Sukses di bisnis, sukses pula di rumah. Bill Gates adalah seorang ayah yang penuh kasih sayang dan gampang digoda seisi rumah. Berikut beberapa fakta unik tentang kehidupan Bill Gates:

1. Bill Gates lahir di Seattle, Washington, Amerika Serikat pada tanggal 28 Oktober 1955 dengan nama asli William Henry Gates. Ayahnya adalah seorang Pengacara sedangkan ibunya merupakan seorang Guru.



2. Semasa kecil Bill Gates akrab dipanggil “Trey”.

3. Bill Gates muda sering ditangkap polisi New Mexico karena ngebut tanpa SIM.

4. Komputer yang dipakai Gates untuk belajar adalah komputer hasil patungan ibu-ibu orang tua murid tempat Gates bersekolah.

5. Pada umur 17, Bill Gates menjual program komputer pertamanya berupa aplikasi pembagian jadwal dan waktu kepada sekolahnya dengan harga $4,200 atau sekitar 37 juta rupiah. Uniknya, dia mengatur dirinya di program aplikasi buatannya tersebut agar selalu ditempatkan di kelas yang banyak wanitanya.

6. Di Harvard, Universitasnya dulu, Bill Gates membuat ALTAIR BASIC yang merupakan produk pertama dari Microsoft. Di Harvard pula Bill Gates pernah berkata kepada dosennya bahwa dia akan menjadi jutawan di umur 30 tahun dan seorang milyuner di umur 31 dan ternyata kata-kata tersebut benar-benar terwujud.

7. Pada bulan Maret 2007 majalah Forbes menyatakan bahwa Bill Gates adalah orang terkaya nomor 1 di dunia selama 13 tahun berturut-turut dengan kekayaan total sekitar $56 miliar atau bila dirupiahkan sekitar Rp.504.000.000.000.000.

6. Bill Gates mempunyai penghasilan sekitar Rp. 2,5 juta per detik, $20 juta per bulan, dan $7,8 miliar per tahunnya. Jika bill Gates disamakan dengan sebuah Negara, bisa jadi dia adalah Negara terkaya nomor 37 di dunia.

8. Anak-anak Bill Gates dari istrinya, Mellinda, sering menggoda Gates dengan menyanyikan lagu “Billionaire”-nya Travie McCoy dan Bruno Mars. Dalam lagu itu, terdapat lirik: “I wanna be on the cover of Forbes magazine. Smiling next to Oprah and the Queen…”

Lirik yang meledek karena di usia 55 tahun, Gates beberapa kali muncul di cover majalah Forbes. Gates juga berteman baik dengan Oprah Winfrey, dan Ratu Inggris telah menganugerahi gelar kepada Gates di tahun 2005.

9. Gates telah menyumbangkan US$28 miliar untuk kegiatan amal. Ini ‘menyebabkan’ Gates turun ke peringkat dua orang terkaya sedunia, setelah miliuner Mexico, Carlos Slim. Padahal, Gates telah memegang gelar orang terkaya selama hampir dua dekade.

10. Ketiga anak Gates, yang saat ini berusia 15, 12, dan 9 tahun, dilaporkan akan mewariskan masing-masing setidaknya US$10 juta. Namun Gates tidak mengungkapkan ini dalam wawancara. Menurut Gates, “Saya tidak berpikir jumlah uang itu akan bermanfaat untuk mereka.”

11. Bill Gates sekarang mempersembahkan pekerjaannya untuk mengurus yayasan bernilai US$37,1 miliar yang didirikannya. Apakah Gates akan kembali fokus mengurus Microsoft? “Tidak, saya hanya terlibat paruh waktu (di Microsoft). Ini pekerjaan saya sekarang (di yayasan).”






Bill Gates' Profile/Timeline:

1955 - William Henry Gates III was born on October 28th in Seattle, Washington
1955 - Popularly known as Bill Gates, his family called him "Trey" when he was little
1967 - Bill enrolled in the Lakeside School in Seattle and met Paul Allen
1969 - Bill and Paul (a.k.a "Lakeside Programming Group") reported bugs in exchange for computer time
1972 - Bill and Paul formed Traf-O-Data and developed hardware/software to record highway traffic
1973 - Bill Gates graduated from Lakeside High and enrolled in Harvard University, where he majored in pre-law
1974 - Bill Gates and Paul Allen formed Micro-soft

1975 - Bill and Paul wrote the first computer language called BASIC and licensed it to
MITS
1976 - Bill wrote software routines for BASIC on the Altair to use diskettes for storage
1976 - Gates wrote his famous "Open Letter to Hobbyists", accusing them of software piracy
1976 - Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard
1977 - Bill Gates and Paul Allen officially registers a partnership, and Micro-soft became
Microsoft
1980 - Tim Paterson begans writing an OS for use on Seattle Computer Products' (SCP)
8086-based computer
1980 - IBM repesentatives met Gates and Steve Ballmer to write the OS for their upcoming computer
1980 - They met again and IBM showed the "Acorn" computer running on an 8-bit 8080 processor
1980 - Gates recommended the use of a 16-bit 8086 processor instead and promised an operating system
1980 - SCP ships QDOS 0.10 (Quick & Dirty Operating System)
1980 - Paul Allen approached SCP and purchased the right to resell to an unnamed client for $50,000 - IBM
1980 - Microsoft proposed to be in-charged of IBM's entire software development and convert DOS for IBM's PC
1981 - Microsoft bought all the rights to SCP's DOS and renamed it MS-DOS
1981 - IBM introduced its first desktop, Datamaster, which ran on the 16-bit 8086 CPU
and Microsoft's MS-DOS
1983 - Microsoft announced Windows 1.0
1985 - Bill Gates gave keynote speech at Comdex
1985 - Microsoft released Windows 1.0
1986 - Microsoft is taken public at an IPO price of $21/share
1986 - Bill Gates became a billionaire at 31 years old - the yougest person to do so
1990 - Microsoft released Windows 3.0 and Microsoft sales topped $1 billion for the first time
1994 - Bill Gates and Melinda French got married in Hawaii on January 1st
1994 - Bill Gates becomes the richest person in America
1995 - Microsoft released Windows 95 and Bill Gates became the richest person in the world
1996 - Jennifer Katherine Gates was born on April 26th
1998 - Bill, Melinda and Jennifer moved into their new multi-million dollar house in
Medina, Washington
1998 - Microsoft releases Windows 98
1999 - Bill's fortunes swell to $90 billion and maintains his position on Forbes list as the wealthiest person alive
2000 - Microsoft releases Windows 2000 and Windows ME
2001 - Microsoft releases Windows XP
2002 - