On October 28th, 1955, William Henry Gates III (AKA Bill Gates) was born in Seattle, Washington. Bill Gates started Microsoft at 19 years old in April 1975 with Paul Allen, and in 1987, at the age of 31, Gates became the world's youngest self-made billionaire following Microsoft's IPO. In 1999, during the height of the dot-com boom, his net worth briefly surpassed $100 billion, making him the first "centibilionaire" in history. From 1995 to 2017, Forbes ranked Gates as the wealthiest person in the world for 18 out of 24 years. As of 2026, Gate's net worth remains over $104 billion, even after he donated more than $59 billion to his own foundation. Some sources say that if Gates had kept his original stake in Microsoft, and did not donate any money to charity, he would be the world's first trillionaire, being worth an estimated $1.2 trillion today!
