Bill Gates Net Worth 2022, Age, Height, Wife, Divorce, Wealth In years

Read the complete write-up of Bill Gates net worth, biography: age, height, family, parents, wife, children, policies as well as other information you need to know.

Introduction

Bill Gates is an American business magnate, software developer, investor, author, and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft Corporation, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), president and chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. He is considered one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s.

Gates and Allen founded Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It became the world’s largest personal computer software company. Gates led the company as chairman and CEO until stepping down as CEO in January 2000, succeeded by Steve Ballmer, but he remained chairman of the board of directors and became chief software architect. During the late 1990s, he was criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive. This opinion has been upheld by numerous court rulings.

In June 2008, Gates transitioned to a part-time role at Microsoft and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the private charitable foundation he and his then-wife, Melinda Gates, established in 2000. He stepped down as chairman of the board of Microsoft in February 2014 and assumed a new post as technology adviser to support the newly appointed CEO Satya Nadella. In March 2020, Gates left his board positions at Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway to focus on his philanthropic efforts including climate change, global health and development, and education.

Since 1987, Gates has been included in the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest people. From 1995 to 2017, he held the Forbes title of the richest person in the world every year except from 2010 to 2013. In October 2017, he was surpassed by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who had an estimated net worth of US$90.6 billion compared to Gates’s net worth of US$89.9 billion at the time. As of May 2021, Gates had an estimated net worth of US$144 billion, making him the fourth-richest person in the world.

Later in his career and since leaving day-to-day operations at Microsoft in 2008, Gates has pursued many business and philanthropic endeavours. He is the founder and chairman of several companies, including BEN, Cascade Investment, bgC3, and TerraPower. He has given sizable amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reported to be the world’s largest private charity.

Through the foundation, he led an early 21st-century vaccination campaign which significantly contributed to the eradication of the wild poliovirus in Africa. In 2010, Gates and Warren Buffett founded The Giving Pledge, whereby they and other billionaires pledge to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropy.

Early life

Bill Gates who real name is William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955 (age 66 years) in Seattle, Washington. He is the son of William H. Gates Sr. (1925–2020) and Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994). His ancestry includes English, German, and Irish/Scots-Irish. His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way of America. Gates’s maternal grandfather was J. W. Maxwell, a national bank president. Gates has an older sister Kristi (Kristianne) and a younger sister Libby.

He is the fourth of his name in his family but is known as William Gates III or “Trey” (i.e., three) because his father had the “II” suffix. The family lived in the Sand Point area of Seattle in a home that was damaged by a rare tornado when Gates was seven years old.

Early in his life, Gates observed that his parents wanted him to pursue a law career. When he was young, his family regularly attended a church of the Congregational Christian Churches, a Protestant Reformed denomination. Gates was small for his age and was bullied as a child. The family encouraged competition; one visitor reported that “it didn’t matter whether it was hearts or pickleball or swimming to the dock; there was always a reward for winning and there was always a penalty for losing”.

At 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school, where he wrote his first software program. When he was in the eighth grade, the Mothers’ Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School’s rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the students. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and he was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine, and implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer.

Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, Gates and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation (CCC) which banned Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Gates’s best friend and first business partner Kent Evans, for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.

The four students formed the Lakeside Programmers Club to make money. At the end of the ban, they offered to find bugs in CCC’s software in exchange for extra computer time. Rather than using the system remotely via Teletype, Gates went to CCC’s offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, including Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970 when the company went out of business.

The following year, a Lakeside teacher enlisted Gates and Evans to automate the school’s class-scheduling system, providing them computer time and royalties in return. The duo worked diligently in order to have the program ready for their senior year. Towards the end of their junior year, Evans was killed in a mountain climbing accident, which Gates has described as one of the saddest days of his life. Gates then turned to Allen who helped him finish the system for Lakeside.

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At 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen called Traf-O-Data to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. In 1972, he served as a congressional page in the House of Representatives. He was a National Merit Scholar when he graduated from Lakeside School in 1973. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) and enrolled at Harvard College in the autumn of 1973.

He chose a pre-law major but took mathematics and graduate-level computer science courses. While at Harvard, he met fellow student Steve Ballmer. Gates left Harvard after two years while Ballmer stayed and graduated magna cum laude. Years later, Ballmer succeeded Gates as Microsoft’s CEO and maintained that position from 2000 until his resignation in 2014.

Gates devised an algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems presented in a combinatorics class by professor Harry Lewis. His solution held the record as the fastest version for over 30 years, and its successor is faster by only 2%. His solution was formalized and published in collaboration with Harvard computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.

Gates remained in contact with Paul Allen and joined him at Honeywell during the summer of 1974. In 1975, the MITS Altair 8800 was released based on the Intel 8080 CPU, and Gates and Allen saw the opportunity to start their own computer software company. Gates dropped out of Harvard that same year. His parents were supportive of him after seeing how much he wanted to start his own company. He explained his decision to leave Harvard: “If things hadn’t worked out, I could always go back to school. I was officially on leave.”

Bill Gtes hobbies

Gates is an avid reader, and the ceiling of his large home library is engraved with a quotation from The Great Gatsby. He also enjoys bridge, tennis and golf. His days are planned for him on a minute-by-minute basis, similarly to the U.S. President’s schedule. Despite his wealth and extensive business travel, Gates flew coach (economy class) in commercial aircraft until 1997, when he bought a private jet.

