How Did Bill Gates Become So Rich? A Rummage-Sale Computer, a Product He Hadn't Built Yet, and the Judge Who Ordered Microsoft Cut in Two
It is March 1975. A plane is dropping toward Albuquerque, New Mexico.
One passenger has a notebook open and is scribbling numbers as fast as he can.
In his bag is a roll of paper tape. On that tape is a computer program that has never once run on the machine it was written for. Nobody who wrote it has even seen that machine.
Tomorrow morning, he has to show it to the man who builds it.
And he has just realised the program is useless. They forgot a piece. Without it, the computer cannot even read the tape.
So he is writing the missing piece by hand, in ones and zeros, before the wheels touch the runway.
If it fails, there is no company. No Microsoft. No fortune.
The passenger was Paul Allen. The program had been written with his friend from school, a 19-year-old Harvard student named Bill Gates.
The short answer Bill Gates became rich by co-founding Microsoft in 1975 and keeping a huge ownership stake as it grew. His big break was a 1980 deal to supply the operating system for IBM's first PC, while keeping the right to sell it to every other PC maker. When Microsoft listed in 1986, his 45% stake was worth $350 million. By 1999 he was worth about $100 billion. His fortune came from ownership, not salary. |
If you have ever wondered how one man went from a school computer club to the top of the world's rich list for most of 23 years, this is the full story.
You will see the near-misses nobody talks about: the friend he lost, the deal he signed for a product he did not own yet, and the judge who ordered his company cut in two.
And at the end, you will get the part most Bill Gates articles skip: what an ordinary investor can actually copy, and what you absolutely should not.
In this story:
Part 1: A Rummage Sale That Changed the World
Bill Gates was born in Seattle in 1955. His father was a lawyer. His mother, Mary, was a teacher turned civic leader who sat on bank and charity boards.
Keep her name in mind. She comes back at the single most important moment in this story.
Young Bill was not a model student at first. He was bright, restless and argued with everyone, including his parents.
His parents enrolled him at Lakeside, a private school in north Seattle.
The machine nobody else had
In 1968, the Lakeside Mothers' Club held a rummage sale.
With the money, reportedly about $3,000, they did something almost no school in America had done. They bought a Teletype terminal, half typewriter and half telegraph, and paid for time on a General Electric computer over a phone line.
Computers then cost tens of thousands of dollars. Most adults had never touched one.
A 13-year-old eighth-grader named Bill Gates walked into that room and, in a sense, never walked out.
The friends in the Teletype room
He was not alone. A tall older boy named Paul Allen, 15, was always there too. So were two others, Kent Evans and Ric Weiland.
The money from the Mothers' Club ran out fast. Gates later said the students burned through it so quickly that it was awkward for the teachers.
So the boys did what hungry people do. They found another way.
They formed the Lakeside Programmers Club. A local firm, Computer Center Corporation, let them use its computer for free if they found bugs in its system. Later, they wrote a payroll program for another company in exchange for computer time.
Pause on that. Before he could drive, Bill Gates was trading his skill for the one thing he could not afford.
That is the first pattern in his whole life. When the door was locked, he did not wait. He traded his way in.
The friend he lost
Kent Evans was Bill's closest friend. They talked every night. They read about business, planned careers and pictured working together for life.
In May 1972, a year before they would have graduated, Kent died in a mountain-climbing accident. He was 17.
Gates has said he still remembers Kent's phone number. In his 2025 memoir, Source Code, he describes crying on the chapel steps as hundreds of people filed in for the memorial.
He decided he would now do the things he and Kent had planned. As he later put it, "I'll do it without Kent."
He turned back to the one other friend who understood computers the way he did: Paul Allen.
Part 2: The Failure Before the Fortune
Gates and Allen's first real company was not Microsoft.
It was called Traf-O-Data. It used a small computer to read the paper tapes that traffic counters produced on roads, and turn them into reports for city engineers.
It never became a big business.
Most success stories skip this part. They should not. Traf-O-Data taught the two of them how to build software for a tiny, cheap computer chip. That exact skill would make them rich three years later.
