With a net worth of approximately $78.9 billion, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates is the wealthiest man in the world.
Gates has been a public fixture ever since he and Paul Allen started a computer revolution in the 1980s. He has all of the toys you would expect from the world's richest man, from a private jet to a 66,000-square-foot home he nicknamed Xanadu 2.0.
Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington. Son of a lawyer and a schoolteacher, he was an argumentative but brilliant child. As a teenager, his appetite for knowledge was so great that he read the entire World Book Encyclopedia series from start to finish.
After graduating from Lakeside in 1973, Gates headed to Harvard. Though he entered as a pre-law major, he soon changed course and quickly worked his way through the university's upper-level math and computer science classes.
Harvard is where Gates met Steve Ballmer, whom he would later bring to Microsoft and eventually promote to CEO of the company. Although they lived down the hall from each other in Currier House, they met during a graduate-level economics class. The pair remain good friends today.
Two years later, Gates dropped out of school to found Microsoft with Paul Allen. Though he never earned his bachelor's degree, Harvard awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2007. "I'm a bad influence. That's why I was invited to speak at your graduation," he said at the commencement ceremony. "If I had spoken at your orientation, fewer of you might be here today."
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