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Bill Gates is the world's second richest person. His net worth is more than $93 billion [as of December 2018]. If Gates gave every single person in the world $10, he'd still have more than $20 billion left.



Gates became the world's youngest self-made billionaire in history at age 31. Holding the title until 2008, when 23-year-old, Mark Zuckerberg, dethroned him.



Gates spends his fortune on everything from luxury cars to taking care of his favorite tree, but his primary goal is to help the world.





Bill Gates got an early start to building his fortune. At just 17, he sold his first computer program, a timetabling system, to his private high school for $4,200.



Childhood friends, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975. In 1980, Microsoft developed an operating system for IBM's first personal computer. The system, MS-DOS, soon became one of Microsoft's most profitable products as it would develop into what would become the operating system for nearly every PC. When Microsoft went public, the company was valued at $61 million and Gates made $1.6 million from selling shares. His remaining 45% stake in the company became worth a whopping $350 million.



At just 30 years old, Gates was already one of the wealthiest people in America. In 1990, Microsoft released another extremely successful product, Microsoft Office, which continues to be one of Microsoft's biggest products today, 30 years after its release. And when Windows 95 launched in 1995, Gates became the world's richest man, remaining there until Warren Buffett snagged the spot in 2008, who was knocked down by Jeff Bezos in 2017.



In 1999, at the height of the dot com boom, Bill Gates' fortune briefly surpassed $100 billion.



But it wasn't always smooth sailing for Gates. In 2000, he stepped down as CEO while Microsoft was involved in an anti-trust lawsuit, filed by the Department of Justice. Following a ruling that the company had broken anti-trust law, Microsoft's stock price dropped 14%. It took about 15 years for Microsoft to recover. But since then, the company has made strong progress.

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