Bill Gates, one of the wealthiest men in the world, is practically a
household name due to the huge popularity and use of Microsoft products. It’s
unlikely that you’ve never heard of Bill Gates, but it’s possible that there are
some things about his life you didn't know. He was born on October 28, 1955, in
Seattle, Washington, the same city where his family currently lives. He’s famous
for founding Microsoft and creating Windows, which he introduced in 1985, but
there are many other elements to his life and career. He’s known for
his brains and his philanthropy, but many of the details of his life are harder
to come by. Because he is so wealthy and famous, people are very
interested in learning more about him and the journey he took to becoming the
one of the wealthiest and most influential people in the world.
Here are fifteen
interesting facts about Bill Gates that you probably didn’t know before now.
15) He was a 31-Year-Old Billionaire
Bill Gates was raised in Seattle, near the current headquarters of Microsoft,
and was bright from a very young age. He reportedly told his professors at
Harvard that he planned to become a millionaire by the time he turned thirty.
Gates certainly surpassed this goal when he became a billionaire just one year
after his millionaire goal mark. He became the head of Microsoft in 1978. At the
age of only twenty-three, Microsoft was already earning $2.5 million. Gates’s own earnings rocketed over the years and
in October of 1987, just before he turned thirty-two, Forbes named him a
billionaire.
Bill Gates at the 2007 Halo 3 Launch
By Gamerscore Blog from USA (Halo 3 Midnight
Madness Bellevue Best Buy 206)
via Wikimedia Commons
In an interview with Daily Mail, Gates stated that his children
make fun of him by singing the song “Billionaire” by Bruno Mars. It’s certainly
appropriate. Microsoft was a quickly-growing company, with quickly-growing
profits, as made evident by Bill Gates’s rise to wealth.
14) Bill Gates KBE
In 2005, at the age of forty-eight, Bill Gates received an honorary
knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. Since he is an American citizen he cannot be
called Sir Bill Gates, but his title is KBE. KBE stands for Knight Commander of
the Order of the British Empire. That’s quite a title. He and his wife Melinda
visited Buckingham Palace for the ceremony where he was given an insignia, and
during his stay he and the Queen talked about computers
along with other things.
Queen Elizabeth II
Other Americans who have been given honorary knighthood include director
Steven Spielberg, President Ronald Reagan, and actor Bob Hope.
13) Early Retirement
Bill Gates may be famous for founding and running Microsoft, but he no longer
does that full time. As of 2008, he retired from working daily
at Microsoft so he could focus on his charitable activities. He is still Chairman at
Microsoft, but he now devotes the majority of his time to his philanthropy. He
and his wife Melinda operate the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the
largest organization of its kind in the world. The foundation partners with
other organizations to try to make an impact on the larger problems of the world. There are
four major focus areas for the foundation. The first is the Global Development Division, which
focuses on poverty and hunger across the globe.
The second is the Global Health
Division, which works for global advances in health. One focus of this division
is to work on vaccines for polio, malaria, and HIV. Gates has stated in an
interview with the Daily Mail that there is so much money invested in curing cancer
that he prefers to focus his money on diseases like malaria, which have more
likelihood of being cured with the help of the large amount of money his
foundation can contribute. The third focus of the foundation is the United
States Division, focused primarily on education, and the last area is the Global
Policy and Advocacy Division.
12) An Aptitude for Scholastics
Bill Gates is known for being a very smart man, but his score on the
Scholastic Aptitude Test (the SAT) is the proof to back it up. When Gates took
the SAT in high school, he scored 1590. The highest possible score for the SAT
at the time was 1600. It’s no surprise then that he was accepted to Harvard
University, where he enrolled after graduating from high school in 1973. While
this is one of the top fifteen interesting facts about Bill Gates, another
interesting tidbit is that his Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, scored a
perfect 1600 on his SAT.
Though not as rich or famous as Bill Gates, Allen is
also a billionaire and philanthropist. Allen is also a big figure in Seattle. He
owns Vulcan Sports and Entertainment, the company that partially owns the
Seattle Sounders, a Major League Soccer team. He also controls CenturyLink
Field, home to the Sounders and the Seattle Seahawks, the National Football
League team that is also owned by Allen. Both Microsoft founders, Gates and
Allen, are exceptional examples for the argument that the SAT is a test that can
predict success and brain power.
11) An Early Start with Tic Tac Toe
Bill Gates was fascinated by computers from an early age and one of the
interesting facts about him that you may not know is that he started writing
computer programs when he was only thirteen years old. The first program he
wrote was a tic tac toe game in which the player could play against the
computer.
In 1968, Gates’s school, Lakeside School in Seattle, purchased computer time
and Gates soon became extremely interested in computers. He wrote the tic tac
toe game using the early computing language BASIC. Gates also met Paul Allen
while at Lakeside School, beginning a friendship that would propel them into a
partnership when they founded Microsoft years later. Gates’s first computer
program sale was also while he was a teenager. He was still in
high school when in 1972 he co-founded a traffic pattern analysis company called Traf-O-Data.
10) Bill Gates and Bono Are Close Friends
Another celebrity who is noted for his frequent work with charitable
organizations and his own philanthropy is Bono, lead singer of U2. Bono and Bill
Gates have been friends for some time, and when Bono was in Seattle in to play a
concert, he stayed at Bill Gates’s house. Bono knew Paul Allen first and asked him to introduce him to Bill
Gates. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partners with Bono’s own causes,
such as (RED), which raises money for AIDS medication.
By DFID - UK Department for International Development [CC-BY-2.0],
via Wikimedia Commons
In the Daily Mail
interview, Gates states that he took his wife and daughter and three of his
daughter’s friends to the concert, and Gates himself drove them in a minivan.
Bono stayed at their house after the concert, which is not surprising since the
two have worked together so closely on charitable causes for several years. In
2005, Gates and his wife Melinda were on the cover of Time magazine with Bono,
and the three were named the magazine’s “Persons of the Year.” Bono and Bill and
Melinda Gates continue to partner on issues of global concern.
9) Maximum Wage
Bill Gates earns about $250.00 per second. This is according to multiple
sources that have considered Gates’s earnings and divided it down. It’s no
secret that Gates is an incredibly wealthy man, but this highlights his wealth
in a staggering way. This statistic is baffling enough on its own, but there are
those who have taken it even further by figuring out a number of interesting
hypothetical situations involving Gates’s money.
For example, Poly Mic states
that Gates would have to spend about $6 million every day for the next
thirty-three years if he wanted to use up all his money in that time. This
probably doesn’t take into account the money that he continues to earn, though,
but only the money that he already has. While everyone knows that Bill Gates is
rich, you might not have every thought about it in such specific terms before.
What is so interesting about Gates’s wealth is his pledge to donate at least
half of it to charity and to leave very little of it to his three children.
8) Do Not Disturb
Many celebrities seek privacy for their wedding ceremonies, but it seems that
paparazzi always find a way to find a good shot of the bride and groom. This was
not the case for the wedding of Bill and Melinda Gates. When Bill Gates married
Melinda French in Hawaii in 1994, he was determined to keep the wedding an
invitation-only affair. He bought all the empty rooms in the Manele Bay Hotel
where they were staying. He even went so far as to hire every local helicopter
so that none would be available for use by photographers.
Melinda French had
worked as a manager at Microsoft, and the two took many precautions to ensure
that their wedding ceremony was kept private and secure. In an article about the
wedding in the Seattle Times, reporters note the extreme security and that those
reporters who arrived were made to sign a statement that they understood they
were trespassing and that they should leave. It’s obvious that Gates wanted
absolute privacy for his wedding and was prepared to spend any amount of money
necessary to achieve it.
7) No Silver Spoons for the Gates Children
You might think that being one of the three Gates children would be a dream
come true and an instant ticket to lifelong super-richness. Bill Gates has other
plans. His three children are Jennifer, 15, Rory, 12, and Phoebe, 9. In an
interview with Daily Mail, Bill Gates stated that his children would only
inherit a “minuscule portion” of his money. He wants them to get jobs and “find
their own way.” Though Gates stated that he will pay for any educational and
health needs his children have, he does not intend to set them up with a huge
amount of money for the rest of their lives.
Courtesy of billgatesfamily.com
He wants them to work like he did.
Gates has also stated that he won’t let his children have cell phones until they
are thirteen years old and he and his wife Melinda expect the children to do
chores. It’s also of interest that he says in his interview that his children
don’t use Apple products; they use the Microsoft versions instead. That
certainly makes sense when it’s Microsoft that has paid for any gadgets the
children get. With the Gates’ plans to see their children work rather than
inherit huge amounts of money, it seems Bill Gates wants them to do the same
things he did. Gates wants his children to find things that interest and inspire him and then work
toward those goals.
6) Not Always #1
Bill Gates spent several years as the richest man in the world, from 1995 to
2007. That’s a long time to be the wealthiest person alive. But in 2008, he came
in at #3, behind Carlos Slim and Warren Buffett. By the next year, though, Gates
was back on top. Ever since 2010, Gates has come in second to Carlos
Slim. What’s happening there? Has Microsoft stopped earning as much money? No,
it’s due to a different reason, which is why it appears on the fifteen
interesting things about Bill Gates.
Carlos Slim - The Richest Man in the World
In the past several years, Gates has given
away so much of his personal income that he lost his spot as the richest man in
the world. Gates comes in second as a world
philanthropist, after Warren Buffett, and has given almost 40 percent of his
wealth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. While the standings for the
richest man in the world seem to fluctuate quickly (in May of 2013, Gates was on
top, but the changes are quick), Gates has been in the top three for quite some
time.
5) Bill Gates is a Published Academic Author
During his brief time at Harvard, Bill Gates solved a complicated mathematics
problem presented by a professor at Harvard, Dr. Harry Lewis. According to an
interview with Dr. Lewis for NPR, the professor presented a complex math problem
called a pancake sorting problem to his combinatorial mathematics class. Bill
Gates just happened to be a student in that class. He worked out a solution to the problem and
later published it in 1979. The title of the paper is “Bounds for Sorting by
Prefixed Reversal.” This paper remained the standard by which to solve the
pancake problem for about thirty years until, as NPR’s Kestenbaum puts it, “some
researchers found a slightly better sorting strategy, but it’s only one percent
faster.”
Gates’s former professor notes that the faster strategy was only
possible to find because of the computing capabilities made possible by Gates.
So though Bill Gates didn’t spend much time at Harvard, his time there was
notable in that he solved a problem that took several decades to be improved
upon. Gates’s paper, co-authored by Christos Papadimitiou, an assistant
professor at Harvard at the time, and was published in Discrete Mathematics.
4) He’s Able to Convince Others to Give Away Lots of Money, Too
Bill Gates is known for his charitable work and donations, but another
fascinating fact about Bill Gates is that he is also able to convince other
wealthy people to do the same thing. Gates and Warren Buffett, who ABC News
claims is the number one world philanthropist, formed the Giving Pledge, also
referred to as the Gates-Buffett Pledge, in which they invite other wealth
people to “donate at least half of their wealth to charity or philanthropic
activities.” As the Giving Pledge website states, the pledge is “a commitment by
the world’s wealthiest individuals and families to dedicate the majority of
their wealth to philanthropy.”
Warren Buffet Pictured With President Obama
The Wall Street Journal explains that Gates and Buffett started the organization because Buffett believes, like Andrew Carnegie
did, that “fortunes were often wasted by heirs and thus should be put to
charitable use.” One of the most famous pledgers is Mark Zuckerberg, the founder
of Facebook, who was just twenty-six years old when he signed the pledge in
2010. Other pledgers include George Lucas, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Ted
Turner, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Spanx founder Sara Blakely. Since
Gates himself had an estimated net worth of $72.7 billion as of May 16, 2013, his own pledge to donate at least half of his money to charity
will, on its own, likely make a huge impact on the world and the causes he
supports.
3) Bill Gates May Have Created the First Computer Virus
That’s right. The man responsible for the creation of Windows may have also
been responsible for the first computer virus, and he created it when he was
only a teenager. While we think of Bill Gates as the man who created computer
programs that certainly aren’t free and are supposed to be only helpful and
never harmful, it turns out that he may be responsible for an early program that
he used on a network of computers in Seattle when he was very young. Notable
Biographies explains that Gates was working on a computer at the Computer Center
Corporation (CCC) when he learned that the computer was connected to other
computers on a national network.