Gates purchased the Codex Leicester, a collection of scientific writings by Leonardo da Vinci, for US$30.8 million at an auction in 1994. In 1998, he reportedly paid $30 million for the original 1885 maritime painting Lost on the Grand Banks, at the time a record price for an American painting. In 2016, he revealed that he was colour-blind.

Marriage and divorce

Bill Gates married Melinda French on the Hawaiian Island of Lanai on January 1, 1994. They met in 1987 after Melinda began working at Microsoft. At the time of their marriage, Gates was given permission by Melinda to spend limited time with his ex-girlfriend, businesswoman Ann Winblad.

Bill and Melinda have three children: Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe. The family’s residence is an earth-sheltered mansion in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. In 2009, property taxes on the mansion were reported to be US$1.063 million, on a total assessed value of US$147.5 million. The 66,000-square-foot (6,100 m2) estate has a 60-foot (18 m) swimming pool with an underwater music system, as well as a 2,500-square-foot (230 m2) gym and a 1,000-square-foot (93 m2) dining room.

On May 3, 2021, the Gateses announced they had decided to divorce after 27 years of marriage and 34 years as a couple. They said they would keep working together on charitable efforts. The Wall Street Journal reported that Melinda had been meeting with divorce attorneys since 2019, citing interviews that suggested Bill’s ties with Jeffrey Epstein was at least one of her concerns. The divorce was finalized on August 2, 2021.

Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

A New York Times article reported that Gates’s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein started in 2011, just a few years after Epstein’s conviction, and continued for some years, including a visit to Epstein’s house with Melinda in the fall of 2013, despite her declared discomfort. Gates said in 2011 about Epstein: “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me”.

The depth of the friendship between Gates and Epstein is unclear. Gates generally commented about his relationship with Epstein that “I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him”. However, Gates visited Epstein “many times, despite [Epstein’s] past”. Gates took at least one flight in 2013 in Epstein’s infamous “Lolita Express” aircraft.

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It was reported that Epstein and Gates “discussed the Gates Foundation and philanthropy”. However, in an interview in 2019 Gates completely denied any connection between Epstein and the Gates Foundation or his philanthropy generally. In August 2021, Gates said the reason he had meetings with Epstein was that Gates hoped Epstein could provide money for philanthropic work, though nothing came of the idea. Gates added, “It was a huge mistake to spend time with him, to give him the credibility of being there.”

Public image

Gates’s public image has changed over the years. At first, he was perceived as a brilliant but ruthless “robber baron”, a “nerd-turned-tycoon”. Starting in 2000 with the foundation of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and particularly after he stepped down as head of Microsoft, he turned his attention to philanthropy, spending more than $50 billion on causes like health, poverty, and education.

His image morphed “from tyrannical technocrat to saintly saviour”, a “huggable billionaire techno-philanthropist”, celebrated on magazine covers and sought after for his opinions on major issues like global health and climate change. Still another shift in public opinion came in 2021 with the announcement that he and Melinda were divorcing.

Coverage of that proceeding brought out information about romantic pursuits of women who worked for him, a long-term extra-marital affair, and a friendship with convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. This resulted in a significant deterioration of his public image. In June 2021, The New Republic portrayed Gates as an “oligarch” and as “just another creepy rich guy”.

Religion

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Gates said in regard to his faith: “The moral systems of religion, I think, are super important. We’ve raised our kids in a religious way; they’ve gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I’ve been very lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that’s kind of a religious belief. I mean, it’s at least a moral belief.”

In the same 2014 interview, he also said: “I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand the disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill. But the mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there’s no scientific explanation of how it came about. To say that it was generated by random numbers, that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view [laughs]. 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.”

Bill Gates net worth in billions

How much is Bill Gates worth? Bill Gates net worth is estimated at around $132.7 billion as of 2022. He is the fourth richest man in the world. However, in 1999, his wealth briefly surpassed US$101 billion. Since 2000, the nominal value of his Microsoft holdings has declined due to a fall in Microsoft’s stock price after the dot-com bubble burst and the multi-billion dollar donations he has made to his charitable foundations. In May 2006, Gates remarked that he wished that he were not the richest man in the world because he disliked the attention it brought.

In March 2010, Gates was the second wealthiest person after Carlos Slim, but regained the top position in 2013, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires List. Slim retook the position again in June 2014 (but then lost the top position back to Gates). Between 2009 and 2014, his wealth doubled from US$40 billion to more than US$82 billion. In October 2017, Gates was surpassed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as the richest person in the world.

On November 15, 2019, he once again became the richest person in the world after a 48% increase in Microsoft shares, surpassing Bezos. Gates told the BBC, “I’ve paid more tax than any individual ever, and gladly so … I’ve paid over $6 billion in taxes.” He is a proponent of higher taxes, particularly for the rich.

Gates has held the top spot on the list of The World’s Billionaires for 18 out of the past 23 years. Gates has several investments outside Microsoft, which in 2006 paid him a salary of US$616,667 and a US$350,000 bonus totalling US$966,667. In 1989, he founded Corbis, a digital imaging company. In 2004, he became a director of Berkshire Hathaway, the investment company headed by long-time friend Warren Buffett.

In 1987, Gates was listed as a billionaire in Forbes magazine’s 400 Richest People in America issue, worth $1.25 billion at the time, and was the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. Since 1987, Gates has been included in the Forbes The World’s Billionaires list and was the wealthiest person from 1995 to 1996, 1998 to 2007, 2009, and held the spot until 2018 before being overtaken by Jeff Bezos. Gates was number one on the Forbes 400 list from 1993 through 2007, 2009, and 2014 through 2017.