paul Allen. Though he never earned his
bachelor’s degree, Harvard awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2007.
“I’m a bad influence. That’s why I was invited to speak at your
graduation,” he said at the commencement ceremony. “If I had spoken at
your orientation, fewer of you might be here today.”
While he was still in school, Gates
started developing software for MITS Altair, the world’s first personal
computer. In 1977, Gates and Allen moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico,
where MITS was based, to set up their young software company. Pictured
here are the 11 original Microsoft employees.
In 1979, Gates and Allen relocated
Microsoft to their hometown of Seattle, first setting up shop in the
suburb of Bellevue and later moving to Redmond.
Microsoft released Windows in 1985 and went public in 1986. By 1987, 31-year-old Gates was a billionaire.
In 1995, Gates became the richest man
in the world, with an estimated fortune of $12.9 billion. He’s been at
or near the top of the list of the world’s richest ever since.
In 1998, Microsoft was brought to
court on charges that the company was abusing its power as a software
monopoly. Gates had a very mixed public reputation at the time.
Gates met his future wife, Melinda,
at a press event in 1987. She was a Microsoft employee and later moved
up to become an executive of interactive content. They married in 1994,
and she eventually left the company to pursue charity work.
Bill, Melinda, and their three
children live in this massive, high-tech home in Medina, Washington. The
home has some incredibly futuristic features, including an underwater
sound system in the pool and computerized pins that the house can read
to customize music, temperature, and lighting. The house has an
astonishing 24 bathrooms, plus a garage that can accommodate up to 23
cars. It’s worth an estimated $121 million.
Included in his mansion’s many rooms
is a huge domed library filled with books. Gates is an avid reader, and
he reportedly hired a rare-books dealer to stock his library for him.
Among his possessions is Leonardo da Vinci’s “Codex Leicester,” a
15th-century manuscript that Gates bought at auction for $30.8 million
in 1994.
Gates has an extensive art collection
as well. In 1998 he set a record for American art when he paid $36
million for Winslow Homer’s “Lost on the Grand Banks.” He also owns
pieces by American artists Andrew Wyeth and William Merritt Chase.
Last year, Gates paid $8.7 million
for a Mediterranean-style home in Wellington, Florida. The family had
previously rented the house while they were in Florida for daughter
Jennifer’s equestrian competitions. The home includes several
horse-friendly features, like a 20-stall barn and a show-jumping arena.
Gates likes to take educational trips
with his son. They’ve toured mines, electric plants, and missile solos,
and they’ve even taken a trip to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva,
Switzerland. “He likes learning along with me,” Gates said to Quartz.
He’s also been known to spend some
time at Apussuit Adventure Camp, a remote ski center in Greenland. The
resort has no lifts and few people.
Gates has always had a thing for fast
cars. Over the years, he’s owned a Porsche 930 Turbo, a Mercedes, a
Jaguar XJ6, a Carrera Cabriolet 964, and a Ferrari 348. In the early
years of Microsoft, he bought a 1979 Porsche 911 that he used to race
around the desert.
Paul Allen had to bail him out of jail after one such incident in 1977. The Porsche 911 was auctioned off for $80,000 in 2012.
When he bought his Porsche 959 in the
late ’90s, the car was held up at customs because it had not yet met
EPA standards. Gates, along with several other wealthy Porsche owners,
put up such a fight that the Clinton administration passed the “Show and
Display” law, which allows certain imported vehicles to be exempt from
Federal Motor Safety Standards if the car is historically or
technologically significant.
Playing tennis is one of Gates’ favorite hobbies. Here he high-fives Jeff Bezos during a 2001 charity match.
He counts legendary investor Warren
Buffett among his close friends. When Gates wanted to propose to Melinda
in the early 1990s, Buffett helped the couple pick out a ring. They’ve
taken many trips together, and have even competed in bridge and table
tennis tournaments. Gates sits on the board of Berkshire Hathaway,
Buffett’s investment firm, and Buffett has donated billions to the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation. Here they attend a basketball game with
rapper Ludacris.
Gates stepped down from his position
as CEO of Microsoft in 2000, taking on a more limited role as chairman.
Nowadays, he serves as technology advisor to current CEO Satya Nadella.
When he’s not working on something with Microsoft, Gates and wife
Melinda travel to do charity work through their foundation.
The Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation has had its hand in a number of projects, from eradicating
diseases in remote corners of the world to developing richer sources of
food for impoverished people.
Gates reportedly paid $21 million for
his private jet back in 1997. It has definitely come in handy as he
travels to far-flung places for his charity work. “Owning a plane is a
guilty pleasure,” he said during an AMA on Reddit. “I do get to a lot of
places for Foundation work I wouldn’t be able to go to without it.”
In 2010, Bill and Melinda teamed up
with Warren Buffett to start a campaign called “The Giving Pledge,”
which encouraged fellow billionaires to donate at least half of their
wealth to philanthropy. Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, Steve Case, and Mark
Zuckerberg are among those who have signed the pledge so far.
Gates has made a number of
investments in startups like Hampton Creek, which aims to find plant
replacements for eggs. He is also backing several projects developing
next-generation condoms, in the hopes that they could help stop the
spread of HIV and AIDS.
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