47 Fun Facts About Bill Gates

What hit Gates in the face as he arrived for a meeting in Brussels in 1998?

A cream pie, thrown by the crew of Belgian prankster Noël Godin, who made a career of ambushing the powerful with pastry. Gates was his most famous target.

Gates was born in 1955 in which city?

Seattle, where a rare tornado threw the carport over the Gates family home in 1962, a month before Bill turned seven.

William Henry Gates III grew up answering to which family nickname?

Trey, a card player's word for a three, marked him as William Henry Gates III. His father was William H. Gates II.

Gates's parents originally wanted him to pursue which career?

Law: his father was a prominent attorney, and Gates entered Harvard in 1973 as a pre-law student before computing took over.

At which private school did Gates meet his future co-founder and start programming?

Lakeside, where the Mothers' Club spent rummage-sale money on a Teletype terminal and computer time, and a 13-year-old Gates got hooked.

Gates's first computer program was an implementation of which game?

Tic-tac-toe, written in BASIC at 13 on a school Teletype linked to a General Electric computer, let classmates play against the machine.

What got the teenage Gates and his friends banned from Computer Center Corporation's PDP-10 for a summer?

Exploiting bugs for free time earned the schoolboys a summer ban, but the company then traded them computer hours for hunting down its bugs.

How did Kent Evans, Gates's best friend and first business partner, die in their junior year?

A mountain climbing accident on Mount Shuksan killed Evans at 17 in May 1972, while the pair were writing their school's class-scheduling program.

Before Microsoft, Gates and Paul Allen ran which company as teenagers?

Traf-O-Data processed traffic-counter data for local governments and earned the pair about $20,000.

Which notoriously hard Harvard course did Gates take?

Math 55, which Harvard's own math department has called probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country. Gates got through it, then dropped out in his junior year.

Gates's Harvard-era algorithm for which combinatorics problem stood as the best known for about 30 years?

Pancake sorting: getting a jumbled stack into size order using only flips of a spatula. His professor posed it in class as an unsolved puzzle, and Gates, then a sophomore, came back with a faster method a day or two later.

Which 1975 machine, featured in Popular Electronics, prompted Gates and Allen to start their company?

MITS Altair 8800: they told its maker they already had a BASIC for it before writing a line, then wrote one within weeks without an Altair of their own to test it on.

Microsoft began life not in Seattle but in which desert city?

Albuquerque, New Mexico, where its first customer built kit computers. Microsoft only came home to the Seattle area around the start of 1979, settling in Bellevue.

Which 1980s teen-movie star played Gates in a 1999 TV film about Microsoft and Apple?

Anthony Michael Hall, who played Brian, the brainy one in detention in The Breakfast Club. Asked about the film years later, Gates called the portrayal "reasonably accurate".

Gates's 1976 Open Letter to Hobbyists was an early public complaint about what?

Software piracy: Gates, then 20, wrote that only about one in ten hobbyists running Microsoft's BASIC had paid for it, and told the rest bluntly that they were stealing.

Who mentioned Microsoft to IBM's John Opel in 1980, shortly before IBM chose it for the PC?

Gates's mother: Mary Gates sat on the national United Way board with Opel, who reportedly put in a good word for her son's small firm with his executives.

When IBM first asked about an operating system, Gates referred them to which company?

Digital Research, whose CP/M was the leading operating system for small computers. When those talks went nowhere, Microsoft bought a lookalike from a small Seattle firm and licensed that to IBM instead.

Which Microsoft product began life as another firm's Quick and Dirty Operating System?

MS-DOS: Microsoft bought the program from a small hardware firm and adapted it for the IBM PC, but kept the right to sell it to other computer makers. When IBM clones flooded the market, most of them ran it.

Gates's co-founder left Microsoft in early 1983 after being diagnosed with what?

Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system. Allen recovered after treatment and kept his seat on Microsoft's board, but never went back to a day job there.

When Steve Jobs accused him of copying the Mac, Gates said both had robbed a "rich neighbor" named what?

Xerox, whose Palo Alto lab pioneered the mouse-and-icons screen. Gates said he had broken in to steal the TV set, only to find that Jobs had already taken it.

At 31, Gates became the youngest person up to that time to do what?

Become a billionaire: Microsoft's shares, first sold to the public in 1986, climbed so fast that his stake passed $1 billion within about a year.

To show off a machine his foundation funded, Gates drank a glass of water that had recently been what?

Human sewage: the Omniprocessor boils sludge, burns the dried solids for power and purifies the steam. Gates said the water tasted as good as any he had had from a bottle.

Who succeeded Gates as Microsoft CEO in 2000?

Steve Ballmer, his old Harvard dorm-mate, who had joined Microsoft in 1980. Gates stayed on as chairman and gave himself a new title, chief software architect.

Gates stepped down as Microsoft chairman in 2014 to become technology adviser to which new CEO?

Satya Nadella, who asked the founder to give Microsoft more of his time, not less. Gates said the move would let him spend over a third of his time with the product groups.

With which lawyer did Gates split hairs over the meaning of everyday words in his 1998 antitrust deposition?

David Boies, the government's trial lawyer. When the videotape was played in court, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson laughed out loud and shook his head.

Gates met Melinda French, a newly hired Microsoft product manager, on a 1987 work trip to which city?

