Little-Known Facts About Well-Known Leaders - Bill Gates
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Everyone knows the most recent headlines about our country’s greatest leaders. In this feature, we’d like to shed some light on the lesser-known facts about these folks in hopes of giving you a little greater insight as to what makes them tick.
Bill Gates
- William Henry Gates was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, USA.
- His father William was a corporate lawyer, and his mother Mary was a schoolteacher.
- By the age of 17, Gates had sold his first computer program, a time-tabling system for his high school, for $4,200.
- Gates scored 1590 on his SAT standardized test. The top score for the test is 1600.
- Gates told his university teachers he would be a millionaire by age 30. He became a billionaire at age 31.
- While at Harvard, Gates co-wrote Altair BASIC, which became Microsoft’s (then called Micro-Soft) first product.
- He met his wife, Melinda French, in 1987 at a Microsoft press event in Manhattan while she was a worker for the company. They would go on to get married on New Years Day in 1994.
- In 2002, Bill Gates was considered more idolized than Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung in a poll of teenagers in Hong Kong and China. The survey was conducted by the City University of Hong Kong.
- In 2005, Gates was honored with the title Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II of England.
- As of the March 2007 issue of Forbes magazine, Bill Gates has been listed as Number 1 on “Forbes’ Richest People” list for 13 years in a row. His current net worth is about $56 billion.
- Gates has recently announced that he will be reducing his involvement at Microsoft and will be devoting more time to his charity work.
- He is currently having a building named after him at Carnegie Mellon University, called the Gates Building of Computer Science.
- Gates is the current owner of the Codex Leicester — a 72-page collection of Leonardo da Vinci’s scientific writings. The writings are a mixture of observations on water properties, astronomy, and rocks and fossils. Gates puts the Codex on public display once a year in a different city around the world.
- Bill Gates earns $250 every SECOND; that’s about $20 million a DAY and $7.8 billion a YEAR!
- If he drops a thousand-dollar bill, he needn’t even bother to pick it up because in the four seconds it would take him to pick it up, he would’ve already earned it back.
- The US national debt is about 5.62 trillion. If Bill Gates were to pay the debt by himself, he could finish it in fewer then 10 years.