This network, called Cybernet, was vulnerable
to being infiltrated by computer programs and, when Gates “installed a program
on the main computer that sent itself to the reset of the network’s computers,”
the whole network crashed. This resulted in Gates being banned from using the
computers during his junior year of high school. The reason for his ban from CCC
is explained differently by the Times of India, who claim that it was because
Gates and three other students were “caught exploiting its operating system bugs
to steal computer time.” Since they had to pay for the time they spent using
computers, they found a way around it, but were banned when they were caught.
2) He Has a Mugshot
Bill Gates is a certainly an upstanding citizen, donating huge amounts of
money to charity and doing lots of work around the globe to make the world a
better place. He also seems like a straight-laced, professional businessman. So
it’s extra funny to find out that, when he was quite young, Bill Gates was
arrested. The lack of severity of his crime is evident from the grin on his face
in his forward-facing shot, but he was indeed arrested in New Mexico in 1977.
The arrest was only for traffic violations,
Gates ran a red light and was “driving without a license.”
His mugshot is easy
to find online, though he has not offered a public explanation of what happened
following the arrest. It appears that he never faced any jail time and was soon
set free. Gates himself has joked about the photo, though. A version of the
mugshot was used in a Microsoft commercial featuring Gates himself. At least he
doesn’t take himself too seriously.
1) He Was a Harvard Dropout
By now, you know that Bill Gates scored a near-perfect score on his SAT and
was accepted to Harvard, where he began classes in 1973, but you may not know
that he dropped out to co-found Microsoft with his friend, Paul Allen. While at
Harvard, Gates read an article in Popular
Mechanics about the Altair, a microcomputer being sold for $350 by a company in
New Mexico called MITS. In the same year, Gates dropped out of school and he and
Allen co-founded their company. Originally called Micro Soft, the company
eventually became Microsoft, the huge corporation that earned Allen and Gates
billions of dollars and notable fame.
In a society that views dropping out of
school as a universally bad decision, it’s always interesting to read about
someone who dropped out of college and became a huge success. This is certainly
true of Bill Gates. The richest man in the world never graduated from college.
Of course, Bill Gates’s life is quite different from the lives of most other
people in the world, but this fact stands out as one that certainly makes him
different from most successful businessmen and businesswomen in the world. He
had a great deal of confidence in his plans and his friend Paul Allen believed
in them, as well. It worked out well for the pair, as their company grew quickly
and greatly over the years, resulting in one of the biggest and most profitable
business ventures ever.
Final Words
Now that you’ve read these fifteen interesting facts about Bill Gates, you
probably have a much better idea of who he is and how he came to be one of the
richest and most influential people in the world. He dedicates the majority of
his time and money to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, an influential
organization not only in its global work for many charitable and world-changing
causes, but in its influence on other people who are also incredibly wealthy.
The Giving Pledge has the potential to generate a huge amount of change in the
world and Bill Gates is a driving force in the move toward philanthropy for many
current millionaires and billionaires. He’s certainly an example of someone who
made the best possible use of his good ideas and of the money he earned because
of them.
References: 15) He was a 31-Year-Old Billionaire
Billionaire Times - (At the age of only twenty-three, Microsoft was
already earning $2.5 million)
14) Bill Gates KBE
BBC - (he was given an insignia..)
13) Early Retirement
CNN - (he retired from working daily at Microsoft..)
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website - (There are four major focus
areas for the foundation)
11) An Early Start with Tic Tac Toe
CNN - (he was still in high school when in 1972..)
10) Bill Gates and Bono Are Close Friends
Daily Mail - (when Bono was in Seattle in to play a concert..)
Forbes - (Bono knew Paul Allen first and asked him to introduce him to
Bill Gates.)
6) Not Always #1
ABC News - (Gates has given away so much of his personal income that he
lost his spot as the richest man in the world)
4) He’s Able to Convince Others to Give Away Lots of Money, Too
CNN - (Gates himself had an estimated net worth of $72.7 billion as of
May 16, 2013)
2) He Has a Mugshot
Times of India - (Gates ran a red light and was “driving without a
license.”)
1) He Was a Harvard Dropout
Notable Biographies - (Gates read an article in Popular Mechanics about
the Altair, a microcomputer being sold for $350..)
.jpg/1280px-Justine_Greening_meets_with_Bono_and_Bill_Gates_(8077292282).jpg)
.JPG/1280px-Bill_og_Melinda_Gates_2009-06-03_(bilde_01).JPG)
.jpg){kind=link}
.JPG){kind=link}
