Love him or hate him you have to respect him. The man has made himself a player on the world stage and some people believe him to be the most powerful man in the world. Today will be taking a look at 40 interesting facts about Bill Gates and Microsoft in 2022.
1. What is Bill Gates Net Worth?
Bill Gates Net Worth as of today February 13th 2022 is $130.7 Billion dollars.
2. Was Bill Gates The Worlds Richest Person.
Bill Gates held the #1 spot on Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people for 18 years, From 1995 to 2017.
3. Color Blind
In a 2006 interview, the billionaire revealed that he is color-blind.
4. Sometimes it takes luck
Young Bill Gates got an early start in his career with computers. In 1968, a 13-year-old Gates attended Lakeside School, where the Mothers’ Club purchased a computer—a Teletype Model 33. Lakeside was one of the only schools in the United States to have a computer at that time
5. When did Bill Gates start Programming computers?
Gates quickly took to computer programming. He wrote his first computer program as a teenager in at Lakeside School. His program, written in the BASIC programming language, was a computer game that allowed the user to play tic-tac-toe against the computer.
6. Avid Reader
Bill Gates somehow finds time to read 50 books each year.
7. Custom Library
The ceiling of Bill Gates home library features an engraved quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
8. Bill Gates is also an author
The Road Ahead was published in 1995, and was co-written by Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. His second book, Business @ the Speed of Thought, was published in 1999. His third book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster was released in February of 2021.
9. Is Bill Gates a College Drop out?
Gates graduated Lakeside School in 1973 as a National Merit Scholar. However, his education after high school didn’t last long. Gates dropped out of Harvard College after only two years.
10. What is Bill Gates Biggest Regret?
Bill Gates has said that not learning to speak any languages other than his native English is one of his biggest regrets.
11. Trouble with the law
In 1975, 22-year-old Gates was arrested in New Mexico for speeding and driving without a license. In 1997, he was arrested again, this time for running a red while driving without a license.
12. Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld Commercial
In a commercial for Microsoft in 2008, Gates appeared alongside comedian Jerry Seinfeld. The ad featured the pair shopping at a shoe stores, and when Gates holds up a membership card, in place of the card’s ID photo, viewers can instead glimpse the 1977 mugshot from his speeding violation shown below.
13. What is Bill Gates favorite Band?
Bill Gates is known to be a music fan, and has said Weezer is his favorite American rock band. His other favorites include U2 and fictional rock group Spinal Tap.
14. Bill Gates Source of Inspiration?
Bill Gates counts Italian Renaissance painter and inventor Leonardo da Vinci as a major source of inspiration
15. One of Bill Gates Largest Purchases?
In 1994, Gates paid $30.8 million for the Codex Leicester, which contains da Vinci’s writings on fossils, the movement of water and soil erosion, and the luminosity of the moon. Gates didn’t hoard this knowledge though—he had the codex pages scanned and released them as a CD-ROM in 1997. Since then, the codex has been on display at art galleries around America, including in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Raleigh, South Carolina.
16. Flying Coach
Unlike some billionaires, Bill Gates often eschews luxury and famously flew coach until 1997, when he finally purchased his own plane.
17. Bill Gates Gets Married!
Bill Gates met his wife Melinda through work. Melinda Gates (née French) was working as a product marketing manager at Microsoft when she met Bill at a dinner. The pair kept their relationship a (poorly kept) secret for years, before making it public in 1993 when they became engaged. The lovebirds married in 1994.
18. Bill Gates Gets Divorced!
After 27 years of marriage Bill and Melinda gates called it quits on August 2nd 2021. The reason is thought to be questionable behavior by Bill Gates which Melinda refused to tolerate.
19. Does Bill Gates have Children?
Yes, Bill and Melinda Gates share 3 children together. The childrens names are Jennifer Katharine, Rory John, and Phoebe Adele.
20. How much money will Bill Gates leave his children?
While their father may have a net worth of over $130 billion, the Gates children will inherit only $10 million each. Says Gates, “Leaving kids massive amounts of money is not a favor to them.” One might argue that $10 million might still count as a “massive amount of money.”
21. Bill Gates plans everything!
As an important and influential man, Bill Gates leads an extremely well-ordered life. His days are planned on a minute-by-minute schedule, similar to the way US Presidents have their days scheduled.
22. Inventing New words for wealth
Bill Gates wealth grew so large during the dot com boom in the 90’s a new word needed to be invented to describe the massive amount of wealth he’d acquired. In 1999 Bill Gates became the world first centi-billionaire.
23. Is Bill Gates Religious?
Gates has been open about his agreement with secular humanists like Richard Dawkins, but has stated that he is religious. He told Rolling Stone that his children were raised Catholic, and said in the same interview, “I think it makes sense to believe in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don’t know.
24. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
During his lifetime, Gates has been involved with various philanthropic endeavors, and in 1999 he and his ex – wife founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Foundation has poured billions of dollars into a wide range of undertakings, including funding libraries in the United States, combating diseases such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, and encouraging agricultural development and sustainable crops in countries with high poverty rates. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the single largest private philanthropic institution in the world, with a staggering $43 billion endowment.
