Once a young boy who enjoyed tinkering with computers, Bill Gates now is one of the richest people in the world. According to Forbes, Gates’ net worth was at a staggering $110 billion as of March 2023.
These days, Gates is more interested in giving his money away than he is in acquiring more. In 2010, Gates — along with his now ex-wife, Melinda, and fellow multi-billionaire Warren Buffett — co-founded The Giving Pledge, which encourages the world’s wealthiest people to give away most of their fortunes to charity.
He has donated at least $35.8 billion in stock from Microsoft, the company he co-founded, to his own Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, according to Forbes. In 2021, they made a multiyear pledge of $15 billion to the foundation, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported.
Budding entrepreneurs and philanthropists want to know how Gates amassed his fortune so that they might join the Billionaires’ Club one day. Here are a few habits that helped Bill Gates become a massive success.
He Has a Thirst for Knowledge
Gates attended Harvard University only briefly before he dropped out, yet he attributes his time there to his success.
“It was an amazing privilege (studying at Harvard); and, though I left early, I was transformed by my years at Harvard, the friendships I made, and the ideas I worked on,” Gates said in a 2007 commencement speech.
Gates studied computers, but he also dabbled in many other subjects that interested him at the Ivy League school.
“Academic life was fascinating,” he said during the speech. “I used to sit in on lots of classes I hadn’t even signed up for.”
This thirst for knowledge and his willingness to always improve and learn contributed to the growth of his eventual business.
He remains a staunch supporter of education. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Global Education Program in 2018 with a focus on teaching reading and math skills to primary school children in sub-Saharan Africa and India.
His Parents Were Supportive
When asked in 1998 about his role models, Gates said he looked up to his parents. Gates’ parents nurtured and supported his interest in computers as well — even after he decided to abandon his Harvard education. Gates’ father, Bill Gates Sr., told Forbes that his son’s decision to drop out of college “wasn’t precisely what my wife and I had envisioned for any of our children.”
However, Gates’ parents were extremely supportive of his endeavors after that. After Gates’ mother died in 1994, she helped her son “get the contract that led to a lucrative relationship with IBM for his fledgling Microsoft Corporation,” according to The New York Times.
As for his father, Gates long cited him as an inspiration for his philanthropic work, which has dominated the younger Gates’ time and energies since he left his day-to-day work at Microsoft in 2008. The elder Gates was actively involved in his son’s philanthropic work — he even wrote the first check for Gates’ foundation — until his death in 2020 at the age of 94.
Bill Gates is the father of three children — daughters Jennifer and Phoebe, born in 1996 and 2002, and son Rory, born in 1999. In interviews and speeches, he has given his ex-wife credit for 80% of the child rearing and said they followed the “love and logic” parenting method of the 1970s.
He Reads a Lot
In the Forbes interview, Gates’ father said his son was an incredibly avid reader as a child.
“Just about every kind of book interested him — encyclopedias, science fiction, you name it,” he said. “I was thrilled that my child was such an avid reader, but he read so much that Bill’s mother and I had to institute a rule: no books at the dinner table.”
That hasn’t changed. In 2021, in honor of World Book Day, he tweeted about his passion.
“I try to read every day, whether I have a busy day at the office or am out for a hike,” he wrote. “It’s one of my favorite ways to learn new things and better understand the world.”
Reading likely contributed to Gates’ net worth, as it helped provide him with the knowledge he would need to become a successful entrepreneur. He recommends books on his blog, GatesNotes.
He Chose a Great Business Partner
Gates has made countless brilliant business decisions, many of which have involved the people he has chosen to work with.
“I’d say my best business decisions really have to do with picking people,” Gates said in the 1998 interview. “Deciding to go into partnership with Paul Allen is probably at the top of the list.”
Allen and Gates were friends growing up, and they co-founded Microsoft in 1975. Allen left the company eight years later, after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. A fellow philanthropist who gave away more than $2 billion, Allen owned the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers at the time of his death, at age 65, in 2018 from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Throughout the years, Gates and Allen had a “complex relationship,” as outlined in Allen’s book, “Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft.” However, Gates attributes Microsoft’s early success to his partnership with Allen and the many lessons they learned along the way.