Harvard, and the restlessness
In 1973, Gates went to Harvard. He had been accepted by Princeton and Yale too.
He found out quickly that he was no longer the smartest person in every room. He spent nights in the university's computer lab instead of the lecture hall.
Allen, meanwhile, had left college and taken a job at Honeywell near Boston. He kept pushing the same idea: computers were about to become cheap, and whoever wrote the software for them would win.
Bill agreed. They just needed the machine to arrive.
Part 3: The Magazine Cover and the Bold Lie
In December 1974, Paul Allen was walking through Harvard Square when he saw a magazine on a newsstand.
The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics had a computer on the cover. The Altair 8800, a kit made by a small Albuquerque firm called MITS, sold by mail order to hobbyists.
Allen ran to tell Bill. This was it.
"We've got BASIC for your Altair"
The Altair had no keyboard, no screen and no language anyone could easily program in. It had switches and blinking lights.
Gates and Allen contacted MITS founder Ed Roberts and told him they had a version of the BASIC programming language ready for his computer.
They did not. They had not written a line. They did not even own an Altair.
Roberts said what everyone was telling him: plenty of people claimed to have BASIC. Whoever showed up first with one that worked would get the deal.
Eight weeks, no machine
What followed is one of the great sprints in business history.
They had roughly eight weeks. Allen built a program on Harvard's big PDP-10 computer that pretended to be an Altair. Gates wrote most of BASIC itself, squeezing it into a tiny amount of memory. A Harvard student named Monte Davidoff joined to help with the maths routines.
In March 1975, Allen flew to Albuquerque with the paper tape. You know the rest of that flight now. He wrote the loader by hand on final approach.
The next morning at MITS, he fed the tape into a real Altair for the very first time.
The Teletype paused. Then it clattered and printed two words: MEMORY SIZE?
It worked. First try.
Roberts agreed to sell their BASIC with his computer. On April 4, 1975, the two friends formed a partnership they called Micro-Soft.
Pause on this for a second Gates sold something before he had built it, and then worked like his life depended on delivering it. That is a risky habit and it is not one to copy with your savings. But notice what made it work: he had spent seven years, since that Teletype room, learning the skill. The bluff was about the deadline, not the ability. |
Rich? Not even close
In its first year, Micro-Soft took in $16,005 in revenue. Gates and Allen were paying themselves about $9 an hour.
Gates eventually insisted on a bigger share, arguing he was doing more of the work. Allen agreed to a 64–36 split in Bill's favour. That decision matters enormously later, because ownership is where Gates' fortune comes from.
Part 4: The Struggles Nobody Puts on a Poster
The Altair was a hit with hobbyists. Their BASIC was popular too.
There was just one problem. Almost nobody was paying for it.
"Most of you steal your software"
Hobbyists were copying the BASIC tape and passing it around for free. At one famous computer club meeting in California, a member made dozens of copies and handed them out.
On February 3, 1976, 20-year-old Bill Gates wrote an angry open letter to the hobbyist community.
He said fewer than 10% of Altair owners had bought BASIC. He worked out that the royalties made their work worth less than $2 an hour. And he wrote one line that people still quote 50 years later: "Most of you steal your software."
The letter made him enemies. But it also made him change the business.
Microsoft stopped relying on small royalties from hobbyists and started selling its software to computer makers under fixed-price contracts, typically in the tens of thousands of dollars each.
That shift, from selling to individuals to licensing to manufacturers, is the seed of everything that followed.
The night in jail
There is a less flattering story from this period, and Gates tells it himself.
In 1977, he was pulled over in Albuquerque, driving without a licence, and taken to jail. The company had kept enough cash around for Allen to come down and bail him out.
Gates later said the lesson that stayed with him was to always keep cash on hand, so he could bail himself out.
He took that rule far beyond a jail cell.
The payroll fear
As Microsoft grew, Gates hired people older than him, with mortgages and children.
He has said he lay awake worrying about one question: if customers stopped paying, could he still meet the payroll?
So he made a rule. Microsoft would always keep enough cash in the bank to pay every employee for a full year, even if not a single dollar came in.