25. Drinking Sewer Water
One of the most notable causes of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the struggle for clean, drinkable water in poor and developing countries. In 2015, Gates appeared on The Tonight Show to promote a machine that extracts potable water from sewage—Gates and Fallon both drank a glass of water treated by the machine to prove its safety.
26. Bill Gates Mother
Gates inspiration for his incredible philanthropy may have been imparted by his parents. His mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, served on the board of the United Way.
27. Does Bill Gates have a college degree?
Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975, after only two years, but still managed to get a Harvard degree to hang on his wall: the school bestowed on him an honorary degree in 2007. Gates must have quite a collection going: he also has honorary degrees from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, Tsinghua University in China, and Waseda University in Japan.
28. Was Bill Gates Knighted by the Queen?
Yes, Honorary degrees aren’t the only accolades Gates has received: Queen Elizabeth II of England made Gates an honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2005, in support of his charitable and philanthropic efforts. He’s also received the Placard of the Order of the Aztec Eagle from Mexico, the Padma Bhushan from India, and the Silver Buffalo Award from the Boy Scouts of America.
29. Incorrect Prediction
Gates might have proven his mettle in the tech industry, but he’s not always right. In 2004, he predicted that spam email would be eliminated within two years—yet 14 years later, many of our email inboxes are still bombarded by the unwanted messages.
30. Is Bill Gates The Ceo of Microsoft?
Bill Gates no longer serves as Microsoft CEO—he stepped down in 2006 to focus on his charitable work at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
31. What would Bill Gates be doing if he hadn’t started Microsoft?
Gates has said he has a fascination with artificial intelligence, and would have become an artificial intelligence researcher if his software company hadn’t panned out.
32. Microsoft Millionares
Bill Gates wasn’t the only one to cash in on Microsoft’s success. When the company went public in 1986, the stock price skyrocketed and Bill was only one of 12,000 millionaires created by the company’s success.
33. How Bill Gates spends his free time?
Gates reportedly also enjoys playing bridge, golf, and tennis in his practically-nonexistent free time. We hope he still finds time for the odd game of computer tic-tac-toe now and then.
34. The Microsoft Anti – Trust Lawsuit
Despite his charitable work, Gates has faced some criticism for his business practices. In 1998, Microsoft was the target of an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice, which sought to determine whether Microsoft’s bundling of software packages was intended to bring about a monopoly on the market. The case alleged that Microsoft made it difficult to install competing software on computers running Microsoft Windows, and also made it difficult to uninstall programs like Internet Explorer that came automatically installed with Windows. The average Windows user of the ‘90s who suffered through the Internet Explorer loading screen was probably likely to agree that there was something behind the allegations.
35. Dividing Microsoft
In 2000, Microsoft lost the landmark antitrust case against them, and as a result were ordered to split the company in half, creating what were to be referred to as “Baby Bills.” However, an agreement was reached in 2001 to allow the company to stay as one—only one Bill remains.
36. Not the Kind of Boss you want
Gates admitted that in the beginning he memorized employee license plates and kept track of when his employees were arriving and leaving work. He said, “Eventually, I had to loosen up, as the company got to a reasonable size.”
37. Were Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Friends?
Bill Gates had a lengthy and complicated relationship with fellow iconic tech entrepreneur Steve Jobs. The pair began as allies—Microsoft wrote software for the Apple II personal computer and the pair regularly spent time together in Cupertino at Apple’s headquarters. However, while Gates had earlier been critical of Apple’s revolutionary Graphical User Interface, their relationship fractured when Microsoft released its own GUI in the form of Windows in 1985. Towards the end of Steve Jobs life the two seemed to repair the relationship a bit.
38. Steve Jobs talks Trash about Bill Gates
After their feud began, Steve Jobs took some public pot-shots at Bill Gates’ nerdy, stodgy public image. Jobs said of Gates, “He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”
39. Bill Gates Did Not Have a Squeaky Clean Beginning!
Gates quickly grew out of his school’s computer. He and some schoolmates sought out other computers, including a PDP-10 belonging to the Computer Center Corporation. The students, who included Paul Allen and Ric Weiland, both of whom also went on to become tech industry pioneers, were eventually banned from using the computer after they found a workaround in the software that allowed them to get free computer time. But the ban didn’t last long—at the end of the summer, the CCC offered computer time to the students in exchange for finding and fixing bugs like the one they’d exploited in their programs. Another company hired them the following year to write a payroll program.
40. Coding to Meet The Ladies!
A young Bill Gates used his programming talents to help out at Lakeside School—and help himself. After the school asked him to write a program to schedule students’ class timetables, Gates modified the code to place himself in classes with a high number of “interesting girls.”
Bonus Fact: How Old Is Bill Gates?
Bill Gates was born on October 22nd 1956 which makes Bill Gates 66 years old.
