20 interesting facts you probably didn't know about billionaire Bill Gates.
When you mention Bill Gates, almost everyone knows him. His name and career have an incredibly powerful influence worldwide. To ordinary people, he is one of the world's richest billionaires. In the technology world, Gates is a legend, the founder of one of the world's largest technology companies . And to people in developing countries, Gates is a "living saint" as he and his wife have shared billions of dollars of their wealth with charity to improve the lives, health, and education of the poor.
Besides the above, this billionaire's life has many more interesting aspects that few people know about, or have even heard of. If you are a fan of Bill Gates, there's no reason not to read this article; it certainly won't disappoint you.
1. As a young boy attending Lakeside School in Seattle, USA, Bill Gates independently developed his first computer software program on a General Electric computer. This program automatically allowed users to play tic-tac-toe (a type of checkers) against the computer.
2. After the school recognized Bill Gates's programming talent, they let him write a software program to schedule classes for each student. The mischievous Gates modified the program's code, placing himself in classes with "beautiful and interesting girls" at the school.
3. Many people may not believe it, but Bill Gates actually read the entire World Book Encyclopedia series when he was a teenager.
4. Gates graduated from Lakeside High School in 1973 with a near-perfect SAT score of 1590/1600. This is a standardized test used for admission to several universities in the United States.
5. One interesting aspect of Gates that many admire is his willingness to leave university, to leave a prestigious school that many people dream of attending, in 1975 to pursue his entrepreneurial dream of starting Microsoft .
6. Two years after dropping out of Harvard University, he was arrested by police for running a red light and driving without a license in New Mexico.
- Why is Bill Gates called an "eccentric genius"?
7. When Microsoft was first founded, Bill Gates had a habit of memorizing each employee's license plate number so he could know how early or late they arrived at work. However, as the company grew and the number of employees increased, he gradually had to abandon this habit.
8. Bill Gates is a car collector, and he owns a rather large collection of Porsches. He bought the Porsche 959 sports car 13 years before it was officially approved for road use by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Transportation.
9. Perhaps few people know that Gates was once trained to fly. He now frequently travels in the plane he bought in 1997, which he often calls "extravagant."
10. Bill Gates is the only person to possess an extremely valuable asset: the Leicester Codex, a comprehensive collection of handwritten manuscripts by the artist, scientist, and inventor Leonardo da Vinci. Gates spent $30.8 million to acquire this precious document at auction in 1994.
11. Although he is a billionaire with a massive fortune, Bill Gates says that his children will only inherit $10 million, because he believes that leaving them such a large sum of money is not good for them.
- Bill Gates' children will only inherit $10 million.
12. Today, he dedicates most of his time to his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. However, he also doesn't forget to work with Microsoft, specifically on the "Personal Secretary" project, something that will "remember everything and help you find old things, helping you choose a goal to focus on."
13. Gates once said that if Microsoft hadn't succeeded, he would probably be known today as an artificial intelligence researcher rather than a technological genius.
14. Gates expressed concerns about the remarkable intelligence of artificial intelligence (AI) in the future, similar to those of physicist Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, chairman of SpaceX.
15. Like many others, he has a great passion for music, and Gates' favorite song is Weezer.
16. He reads 50 books a year. "Reading remains my primary way of learning new things and also of challenging my understanding."
17. Bill Gates revealed that not knowing any foreign languages is his biggest regret in life.
18. Microsoft was not the first partnership between Gates and Allen.
Gates and Allen's first collaboration was a traffic measurement program for a company called Information Sciences. Gates was only 17 years old at the time, and Allen was 19. They came up with the idea of digitizing the measurement process and using computers in the library to create more readable charts of hourly traffic flow.
After earning $360 for each machine, the two developed the "Traf-O-Data" computer with a special 8008 microprocessor to read and analyze paper tapes. Overall, the Traf-O-Data worked effectively. At that point, they realized they knew how to build the machine, but didn't know how to sell it.
Allen once shared, "In that first startup, we had big dreams that money would come to us," and he considers that experience a valuable lesson about the importance of a business model.
19. Success achieved with the help of competitors.
In 1980, IBM hired Gates to develop a 16-bit operating system for the new personal computer, but since he hadn't yet built his own operating system, he introduced IBM to Gary Kildall of Digital Research.
However, when the IBM representative arrived, Kildall was not home, and his wife and business partner Dorothy flatly refused the offer. Realizing the opportunity was slipping away, Gates hired Seattle Computer to produce a copy based on a portion of CP/M and repackage it into DOS to sell to IBM.
This development paved the way for Microsoft to become the dominant name in PC operating systems through MS-DOS – later Windows – and helped its chairman become a billionaire by the age of 31.
20. Microsoft is where Gates and his ex-wife met.
In 1987, Bill Gates first met Melinda French at Microsoft, four months after she started working there. They happened to be sitting next to each other at a party during an Expo trade show in New York City. "That first encounter revealed that he was much funnier than I had imagined," Melinda recalled.
A few months later, they happened to meet again in the Microsoft parking lot, and Gates offered to invite her to dinner in two weeks. Melinda declined and gave Gates her phone number, telling him to call back closer to the date. She didn't expect that Bill Gates would call her that very evening and suggest meeting up that night.
Their relationship was a secret at the company. It wasn't until 1993 that the veil was lifted when they got engaged and married in Hawaii in early 1994. However, on May 4th, Bill and Melinda Gates announced their decision to divorce after 27 years of marriage .
You might be interested in:
- Bill Gates: The secrets of the life of the world's richest man.
- Unexpected twists and turns in Bill Gates' life
- 29 meaningful quotes from Bill Gates that freshmen should remember.