Most young founders spend everything chasing growth. Gates built a wall of cash first. Keep that in mind. It is one of the most useful lessons in this whole story for an ordinary person.
By 1977, the business was strong enough that he never went back to Harvard. In 1979, Microsoft moved home to the Seattle area.
Microsoft was respected by programmers. But it was still small.
Then, in the summer of 1980, the biggest computer company on Earth came knocking.
Part 5: The Climax: The IBM Deal
In 1980, IBM was the giant of computing. And it was in a hurry.
It wanted to launch a personal computer fast, before smaller rivals like Apple took the market. To move quickly, it would use outside parts and outside software.
IBM asked Microsoft for its programming languages. Then it asked about something much bigger: the operating system, the core program that makes a computer run.
Microsoft did not have one.
The meeting that went wrong for someone else
IBM was pointed to Digital Research, whose CP/M system was the most popular of the day.
That meeting, in August 1980, did not produce a deal. Accounts differ on exactly why. But IBM wanted to buy the system outright and rename it, and Digital Research wanted to keep selling it on its own terms. IBM walked away.
So it came back to Microsoft.
Remember Mary Gates?
Here is where his mother comes back.
Mary Gates sat on the national United Way board. So did IBM's chairman, John Opel. She had talked to him about her son's company.
When Microsoft's name came up inside IBM, Opel reportedly recognised it as the company run by "Mary Gates' son."
Historians argue about how much this mattered. Some say it only reassured IBM about a deal that was already happening. But Gates himself has credited his mother's role. In a giant company nervous about trusting a small firm run by a 24-year-old, it did not hurt.
Buying the product he had already promised
IBM wanted an operating system. Microsoft did not have one. So Gates found one.
A few miles away, a small Seattle firm called Seattle Computer Products had a system written by a programmer named Tim Paterson. He had called it QDOS: the "Quick and Dirty Operating System."
Microsoft first paid $25,000 for a licence to it. Seattle Computer Products did not know who the customer was.
IBM and Microsoft signed their deal in November 1980.
Then, on July 27, 1981, weeks before the IBM PC was announced, Microsoft paid another $50,000 to own the system outright. All in, about $75,000.
It became MS-DOS.
The clause that made him a billionaire
This is the most important sentence in the whole story, so read it slowly.
Microsoft did not sell MS-DOS to IBM. It licensed it, and kept the right to license it to every other computer maker too.
IBM thought the value was in the hardware. Gates thought the value was in the software.
Within a few years, dozens of companies were building cheap "IBM-compatible" PCs. Almost every one of them needed an operating system. Almost every one of them paid Microsoft.
A detail worth knowing Seattle Computer Products later sued Microsoft, saying it had hidden that IBM was the customer when it bought the system cheaply. The case was settled for close to $1 million. Even then, it was one of the best bargains in business history. |
Part 6: The Day He Became Very Rich
By the mid-1980s, Microsoft was growing fast and making real profits. Gates did not want to go public. The company did not need the money.
But he had been paying staff partly in shares. Microsoft worked out it would soon have more than 500 shareholders, which would force it to register with the US regulators anyway. So in 1986, Gates agreed to list the company.
He even pushed bankers to price the shares lower than they wanted, so early buyers would not be burned.
March 13, 1986
Microsoft shares were sold to the public at $21. By the end of the first day, they had touched $35.50.
Gates sold about $1.6 million worth of his shares. He kept the rest: a 45% stake worth $350 million.
He was 30 years old.
The next year, as the shares kept climbing, he became a billionaire at 31, at the time the youngest self-made billionaire ever.
Windows, and a computer on every desk
Gates had a phrase he repeated for years: a computer on every desk and in every home.
Windows was how he got there. Early versions were clumsy, but later ones caught on. Then, on August 24, 1995, Microsoft launched Windows 95 with a reported $300 million marketing campaign and midnight queues at computer shops.
According to Microsoft, it sold 7 million copies in its first five weeks and about 40 million in its first year.
That same year, Forbes ranked Gates the richest person in the world for the first time.
