Bill Gates, full name William Henry Gates III, was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, USA. He became the youngest billionaire in history. At the age of 12, he got access to a computer and by his teenage years, he was already helping computerize his high school's payroll system. Gates also founded a company called Traf-O-Data, which sold traffic-counting systems to local governments. At 19, he dropped out of Harvard University to co-found Microsoft Corporation with Paul G. Allen. Microsoft made a big impact in the computer industry by licensing its operating system MS-DOS to IBM in 1980 for use in their first personal computer. This move made Gates a billionaire in 1986, and within a decade, he became the world's richest individual. From 1995, he held the title of the world's richest person for 20 consecutive years. Gates refocused Microsoft on internet software solutions and expanded into computer hardware and gaming with the Xbox. In 1999, he and his wife established the largest charitable foundation in the U.S. In 2008, Gates stepped back from his day-to-day role at Microsoft to focus more on charity work, though he remained the company's chairman until 2014. Today, he is the fourth richest person globally, with a wealth of $124 billion. Gates was passionate about computers from a young age and even taught himself programming languages like Fortran and Lisp outside of school.

After dropping out of Harvard, Bill Gates and Paul Allen did briefly work for Honeywell, a technology company, before founding Microsoft. During their time at Honeywell, they gained valuable experience and insights into the computer industry, which later influenced their entrepreneurial endeavors.