Bill Gates is one of the most famous people on the planet for excellent reasons. In part, Gates was one of the co-founders of Microsoft, meaning that his name is not just synonymous with wealth but also with the fundamental way that computers have changed our lives in recent decades.
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 10 things you didn’t know about him.
1.
HE HAS BEEN ARRESTED TWICE.
In 1975, Gates was arrested for speeding while driving without a driver’s license. While in 1977, Gates was arrested a second time for running a red light while driving without a driver’s license. These are the only times that he has been arrested, though it might be interesting to note that he has had famous encounters with the legal system because of antitrust litigation against the company that he headed.
2.
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.
3.
GATES MET MELINDA THROUGH WORK.
Gates met his wife, Melinda, through work. To be precise, the then-named Melinda French had just started working as a product marketing manager at Microsoft when she met him at an Expo dinner. They managed to keep their relationship as an open secret at the company for years and years, but chose to make it public when they became engaged in 1993 before getting married in 1994.
4.
HE MAKES A SERIOUS AMOUNT OF MONEY EVERYDAY.
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 over $20 million every day. That’s an average of $15,000 a minute, or $250 a second.
5.
HE WOULD MAKE A RICH COUNTRY.
By comparing Gates net worth. We can evaluate that if Bill Gates was a country, it would be 37th Richest in the world.
6.
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 (1953 - 2018) co-founded the company (originally named Micro-Soft). Like Gates, Allen was exceedingly wealthy; a certified billionaire. After contracting Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1982, Allen left Microsoft, although he didn’t resign from the board officially until 2000.
7.
HIS PREDICTIONS DON'T ALWAYS WORKOUT.
Despite his business acumen, Gates has been known to make incorrect predictions from time to time. For example, he once predicted that email spam would be eliminated within no more than two years in 2004, which is proven false by the fact that email spam is still popping up on a regular basis in email inboxes throughout the world. Unfortunately, this case shows that human ingenuity can be put to use doing great good as well as something that can be called seemingly perpetual irritation if not necessarily great evil.
8.
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. Gates is not the only business magnate with an interest in making the world a better place to live in. Famously, this can be seen in the example of the “Gates Giving Pledge,” which saw Gates as well as two of his friends, Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett promising to donate half of their wealth to charitable causes. For people who are unfamiliar with the other two men, Zuckerberg is the co-founder of Facebook, while Buffett is one of the most famous and one of the most successful investors on Wall Street.
9.
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. Then again, anyone would love to have their own car collection.
10.
HE HAS A HARVARD DEGREE EVEN THOUGH HE DROPPED OUT.
Amusingly, even though Gates dropped out of Harvard way back in 1975, he actually has a Harvard degree because the school chose to honor him with an honorary degree in 2007. This is far from being his only award of this kind, seeing as how he has other honorary degrees from a remarkable range of famous schools, ranging from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom to Tsinghua University in China and Waseda University in Japan.