New York, where she went to a business dinner and ended up sitting next to her new chief executive.

Bill and Melinda Gates married in 1994 on the 12th hole of a golf course on which Hawaiian island?

Lānaʻi: to keep the press away, Gates reportedly booked every room at the island's Manele Bay Hotel and hired every helicopter on neighbouring Maui.

Gates's high-tech mansion is nicknamed Xanadu 2.0 after the palatial estate in which classic film?

Citizen Kane, where Xanadu is the newspaper tycoon's vast estate. Newly married, Melinda balked at moving in to the Gates version, with its trampoline room and banks of screens, and hired a new architect to redesign it.

In 1994 Gates paid $30.8 million at auction for the Codex Leicester, a notebook by whom?

Leonardo da Vinci's notebook had been renamed the Codex Hammer by its previous owner, the industrialist Armand Hammer. Rather than call it the Codex Gates, its new owner gave it back its older name.

The ceiling of Gates's home library is engraved with a quotation from which novel?

The Great Gatsby: the line is about a dream so close its hero could hardly fail to grasp it. When they were dating, Melinda switched on a green light in her office, like the one on Daisy's dock, to signal that Gates could visit.

Asked on Reddit for his most expensive guilty pleasure, Gates named owning what?

A private jet: for years, even as the world's richest man, Gates was known for flying economy, until he gave in and bought a plane in 1997. He says it gets him to foundation work he could not otherwise reach.

During a 2009 TED talk on his foundation's work, Gates startled the audience by releasing what into the room?

Mosquitoes: 'There's no reason only poor people should have the experience,' he said, before adding that they were not infected. He had just noted that more money went into baldness drugs than into malaria.

Gates co-founded the Giving Pledge in 2010 with which investor?

Warren Buffett: Gates nearly skipped their first meeting in 1991, saying a man who 'just buys and sells pieces of paper' would have little in common with him. The pair talked for hours and became close friends.

Gates's nuclear reactor design company, building a sodium reactor in Wyoming, is called what?

TerraPower chose Kemmerer because a coal-fired power station there is being retired: the Natrium plant going up next door can reuse its infrastructure and take on its workforce.

In 2021 a magazine survey revealed Gates as the largest private owner of what in the United States?

Farmland: about 242,000 acres when The Land Report broke the news, roughly 0.03% of the national total. Asked why on Reddit, Gates said his investment group had chosen it and that it was not connected to climate.

Gates founded Corbis in 1989 because he expected homes to one day display what on wall-mounted screens?

Famous artworks, which owners could change at will. The firm, first called Interactive Home Systems, ended up licensing photographs instead, and sold its picture library to a Chinese company in 2016.

Time named Gates, Melinda Gates and which rock star its Persons of the Year for 2005?

Bono, whom Gates had expected to be a waste of time. At their first dinner in 2002 the singer began hurling statistics across the table, and Gates decided that he 'really reads this stuff'.

Which president awarded Bill and Melinda Gates the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

Barack Obama, who joked at the 2016 ceremony that the partnership nearly never happened, as Bill's opening line was to ask Melinda out for 'two weeks from this coming Saturday'. Luckily, he added, Melinda believes in second chances.

Gates's 1995 book, co-written with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson, is titled what?

The Road Ahead treated the internet as a mere stop on the way to a grander 'information highway'. The web took off so fast that Gates and his co-authors substantially revised the book for its paperback a year later.

Gates's 2025 memoir, the first of three planned volumes, is titled what?

Source Code stops in the late 1970s, with Microsoft barely under way. In its final pages Gates writes that a boy like him growing up today would probably be diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.

Which honorary British title did Gates receive from Queen Elizabeth II in 2005?

KBE, short for Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Because he is an American, though, Gates may not call himself Sir and can only put the letters after his name.

A famous 1977 police mugshot shows a grinning young Gates, who had been arrested for what?

A traffic violation: pulled over while driving Paul Allen's car, he was locked up 'with all the drunks all night long'. Gates says that is why he has always carried plenty of cash since, so that he could bail himself out.

In 2025 Gates announced that his foundation would do what on the last day of 2045?

Close its doors for good, after giving away some $200 billion. 'People will say a lot of things about me when I die,' Gates wrote, 'but I am determined that "he died rich" will not be one of them.'

Who overtook Gates at the top of Forbes's annual list of the world's richest people in 2018?

Jeff Bezos, lifted by a surge in Amazon's shares. Gates had helped him past: he had given away so much Microsoft stock, mostly to his own foundation, that he would otherwise have been far richer.

Jennifer Gates married an Olympian for Egypt in 2021, a fellow competitor in which sport?

Show jumping: when Jennifer finished at Stanford in 2018, her parents' graduation present was a horse farm costing almost $16 million. She married rider Nayel Nassar two months after he jumped for Egypt at the Tokyo Olympics.

Which Nick Bostrom book did Gates tell a conference audience he would 'highly recommend'?

Superintelligence: on stage with Elon Musk at China's Boao Forum in 2015, Gates urged the audience to read it. He said machines would reach a superhuman level almost as soon as the right learning algorithm was running in silicon.

In Microsoft's early days, Gates memorised what about his staff so he could track their hours?

Their licence plates: he could look out at the car park and see who had come in and who had left, he told BBC radio in 2016. He added that he worked weekends and didn't really believe in holidays back then.