He would hold that spot for 18 of the next 23 years.
Part 7: The Near-Deaths at the Top
You might think the danger was over. It was not. The two biggest threats to Microsoft came when it was already a giant.
The tidal wave he almost missed
In the early 1990s, Gates was focused on PCs and Windows. The internet looked like a toy for universities.
Then a small company called Netscape released a web browser that millions of people loved. Suddenly, the most important program on your computer might not be Windows at all.
On May 26, 1995, Gates sent his top executives a long memo. He made the internet the company's top priority, and wrote a line that became famous: "The Internet is a tidal wave. It changes the rules."
He turned the whole company around in months. Microsoft built Internet Explorer and bundled it into Windows.
It worked. Too well.
The judge who ordered Microsoft cut in two
In May 1998, the US Department of Justice and a group of states sued Microsoft, accusing it of using its Windows monopoly to crush Netscape.
The trial dragged on for months. In early April 2000, last-ditch settlement talks collapsed. On Monday, April 3, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled that Microsoft had broken US antitrust law.
That day, Microsoft shares fell about 14.5%. Roughly $80 billion of the company's value vanished. Gates personally lost about $11 billion on paper in a single day.
Then came the real blow.
On June 7, 2000, the judge ordered Microsoft to be split into two companies: one for Windows, one for everything else.
The company Gates had built since he was 19 was going to be broken apart. At the same time, the dot-com bubble was bursting. Microsoft's share price fell by roughly two-thirds from peak to bottom in just over a year.
Gates had already handed the chief executive job to his old Harvard friend Steve Ballmer that January. He was, for the first time since that flight to Albuquerque, not in control of what happened next.
Seven judges, one ruling
Microsoft appealed.
On June 28, 2001, a federal appeals court, all seven judges agreeing, threw out the breakup order. It agreed Microsoft had broken the law, but said the judge had acted improperly, including by giving interviews to reporters during the case, and that breaking up the company was too extreme.
In September 2001, the government said it would no longer seek a breakup. A settlement with strict rules followed.
Microsoft survived in one piece.
But Gates came out of it changed. Within a few years, his attention was moving away from software and toward something else entirely.
The 6 Moments It Could Have Ended
Here is the pattern of Gates' life in one table. Almost every leap forward came right after a moment that could have ended everything.
Year | The danger | What came next |
|---|---|---|
1972 | His best friend and future partner, Kent Evans, dies at 17 | Gates turns to Paul Allen, and they start working together seriously |
1975 | They promise BASIC for a machine they have never seen | It works on the first try, and Micro-Soft is born |
1976 | Almost nobody pays for their software | They switch to licensing to computer makers, the model that later makes them rich |
1980 | IBM wants an operating system Microsoft does not have | Gates buys one for about $75,000 and keeps the right to sell it to everyone |
1995 | The internet threatens to make Windows irrelevant | The "tidal wave" memo turns Microsoft around in months |
2000 | A judge orders Microsoft split in two, as its shares crash | An appeals court reverses the breakup in 2001 |
Part 8: The Success: Where the Money Actually Comes From
So how rich is Bill Gates now, and where does it really come from?
How rich is Bill Gates today?
On November 7, 2026, Forbes' real-time tracker put Bill Gates' net worth at $121.3 billion, ranking him No. 17 in the world. On the 2026 Forbes World's Billionaires list, published in the spring, he was at $108 billion.
That is lower on the list than he has been in decades. And the reason is the most surprising part of his story.
He earned a salary. He got rich from owning.
Gates was paid a salary at Microsoft, but it was never what made him rich. What made him rich was owning a huge slice of the company, and holding most of it while Microsoft grew from a $777 million company at its 1986 listing to roughly $3.9 trillion in November 2026.
Over the years, he sold and gave away most of those shares. Forbes now estimates he owns less than 1% of Microsoft.
Today his money sits mainly in Cascade Investment, a private investment firm he set up in 1995. Cascade is run day to day by Michael Larson and holds a broad mix of businesses: shares in companies such as Canadian National Railway and Deere, a majority stake in Four Seasons Hotels, and reportedly more than a quarter of a million acres of American farmland, making him one of the largest private farmland owners in the US.
