Bill Gates is one of the super successful entrepreneurs of our century, he’s one of the founders of Microsoft, and also one of the biggest owners of shares in the company. He started with nothing and eventually managed to build one of the biggest software companies in the world which are valued at $1.02 TRILLION (2019). Thus, Microsoft became one of the first companies to pass the threshold of 1 billion US dollars of market capitalization. He is not only very rich and successful but also he is smart and a very cool guy whom I admire a lot. While browsing around, I came across some interesting and fun facts about him and I thought it would be cool to compile a post out of them. I bet that you may even not have heard about some of them, so here they are below. Don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Some Curious and Fun Facts About Bill Gates
- Bill was actually lucky as a schoolboy. Back then, computers were not much popular and most of the schools in the US didn’t even have one. However, Gates was lucky to attend one of the only schools in the US that had a computer – The Lakeside School. This was where his passion for coding was born. If he had studied somewhere else, he would probably become a scientist or a lawyer…
- Microsoft was actually not the first company of entrepreneurs. Gates founded his first company in high school – Traf-O-data. The company analyzed data from railroad traffic counters and created reports out of it. It wasn’t hugely successful but played a huge role in preparing Bill for the real big thing that would follow… Microsoft!
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traf-O-Data
- Bill earned one of his first serious paychecks by doing business with his school. When he was 17, he sold his first piece of software to his high school – a system for timetables that he had created. He made some sweet $4 200 from the sale.
- Gates is a college drop out as actually are many of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time. He dropped out of Harvard in order to found Microsoft in 1975. More than 30 years later, he got an honorable Doctor of Laws degree and practically graduated.
Source: https://harvardmagazine.com/
- Bill Gates fact number 5: When he was 22 years old, he got arrested for driving without a driving license. Here is his picture from the police department in Albuquerque from that day:
- Gates’ foundation donates more money than the World Health Organization in the US. Until now (2019), they have donated around $36 billion from its inception. This is the biggest amount of money a company ever donated to charity. I hope this huge amount of money has been efficiently utilized and not stolen by corrupted governments and non-profits.
- Bill earned around $33 million every single day in 2015. He could give every person on Earth $10 and still be left with $19.2 billion.
- If he found a $100 dollar banknote on the ground, it wouldn’t be worth it to spend time bending over and picking it up. He makes $358 every single second (2015) by using his time for work and bending over for 100 bucks would be just a waste of time for him.
- He had been the richest person on Earth for around 13 years (1995-2008).
- Gates believes that artificial intelligence is one of the main threats to humanity. Not if, but when artificial intelligence becomes a fact, we will not be able to control or predict its activities.
- Currently, Bill Gates is not the richest man in the world. In 2019 he is in second place, after Jeff Bezos.
- His house is clever. Each of his guests is given a pen with which she can control different things in the mansion. The pen is adjusted according to the guest’s preferences and it automatically controls the temperature in the rooms, the lighting, and many other things like that. It took around 8 years for his house to be built and now it costs nearly 3 times the money needed for construction ($63 million).
- Bill used to smoke marijuana and even tried LSD when he was younger, as mentioned in his biography – “Bill Gates: A Biography” – a book well worth reading. However, he once mentioned that this was actually rare even in his life and he had given up this habit: “My errant youth ended a long time ago… That means there were things I did under the age of 25 that I ended up not doing subsequently…The young mind can deal with certain kinds of gooping around that I don’t think at this age I could.”
Bill Gates is an American business magnate, investor, author, and philanthropist who co-founded Microsoft Corporation, one of the world’s largest computer software companies. Born in Seattle, Washington in 1955, Gates is one of the most influential people in the world.
These were our 13 cool, interesting, and fun bill Gates facts. Do you know any other cool stuff about him? We would love to see it dropped as a comment below!
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