As one of the most talked-about figures, Bill Gates has built a significant fortune. In this article, we dive deep into the assets and career highlights.
What is Bill Gates' net worth?
During their senior year, Gates and Allen formed a company called Traf-O-Data and made traffic counters on the Intel 8008 processor. He graduated from Lakeside School in 1973 and enrolled at Harvard in the fall of 1973. At Harvard, Gates took math and graduate-level computer science classes. He met Steve Ballmer at Harvard. Gates dropped out of college at the end of his sophomore year.
When their ban was over, the boys offered to look for bugs in the software in exchange for extra time on the computer. Gates began studying code for the programs that ran on the computer, including Fortran, Lisp, and machine language. In 1971, a Lakeside teacher asked Gates and Evans to automate the school's class scheduling system. The friends wrote software with one twist–Gates changed the code so that he was in classes with a higher number of interesting girls. Gates and Evans wanted to have the new system up and running by senior year. Then, at the end of their junior year, Evans was killed in a mountain climbing accident. Gates turned to Allen to help him finish the project for Lakeside.
Over the decades, Bill has received nearly $60 billion in the form of stock sales and dividends from Microsoft and other investments. The proceeds of his sales and dividends have funded Cascade Investment LLC, the vehicle Gates uses to invest in hundreds of other companies, including 270,000 acres of American farmland, significant stakes in public stocks, including Apple, Canadian National Railway, Republic Services, Ecolab, Waste Management, and Berkshire Hathaway. Cascade also controls the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts.
When Microsoft went public in 1986, Bill owned 45% of the company. Steve Ballmer owned 8%, and Paul Allen owned 25%. Through stock sales, by 2000, Bill's Microsoft stake had been reduced to 14%. Today, he owns a little less than 1.4% of Microsoft, around 103 million shares. That does not make him the company's largest individual shareholder. That honor belongs to Bill's successor, Steve Ballmer, who owns around 4% of the company today. Thanks to Microsoft's $3 annual dividend, every year Bill receives $309 million in dividends. Ballmer receives close to $1 billion every year.
Microsoft began as a conversation between two young men who had been friends since elementary school: Bill Gates andPaul Allen. After basically lying their way into an interview with MITS, the corporation behind the Altair 8800 computer, the two men convinced the company to build and sell their interpreter, and in 1975, MITS launched the Altair BASIC. This initial success allowed the pair to develop their own company, which they named Microsoft. By 1977, they had their first international office in Japan and relocated their domestic office to the state of Washington. In 1980, they won a bid to develop an operating system for IBM, and MS-DOS was born. From the mid-80s to the mid-90s, the company established itself as a technological powerhouse, and not long after it went public in 1986, 12,000 of its employees became millionaires, and another four became billionaires. They were also hit with a number of antitrust lawsuits around this time due to business practices that appeared to monopolize the computer market. The mid-90s brought an expansion in products, including networking and World Wide Web applications, such as the popular browser Internet Explorer. In 2000, Bill Gates retired from the position of CEO, andSteve Ballmer, a long-time employee, took over. Today,Satya Nadellais the CEO.
Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates in 1984 (Photo by Doug Wilson/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
Bill Gates is an American billionaire entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist who has a net worth of $105 billion. And while you might assume that the vast majority of Bill Gates' net worth is connected to the company he co-founded, Microsoft, that is actually NOT the case. Today, he "only" owns 103 million shares of Microsoft, which, assuming a $370 price per share, equates to "just" $38 billion of his net worth today. The remaining roughly $100+ billion net worth comes from an extremely diverse portfolio of investments and assets that are primarily controlled by his investment vehicle, Cascade Investments. We'll detail more about Cascade throughout this article, but through Cascade, Bill owns the majority of Four Seasons Hotel and Resorts and is thelargest private owner of farmland in the United States.
William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. Gates was bullied as a child. He preferred to stay in his room, where he would shout, "I'm thinking," when his mother asked what he was doing. When he was 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school, and he wrote his first software program. He was in eighth grade during his first year at Lakeside, and the school's Mothers' Club used proceeds from a fundraiser to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and time on a GE computer for the school's students. Gates became interested in programming the GE computer in BASIC. He wrote his first program — a tic-tac-toe game– on this computer. Players played the game against the computer. Eventually, Gates and his friends Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans were banned from using the school's computer after they were caught exploiting bugs in the operating system to get free time on the machine. The four students formed the Lakeside Programmers Club to make money.
For much of the period between 1997 and 2008, Bill was therichest person in the world,uninterrupted. He traded spots with Carlos Slim for a few years before regaining the crown uninterrupted again until July 2017, when he was overtaken by Amazon founderJeff Bezos. In the last decade, Bill has consistently been one of the five richest people on the planet.
(Photo by Mike Cohen/Getty Images )
In summary, the total wealth of Bill Gates reflects strategic moves.
Disclaimer: All net worth figures are estimates based on public data.