Read that list again. Railways. Tractors. Hotels. Farmland.
The man who made his fortune in the most exciting industry of the century now keeps it in some of the most boring businesses on Earth.
The fortune he is giving away
In 2000, Gates and his then-wife Melinda French Gates set up what is now the Gates Foundation. In its first 25 years, it gave away more than $100 billion, much of it on vaccines, malaria, polio and child health. About 41% of its money so far has come from Warren Buffett. Forbes says Gates himself has given the foundation more than $63.9 billion.
Then, in May 2025, he went further. He announced he would give away virtually all of his remaining wealth through the foundation, which will spend more than $200 billion and close its doors for good on December 31, 2045.
In his own words, he will "give away virtually all my wealth."
In April 2026, Forbes worked out what Gates would be worth if you added back everything he has given away. The answer: about $356 billion more than his fortune at the time. That would make him the second-richest person alive.
What $1,000 in Microsoft's IPO would have become
Here is the number everyone wants to know.
If you had bought $1,000 of Microsoft at its $21 listing price in 1986, you would have had about 47.6 shares.
After nine stock splits, each original share became 288 shares. So you would now own about 13,714 shares.
At Microsoft's closing price of $530.61 on November 6, 2026, that is worth roughly $7.28 million, before counting a single dividend.
The honest catch To get that $7.28 million, you would have had to hold through the 2000 crash, when Microsoft fell by about two-thirds, and then sit through roughly 16 years when the shares went nowhere. You would also have had to pick Microsoft, out of thousands of 1986 stocks, many of which no longer exist. Almost nobody did all three. |
How Bill Gates Did It: 7 Habits Behind the Fortune
Strip away the luck and the headlines, and seven habits show up again and again in Gates' story.
No. 1: He mastered one skill early, then went all in
By the time the Altair appeared, Gates had already spent about seven years programming. When the moment came, he was ready in eight weeks because he had prepared for seven years.
No. 2: He traded for access when he had no money
The free computer time for finding bugs. The payroll program for computer hours. When he could not buy what he needed, he offered value instead.
No. 3: He saw where the real value sat
IBM thought the money was in the box. Gates thought it was in the software inside every box. Keeping the right to license MS-DOS to everyone is the single decision that built his fortune.
No. 4: He saved like a pessimist
A full year of payroll in the bank, always. The writer Morgan Housel later summed up Gates' approach as saving like a pessimist and investing like an optimist. That cushion meant Microsoft never had to make a desperate decision.
No. 5: He kept his ownership
He took a bigger share early, sold only small amounts at the listing, and let compounding do the heavy lifting for decades. His salary never made him a billionaire. His shares did.
No. 6: He changed course fast when he was wrong
He underestimated the internet. Then he wrote one memo and turned a company of thousands around in months. Being wrong did not ruin him. Staying wrong would have.
No. 7: He thought about what the money was for
His mother pushed him toward giving long before it was fashionable. Today he is trying to spend his fortune before he dies. You do not have to agree with all his choices to see the point: money is a tool, and he decided early what he wanted it to do.
The Lessons for Ordinary Investors (Including One Twist)
Now the part that matters for your money.
The wrong lesson: "I need to find the next Microsoft"
After reading a story like this, it is tempting to go looking for the next Microsoft and put everything into it.
Please do not.
For every Microsoft in 1986, there were dozens of software and hardware companies that looked just as exciting and went bust. This is called survivorship bias: we only hear the stories of the winners, so winning looks normal.
Even if you had found Microsoft, you would have had to hold it through a two-thirds crash and a 16-year wait. Most people sell in a panic long before that. If you have ever done it, you are in very large company. Here is why smart people sell at the very bottom, and the one rule that stops it.
The evidence on picking winners is not kind either. Over long periods, most professional fund managers fail to beat a simple index. You can see the numbers in Stock Picking vs. the S&P 500: What 20 Years of Results Say About Who Actually Wins.
