10 Things You Didn’t Know About Bill Gates
Provided by Lloyd Wells, as part of a project for Best VPN.
Bill Gates is famous for founding Microsoft and for being one of the richest people in the world – but you might be surprised by some of the life choices he has made. Not everything about this billionaire are what you may expect. Here are ten things you didn’t know about him.
He dropped out of university
Bill Gates excelled in school. He achieved an impressive SAT score of 1590 out of 1600 and enrolled at Harvard University in 1973. You might imagine from his academic leanings and eventual success that Gates graduated from Harvard and put his degree to use. But the truth he dropped out in his second year in order to pursue the practical applications of computer programming. You can’t argue with success; Microsoft was founded in 1975.
He has been arrested twice
Gates was first arrested in 1975 in Albuquerque, New Mexico; he was speeding and driving without a license. It is arguably the second offence in December 1977 that is more famous. It also occurred in Albuquerque, and was the result of a traffic violation. It was after this arrest that Gates’ famous mugshot was taken – in it his is wearing a bold floral shirt and is sporting a wide smile. It has been suggested that the mugshot provided the silhouette for the Microsoft Outlook default profile picture.
He exceeded his own goals
While at Harvard University, Gates assured his teachers that he would be a millionaire before the age of 30. He achieved this goal easily – so easily, in fact, that he was actually a billionaire by age 31. However, Bill wasn’t always as accurate with his predictions, as we’ll see later.
Until 1997 he flew economy class
Despite being one of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates continued to fly economy class whenever he took flights on Microsoft business. In 1997 he bought his own private jet as he didn’t feel the company should have to pay for his flights anymore.
He makes a serious amount of money every day
We all know that Bill Gates is rich, but when you breakdown his earnings it gives you a sense of exactly how much money he really has. Gates earns a staggering $20 million every day. That’s an average of $15,000 a minute, or $250 a second.
He would make a rich country
If Bill Gates was a country he would be the 37th richest country in the world.
He wasn’t the only founder of Microsoft
When most people think of Microsoft, Bill Gates is the only name that they associate with the company. But he was not the only founder, in fact Paul Allen co-founded the company (originally named Micro-Soft). Like Gates, Allen is exceedingly wealthy; not quite 37th-country-in-the-world-wealthy, but a certified billionaire. After contracting Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1982, Allen left Microsoft, although he didn’t resign from the board officially until 2000 and still has a reported 100 million shares in the business today.
He intends to donate the vast majority of his fortune
Gates has made a commitment to donate the vast majority of his wealth to charity. He has already given away many billions of charitable contributions through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
His predictions don’t always work out
As mentioned before, Bill Gates’ predictions have not always turned out to be quite right. In 1989, he stated that Microsoft would never make a 32-bit operating system – just four years later, the 32-bit Microsoft NT 3.1 launched. In 2004, he also claimed that spam emails would be “a thing of the past in two years’ time”.
He has a Porsche collection
As was already noted with his past misdemeanours, Bill Gates loves fast cars. He has a collection of Porsches including a Porsche 911 Carrera, a Porsche 930 and a Porsche 959 Coupe.
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