How Bill built the fortune
Gates made his money as co-founder of Microsoft, the company that supplied the operating system for most of the world's personal computers from the 1980s onward. For years he owned a large share of the company, and its 1986 public listing and long rise in value made him one of the richest people on earth while still in his thirties.
Microsoft's breakthrough came in 1980, when IBM needed an operating system for its first personal computer. Microsoft bought the rights to an existing system from a Seattle company, adapted it as MS-DOS and licensed it to IBM while keeping the right to sell it to other manufacturers. As cheaper IBM-compatible machines flooded the market, almost every one of them shipped with Microsoft software. The company built on that base with Windows and the Office productivity suite, which became standard tools in offices worldwide.
Since the 1990s Gates has steadily sold and given away Microsoft stock, and today he owns only a small percentage of it. Most of his remaining fortune is held through Cascade Investment, a private office run by Michael Larson, which buys long-term stakes in listed companies, hotels and land. Large transfers to the Gates Foundation and the settlement of his 2021 divorce have also reduced his personal holdings over time.
Companies and holdings
Cascade Investment's best-known positions include:
- Large shareholdings in Canadian National Railway, the waste and recycling companies Republic Services and Waste Management, and the farm equipment maker Deere
- A controlling stake in Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts
- Extensive farmland across many US states, which has made Gates one of the country's largest private owners of agricultural land
Gates has also founded or backed several companies working on climate and energy. TerraPower, which he helped start in 2006, is developing advanced nuclear reactors, and Breakthrough Energy, launched in 2015, invests in low-carbon technologies. He started the digital image licensing company Corbis in 1989, which was later sold and became part of Branded Entertainment Network.
Early life and career
William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle in October 1955. His father was a prominent lawyer and his mother served on the boards of several companies and charities. At Lakeside School in Seattle he gained access to a computer terminal at an unusually young age and met Paul Allen, with whom he spent long hours writing programs and testing systems.
Gates entered Harvard University in 1973 but left two years later. In 1975 he and Allen founded Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to write a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800, an early hobbyist computer. The company moved to the Seattle area in 1979. Gates served as chief executive until 2000, when Steve Ballmer took over, and stayed on as chairman until 2014. In the late 1990s he led Microsoft through a major antitrust case brought by the US government. He left the Microsoft board in 2020 to focus on philanthropy. Harvard gave him an honorary degree in 2007.
Philanthropy and public life
Gates is one of the most active philanthropists in history. The foundation he started with his former wife, Melinda French Gates, in 2000 has become one of the largest private charities in the world, spending heavily on vaccines, infectious disease control, maternal and child health, agriculture in low-income countries and education in the United States. Its work helped fund the global vaccine alliance Gavi and the fight against polio. In 2010 he and Warren Buffett created the Giving Pledge.
In May 2025 Gates announced that the foundation would spend down its endowment and close in 2045, and that he intends to give away almost all of his wealth through it by then. He writes regularly about global health, climate change and technology, and has published books including one on avoiding climate disaster and a memoir of his early life. He has also faced criticism, ranging from questions about the influence a private foundation holds over global health priorities to scrutiny of his past personal associations, which he has addressed in interviews.