The right lesson: own great businesses, and give them time
Here is the twist. You did not need to find Microsoft to benefit from it.
Anyone who owned a simple S&P 500 index fund over the last few decades owned Microsoft automatically, because it was one of the biggest companies in America. Today it makes up close to 6% of the biggest S&P 500 funds. When Microsoft grew, you grew with it. When it stumbled, the other 499 companies helped carry you.
That is Gates' lesson in its safest form: wealth comes from owning great businesses, not from your salary, and holding them for a very long time.
Gates himself now behaves less like a stock picker and more like a patient owner of many boring, durable businesses. So does his friend Warren Buffett, who famously told ordinary people to buy a low-cost index fund. Here is why the world's greatest stock picker tells people not to pick stocks.
And yes, even the index has long flat stretches. Here is what the record shows over every 20-year period since 1926.
Gates' habits, translated for your money
What Gates did | What you can do |
|---|---|
Kept a year of payroll in the bank | Keep 6–12 months of living costs in cash before you invest |
Owned instead of only earning | Turn part of every pay cheque into ownership of businesses |
Held through the crash | Write down now what you will do in the next crash, and stick to it |
Changed course when he was wrong | If your plan is not working, fix it calmly; do not double down |
Moved his money into boring, durable assets | Choose a simple, low-cost, broad fund over exciting tips |
If you want to see what steady ownership can become, here is what $500 a month in an S&P 500 index fund becomes after 10, 20 and 30 years. And if you live outside the US, here is how anyone, in any country, can own a piece of America's 500 biggest companies.
What to do tonight
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Frequently Asked Questions
How did Bill Gates get rich?
He co-founded Microsoft in 1975 and kept a large ownership stake. His 1980 deal to supply the operating system for IBM's PC, while keeping the right to license it to other PC makers, made Microsoft dominant. His 45% stake was worth $350 million at the 1986 listing and about $100 billion by 1999.
What is Bill Gates' net worth in 2026?
Forbes' real-time tracker put it at $121.3 billion on November 7, 2026, ranking him No. 17 in the world. The 2026 Forbes World's Billionaires list had him at $108 billion. The figure moves daily with markets, and is shrinking over time because he is giving most of it away.
How much of Microsoft does Bill Gates still own?
Very little. Forbes estimates his stake is under 1% after decades of selling and giving shares to his foundation, including a large gift in 2022. The trust that funds the Gates Foundation sold its last Microsoft shares in early 2026. Most of his wealth is now held through Cascade Investment.
Did Bill Gates steal MS-DOS?
No. Microsoft legally licensed and then bought the system, first called QDOS, from Seattle Computer Products for about $75,000 in total in 1980 and 1981. The seller later sued, saying Microsoft hid that IBM was the customer, and the case was settled for close to $1 million.
How old was Bill Gates when he became a billionaire?
He was 31. Microsoft listed on March 13, 1986, when he was 30, making his stake worth $350 million. As the shares kept rising, he crossed $1 billion the next year, becoming at that time the youngest self-made billionaire in history.
Did Bill Gates drop out of Harvard?
Yes. He entered Harvard in 1973, took leave in 1975 to build Micro-Soft with Paul Allen in Albuquerque, and by 1977 had left for good. Harvard later gave him an honorary degree.
How much money has Bill Gates given away?
Forbes says he has given more than $63.9 billion to the Gates Foundation. The foundation gave away over $100 billion in its first 25 years and plans to spend more than $200 billion more before it closes on December 31, 2045.
Could an ordinary investor have gotten rich from Microsoft?
Yes, but it was hard. $1,000 at the 1986 listing would be worth about $7.28 million today, before dividends, but only if you held through a two-thirds crash and a 16-year flat stretch. Owning a broad index fund gave ordinary people a share of Microsoft's growth without needing to pick it.
The End of the Story (and the Start of Yours)
Go back to that plane over the New Mexico desert.
A young man writing ones and zeros on a notepad, hoping a roll of paper tape would work on a machine he had never seen.
Everything that came after, the IBM deal, Windows, the billions, the courtroom, the foundation, rested on that one moment of preparation meeting opportunity.
