William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate, software developer, investor, author, and philanthropist. He co-founded Microsoft with his late childhood friend Paul Allen.

During his tenure at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president, and chief software architect, as well as being the company’s largest individual shareholder until May 2014. He was a key figure in the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Gates was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. In 1975, he and Allen founded Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It grew to become the world’s largest personal computer software company. Gates led the company as chairman and CEO until stepping down as CEO in January 2000, when he was succeeded by Steve Ballmer, but he remained chairman of the board of directors and became chief software architect. During the late 1990s, he was chastised for his anti-competitive business practices.

Numerous court rulings have supported this viewpoint. Gates left Microsoft in June 2008 to work part-time at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the private charitable foundation he and his then-wife, Melinda Gates, founded in 2000. In February 2014, he stepped down as Microsoft’s chairman of the board and took on a new role as a technology adviser to support newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella. Gates stepped down from his positions on the boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway in March 2020 to focus on his philanthropic efforts in climate change, global health and development, and education. Gates has been on Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest people since 1987. Except for 2010 and 2013, he was the richest person in the world every year from 1995 to 2017. In October 2017, he was surpassed by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who had an estimated net worth of $90.6 billion at the time, compared to Gates’ net worth of $89.9 billion. Gates had an estimated net worth of US$107 billion as of November 2022, making him the world’s fifth richest person.

Where did Bill Gates go to high school?

He enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school at 13, where he wrote his first software program. When he was in eighth grade, the Lakeside School Mothers’ Club used proceeds from a rummage sale to purchase a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the students.

Gates became interested in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to do so. On this machine, he wrote his first computer program, a tic-tac-toe implementation that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it flawlessly executed software code. After the Mothers Club donation was depleted, Gates and other students requested access to systems such as DEC PDP minicomputers.