How much is Bill Gates Worth? Bill Gates Net Worth in 2025

Bill Gates Net Worth: How rich is Bill Gates? & How much money is Bill Gates worth? Time to find out!

Bill Gates is an American business magnate, investor, author, and philanthropist and his current net worth is $126.6 billion.

He started his life in Seattle, Washington as the son of William H. Gates Sr. a lawyer, and Mary Maxwell Gates, a member of directors for First Interstate BancSystem and the United Way.

Growing up, his parents had a different path for him, they wanted him to practice law, like his father, but as you are all aware, that didn’t go according to plans.

At the age of 13 he attended the Lakeside school, a private preparatory school, and while there he took an interested in programming the General Electric system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest.

On this machine he wrote his first computer program, which was an implementation of tic-tac-toe that let users to play against the computer.

After this experience he began fascinated with computers, especially by this machine and its ability to always execute software code perfectly.

He and three other students, Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans, were banned to use school’s computers for the summer, after the school caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to gain free computer time.

When the ban ended, the students offered to find real bugs this time in CCC’s software in exchange for more computer time.

He went to CCC’s offices and learned source codes for various programs that ran on their system, instead of using the system via Teletype.

The students continued to find bugs in the CCC’s systems until the company went out of business in 1970.

A year later, Information Sciences, Inc., hired them to write a payroll program in COBOL, in exchange of computer time and royalties.

After that everyone became aware of his talents and he continued by writing the school’s computer program to schedule students in classes.

The funny thing about it is that he would modify the code so that he was placed in classes with “a disproportionate number of interesting girls.”

When he was 17, he and his friend Allen, created a company called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.

After graduating from high school in 1973, he enrolled at Harvard College where he chose pre-law major but took rigorous mathematics and graduate level computer science classes.

After two years at Harvard he dropped out and while in touch with his friend Allen, they decided, after the release of the MITS Altair 8800 based on the Intel 8080 CPU, to start their own computer software company.

Their software company, Microsoft, became the world’s largest PC software company, which is the main source of his income, although he stepped out in 2014 as the CEO of the company and went on to write and co-write several books.

Since 1987 he has been on Forbes list of the world’s richest people and the wealthiest from 1995 to 2007 and again in 2009 and has been the richest man on Earth since then.

In 2009, he and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett, founded The Giving Pledge, whereby they, and other billionaires, pledge to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropy.

Apart from his software company he is known for his philanthropic and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.

He has been married with Melinda Gates since 1994 and together the couple has three kids.

This wraps up our Bill Gates Net Worth profile!