Bill Gates

Microsoft · Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation · 1955–

Born October 28, 1955

Bill Gates (born 1955 in Seattle) learned to program at thirteen on a school Teletype. In January 1975 he and Paul Allen read about the MITS Altair 8800, wrote a BASIC interpreter for a machine they had never seen, and founded Microsoft on 4 April. The decisive move came in 1980: asked by IBM for an operating system, Microsoft sourced one from Seattle Computer Products, shipped it as PC DOS, and kept the right to sell MS-DOS to every rival. Windows followed in 1985, the 1986 IPO made him the richest man alive, and a 2000 court order nearly split the company in two. He left Microsoft full-time in 2008 for the Gates Foundation, which will spend down and close in 2045.

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Which books are linked to Bill Gates?

These are examples from the documented shelf. Each label describes the connection; a book on the shelf is not always a recommendation.

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street by John Brooks — Recommendation. Source
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight — Positive review. Source
The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger — Recommendation. Source

See the full shelf and source notes

Contents

Career highlights

1955Born 28 October in Seattle, Washington.
1968In eighth grade at Lakeside School, the Mothers’ Club bought a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and block time on a General Electric computer; Gates wrote his first programs on it and was banned for a summer from Computer Center Corporation for exploiting operating-system bugs to get free machine time.
1972Founded Traf-O-Data at seventeen with Paul Allen and Paul Gilbert, building an Intel 8008 machine to read roadway traffic-counter tapes; it made a little money before Washington State began processing the tapes free, but left the pair able to simulate a microprocessor in software.
1975Read about the MITS Altair 8800 in Popular Electronics in January, wrote a BASIC interpreter with Allen on Harvard’s PDP-10 without ever touching an Altair, and watched it run first time in Albuquerque in March; Microsoft was founded on 4 April, Allen having coined the name ‘Micro-Soft’.
1976Published ‘An Open Letter to Hobbyists’ after a Homebrew Computer Club member copied a pre-release Altair BASIC tape and handed the duplicates round — ‘Most of you steal your software’ — the first public argument that software was property worth paying for.
1980IBM came to Microsoft in July wanting an operating system for its first personal computer; rather than write one, Microsoft took 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products — buying it outright for $25,000 the following July — shipped it to IBM as PC DOS, and kept the right to license MS-DOS to everyone else. Within a year more than seventy other manufacturers had taken it.
1985Shipped Windows 1.0 on 20 November, two years after announcing it, putting a graphical shell on top of MS-DOS.
1986Took Microsoft public on 13 March; the share-price surge eventually created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees.
1994Donated Microsoft stock to create the William H. Gates Foundation — the seed of the philanthropy that would eventually absorb the rest of his career.
1995Circulated ‘The Internet Tidal Wave’ memo on 26 May, turning the whole company toward the web; Internet Explorer was bundled into Windows, and by October 1997 the Justice Department was in court arguing the bundling broke a 1994 consent decree.
1998The Justice Department and twenty states filed United States v. Microsoft on 18 May; Gates’s videotaped deposition that August, in which he repeatedly could not recall his own emails, became the case’s defining exhibit.
2000Handed the CEO job to Steve Ballmer on 13 January and took the title chief software architect; Judge Jackson, having found Microsoft a monopolist on 5 November 1999, ordered it split in two on 7 June — a remedy the D.C. Circuit overturned on 28 June 2001 before the Justice Department settled for conduct rules that November. The family’s foundations merged the same year into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
2006Announced a two-year transition out of day-to-day work at Microsoft; Warren Buffett pledged more than $30 billion of Berkshire stock to the foundation.
2008Worked his last full-time day at Microsoft on 27 June, handing the chief-software-architect duties to Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie.
2010Launched the Giving Pledge in June with Melinda and Warren Buffett; by August roughly forty billionaires holding some $125 billion had promised to give away more than half their wealth.
2020Left the Microsoft board in March — and Berkshire Hathaway’s — six years after stepping down as chairman, to work full-time on health, climate, and education.
2025Published Source Code: My Beginnings in February, the first of three planned memoirs, and announced he would give away roughly $200 billion over two decades, with the foundation closing on 31 December 2045.

