A list of fun facts about one and only Bill Gates. 

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955.  At age seventeen, Gates had already written and sold his first computer program to his high school for $4,200.    Gates scored an impressive 1590 out of 1600 on his SATs and subsequently attended Harvard.  During the course of his time at Harvard he participated in writing Altair BASIC, which would go on to become the first Microsoft product.  Gates became chairman of the board and President of Microsoft in 1981 after overseeing the restructure of the company.  The first commercially available version of Microsoft Windows was launched on November 20, 1985.  At age 31 he became a billionaire.  The company also partnered with IBM to develop the first version of the operating system OS/2 however this partnership ended in 1991 and Microsoft began to focus on developing the Windows NT kernel.  In January 2000, Gates decided to step down from his position as CEO at Microsoft while remaining chairman of the company and creating the position of chief software architect for himself.  In June of 2006, Gates further decided to only work part-time at Microsoft and instead devote the bulk of his time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Gates, holding more than eight percent of the company's common stock, is the largest individual shareholder of Microsoft.  Outside of Microsoft he has co-authored several books.  Bill Gates' incredible wealth is perhaps as notorious as his achievements in the field of computer science.  He is one of the richest men in the world.  He is purported to make $250 every second, which amounts to about $7.8 billion a year.  It is said that if he were to drop a one thousand dollar bill, it wouldn't matter if he picked it up or not since he would make another thousand dollars in the approximately four seconds it would take him to pick it up.  

Gates and his now wife, Melinda French, met in 1987 at a press event for Microsoft in Manhattan.  She worked for the company at that time.  They were married on January 1, 1994.  The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given over $28 billion to charity, making the couple the second most generous philanthropists in the United States as of 2007.  Some of the causes that the Gates support are global health and education.

Gates is one of the most famous entrepreneurs and he has helped to revolutionize personal computing.  In fact, a 2002 survey revealed that teenagers in Hong Kong and China looked up to Bill Gates more than they did to Mao Tse-tungin, a Chinese Communist leader.  Nevertheless, Bill Gates is not without his critics.  He has been accused of anti-competitive business tactics and taken to court on those grounds.  At least some of the cases have been decided against him.  Gates, according to Time magazine, was among one of the one hundred most influential people of 2004 through 2006.  The magazine has also named him one of the most influential people of the 20th century.  Carnegie Mellon University is honoring Gates by building the Gates Building of Computer Science.