You will probably never have a moment quite like that. Almost nobody does.
But you do not need one.
The part of Bill Gates' story you can copy is not the genius or the luck. It is the quiet part: keeping a cushion of cash, owning instead of only earning, holding on through the crash, and giving great businesses time to grow.
That works for a man worth $121 billion. It also works for a teacher, a nurse or a small business owner with $300 a month.
If you have been burned in the stock market before, it is not too late to start again on calmer ground.
I wrote a free report called "Why You Lost Money in the Stock Market (And Why It Wasn't Your Fault)." In it, you will discover:
The hidden reasons most ordinary investors lose money, even when they work hard and do their research
Why the system is quietly stacked against you, and how to step out of the trap
The simple, boring approach that lets ordinary people own great businesses for decades, the way Gates' fortune grew
What to do first if you are starting over after a big loss
You might also enjoy: How Did Jensen Huang Become So Rich?, Why Warren Buffett Still Lives in the Same House, Rejected 30 Times: How Jack Ma Turned Failure Into a Billion-Dollar Empire and The 7 "Boring" Daily Habits That Separate Self-Made Billionaires From Everyone Else.
About the Author
Stephen Loke has been a student of the market for more than 15 years. He is also an agritourism entrepreneur whose farm has been featured in Bloomberg News and Asahi Shimbun.
He writes Invest And Grow for ordinary people who have been burned by the stock market and want a calmer, simpler way to build wealth for retirement.
This article is general education, not personal financial advice. I am not a licensed financial adviser, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any investment. Net worth figures are estimates that change daily.
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PC Games Hardware, MS-DOS purchase history and settlement: https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Retrospektive-Thema-214694/Specials/MS-DOS-45-Jahre-Microsoft-86-DOS-Kauf-Jubilaeum-1549433/
Benzinga, Mary Gates and the IBM deal: https://benzinga.com/z/46441390
Quartz, Gates on cash reserves and payroll: https://qz.com/work/1213317/bill-gates-tells-ellen-degeneres-his-biggest-worry-as-a-31-year-old-billionaire
Benzinga, Gates' 1977 arrest and cash lesson: https://benzinga.com/z/44265974
Computer History Museum, "The Internet Tidal Wave" memo (May 26, 1995): https://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/may/26/
CNBC, the Internet Tidal Wave memo at 25: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/26/how-bill-gates-described-the-internet-tidal-wave-in-1995.html
TIME, Windows 95 at 20: https://time.com/4007890/20-years-microsoft-windows-95
PC Gamer, Windows 95 launch sales: https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/happy-birthday-windows-95
CNN Money, Microsoft and Nasdaq on April 3, 2000: https://money.cnn.com/2000/04/03/markets/markets_newyork/
CNN Money, Microsoft case chronology: https://money.cnn.com/2001/09/06/technology/microsoft_chronology/
CNNfn, appeals court vacates breakup (June 28, 2001): https://cnnfn.cnn.com/2001/06/28/technology/microsoft_appeal/
Benzinga, Microsoft breakup order and share-price fall: https://benzinga.com/z/11846883
Associated Press via PBS NewsHour, Gates pledges fortune, foundation to close in 2045: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/bill-gates-pledges-remaining-fortune-to-gates-foundation-which-will-close-in-2045
KOMO News / AP, share of foundation money from Warren Buffett: https://komonews.com/news/local/bill-gates-pledges-his-remaining-fortune-to-gates-foundation-which-will-close-in-20-years
IBTimes, Gates Foundation Trust exits Microsoft (2026): https://www.ibtimes.com/why-bill-gatess-full-microsoft-exit-shouldnt-have-come-surprise-final-32-billion-sale-ends-3802959
Fox Business, Microsoft closing price, November 6, 2026: https://www.foxbusiness.com/quote?stockTicker=msft
Trefis, Microsoft market value, November 2026: https://www.trefis.com/data/companies/msft
Yahoo Finance / Benzinga, Gates' years as world's richest person: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-worlds-richest-man-155055431.html
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