Bill Gates

Male

White

European American

Descendant, several generations settled in the Pacific Northwest

Christian, Congregational (Congregational Christian Churches)

An affluent attorney's household behind him meant zero risk of losing housing or income over the decision to leave Harvard.

Family money and, by his own account at Harvard's 2007 commencement, an implied ability to go back and finish the degree if the software business didn't work out.

The hardship was chosen. There was a home to go back to if it failed.

Father William H. Gates Sr., a prominent Seattle attorney who co-founded what became the K&L Gates firm; mother Mary Maxwell Gates, a bank and United Way board member who also sat on the University of Washington board of regents for 18 years.

2

2

Lakeside School, an elite private Seattle school; the family paid the tuition.

The Lakeside Programmers Club, formed around the school's computer access, including Paul Allen, Kent Evans, and Ric Weiland. Allen became his Microsoft co-founder.

His mother Mary Gates sat on the national United Way executive committee alongside IBM chairman John Opel and mentioned her son's company to him in 1980. Opel reportedly mentioned her to other IBM executives, and IBM approached Microsoft about an operating system shortly after.

MITS, maker of the Altair 8800, agreed to distribute the BASIC interpreter Gates and Allen wrote for it in 1975, without either of them having owned the machine they wrote it for.

Network, Credibility

Paul Allen, a Lakeside classmate one grade above him, co-founded Microsoft in 1975 and had already worked with Gates on Traf-O-Data.

19

In eighth grade, the Lakeside Mothers' Club used rummage-sale proceeds to buy a Teletype Model 33 terminal and computer time on a General Electric system. Gates wrote his first program on it, a tic-tac-toe game, and kept finding ways to get more machine time through his teens, including a bug-hunting arrangement with a local computer firm that gave the group free access until it went out of business in 1970.

Attended Harvard College 1973 to 1975, no degree; scored 1590 of 1600 on the SAT. Received an honorary Doctor of Laws from Harvard in 2007.

None established. Harvard tuition came from an affluent family with no need for aid or loans.

Royalties from the Altair BASIC deal with MITS, 1975, the interpreter he and Allen wrote on Harvard's PDP-10 for a machine neither of them owned.

Technology Venture Investors, led by David Marquardt, made the one outside investment before the 1986 IPO, around 1981. Wikipedia's account of Marquardt states Microsoft "did not need the venture capital investment" by that point and took it mainly in preparation for going public.

Grew on software licensing revenue from the first product onward. The one outside financing round came after the company was already profitable, not to fund survival.

Licensed the DOS to IBM non-exclusively in 1981, keeping the right to sell the same software to every maker of IBM-compatible clones. The instinct to keep rights had already been tested: an earlier dispute with MITS over the BASIC interpreter went to arbitration, and the arbitrator ruled Microsoft could sell it to other computer makers too.

Bought an existing operating system, 86-DOS (also called QDOS), from Seattle Computer Products for under $100,000 rather than writing one from scratch, then adapted it for IBM.

1

Traf-O-Data ran on the founders' own modest teenage earnings; no real capital was ever at risk.

25

The 1975 Altair 8800 had already opened a hobbyist personal-computer market; by 1980 IBM's decision to enter that market with an open, off-the-shelf architecture created the opening Microsoft filled.

Bought the core of the operating system (86-DOS) rather than building one from nothing, then licensed and extended it.

Software

108900000000

Journalistic estimate

2026

not established

Nearly all wealth sits in Microsoft equity built at founding, plus its reinvestment since; not a salary story at any point.

Co-founded the Gates Foundation in 2000 with an initial $5 billion stock donation, and has since given more than $59 billion to it.

Uncapped

United States v. Microsoft Corp. (1998-2001): the district court found Microsoft had illegally maintained its Windows monopoly and tied Internet Explorer to it, and initially ordered a breakup. The appeals court vacated the breakup in 2001 but left the underlying findings largely intact. A 2001-2002 settlement required Microsoft to share APIs with third parties and submit to five years of outside monitoring; it did not require code changes or a fine.

After

Incidental

Civil wrong

None

Brilliant, Combative, Philanthropic

Public

Mixed

Spent roughly two decades rebuilding his public image through the Gates Foundation, moving from the public face of a federal antitrust case to one of the most prominent philanthropists in the world.