Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. He is the son of William H. Gates Sr. (1925-2020) and Mary Maxwell Gates (1929–1994). His ancestors are English, German, and Irish/Scots-Irish.
His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the boards of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way of America.
Gates, Bill (William Henry Gates 3d), 1955–, American business executive, b. Seattle, Wash. At the age of 19, Gates founded (1975) the Microsoft Corp., a computer software firm, with Paul Allen. They began by purchasing the rights to convert an existing software package.
In 1980 they agreed to produce the operating system for the personal computer being developed by International Business Machines (IBM). That system, MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System), and subsequent programs (including the Windows operating systems) made Microsoft the world’s largest producer of software for microcomputers.
Gates, who was long chairman of Microsoft, is one of the wealthiest persons in the world. In 1994 he founded the William H. Gates Foundation, to focus on health issues in developing countries, and in 1997 established the Gates Library Foundation, later renamed the Gates Learning Foundation, to provide education assistance. In 1999 the former was renamed the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the latter was merged (2000) into it.
In 2008 Gates, while remaining as company chairman, withdrew from daily participation in the running of Microsoft in order to devote more time to the foundation, but in 2014 he returned to a more active role at Microsoft, becoming an adviser to the company’s chief executive while also stepping down as chairman. He resigned from Microsoft’s board in 2020. He has written The Road Ahead (1995, with N. Myhrvold and P. Rinearson) and Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999).
According to Forbes, Bill Gates is worth 102.2 billion USD
READ NEXT: Today in History: Jonas Salk, man who developed polio vaccine, was born