Lessons for founders

Own the layer everyone else has to build on. Microsoft’s fortune was not made by writing the best operating system but by making sure every PC maker had to license one from Redmond. Within a year of the IBM deal more than seventy manufacturers had taken MS-DOS, and every one of them made Microsoft’s standard harder to dislodge.
The terms matter more than the deal. When IBM asked for an operating system in July 1980, Microsoft did not have one; it bought 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products for $25,000 and delivered it as PC DOS. The value was entirely in the clause IBM did not insist on — Microsoft kept the right to sell the same system to IBM’s competitors.
Argue for your business model before the market believes in it. In February 1976, with Microsoft a few months old and Altair BASIC circulating on freely copied paper tape, Gates published ‘An Open Letter to Hobbyists’: ‘Most of you steal your software.’ It made him widely disliked in the hobbyist community and established, years ahead of the industry, that software was a product rather than a giveaway attached to hardware.
A failed venture is how you get ready for the real one. Traf-O-Data (1972) never made much money and died when Washington State started processing traffic tapes for free. But building it forced Gates and Allen to simulate an Intel processor in software, which is exactly how they wrote a BASIC interpreter in 1975 for an Altair they had never seen.
Commit before you are ready, then close the gap on the way. Gates and Allen wrote to MITS claiming a working BASIC before one existed. Allen wrote the bootloader in 8080 machine language on the flight to Albuquerque, having realised on approach that they had forgotten it. It ran first time.
One memo can turn a whole company. ‘The Internet Tidal Wave,’ circulated internally on 26 May 1995, reassigned the company’s priorities around the web in a single document. Microsoft went from having no browser strategy to shipping Internet Explorer inside Windows — and from there into the antitrust case that defined the next five years.
Winning the market invites the state. The same bundling that beat Netscape produced United States v. Microsoft, filed 18 May 1998. Judge Jackson found Microsoft a monopolist in November 1999 and ordered it broken in two in June 2000; the D.C. Circuit reversed the remedy but not the facts. The cost was five years of executive attention at the peak of the company’s power.
Read to change your mind, not to confirm it. Gates has run a public book blog for over a decade and treats reading as a way of being corrected. Of Hans Rosling’s Factfulness he wrote: ‘The framework Hans enunciates is one that took me decades of working in global development to create for myself, and I could have never expressed it in such a clear way. I’m going to try to use this model moving forward.’
Give your institution an expiry date. Most large foundations are built to last forever. In 2025 Gates announced the opposite: roughly $200 billion given away over two decades, and the Gates Foundation shutting down on 31 December 2045. A deadline forces spending on problems solvable now rather than endowment preservation.

On the Founders podcast

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Read about them

Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire

James Wallace and Jim Erickson

Wallace and Erickson examine Gates’s life and Microsoft’s early growth, using interviews with friends, employees and business rivals. source ↗

Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry — and Made Himself the Richest Man in America

Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews

Manes and Andrews’s 1993 biography examines Gates’s life and Microsoft’s rise, drawing on interviews with him and people around him. source ↗

Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace

James Wallace

Wallace examines Gates and Microsoft’s competition, antitrust scrutiny and internet strategy. source ↗

Bill Gates: A Biography

Michael B. Becraft

Becraft’s biography covers Gates’s early life, Microsoft, its trial and his philanthropy. source ↗

Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside

Jennifer Edstrom and Marlin Eller

The book examines Microsoft under Gates through the account of Jennifer Edstrom and former Microsoft developer Marlin Eller. source ↗

Idea Man: A Memoir by the Co-founder of Microsoft

Paul Allen

Allen’s memoir describes his partnership with Gates and their work founding Microsoft. This connection identifies Gates as a subject of Allen’s account, without implying Gates endorsed it. source ↗

In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World

Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz

Gates is interviewed about operating systems and the future of an internet-centered industry. This records his participation, without implying he recommended the book. source ↗

Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing

Randall E. Stross

The publisher description names Gates among the people who appear in Stross’s account of the personal computer industry and Jobs’s NeXT venture. source ↗

The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts Its Competition

Randall E. Stross

Stross examines Microsoft's hiring, product development, customer feedback and competition under Gates. This is a company-history connection, without implying Gates recommended the book. source ↗

The Making of Microsoft: How Bill Gates and His Team Created the World's Most Successful Software Company

Daniel Ichbiah and Susan L. Knepper

Ichbiah and Knepper examine Microsoft and Gates's role in building the company. The contents include BASIC Beginnings and Microsoft's First Year; this is a company-history connection, without implying Gates recommended it. source ↗

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Walter Isaacson

Gates is one of the technology pioneers covered in Isaacson's history of computers and the Internet. The book examines collaboration among engineers, inventors and entrepreneurs; this is a featured-subject connection, without implying Gates recommended it. source ↗

Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets, and Manages People

Michael A. Cusumano and Richard W. Selby

An observed study of Microsoft under Gates, including software development and management. This records its subject, not a Gates endorsement. source ↗

Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and Its Battle with Microsoft

Michael A. Cusumano and David B. Yoffie

The licensed chapter examines Gates’s response to Netscape, including free browser and server products. It is not a recommendation by him. source ↗

In their own words

Source Code: My Beginnings

Bill Gates

Gates writes about his own childhood and early computing experiences, through leaving college and starting Microsoft with Paul Allen. source ↗

The Road Ahead

Bill Gates with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson

Gates wrote this book with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson. In his November 24, 2020 retrospective, he discusses both successful forecasts and ideas that took longer than he expected. source ↗

Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy

Bill Gates and Collins Hemingway

Gates, with Collins Hemingway, argues for integrated digital systems using examples from Microsoft and other companies. source ↗

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

Bill Gates

Gates wrote this 2021 book on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, combining his research with a plan for technology, policy and individual action. source ↗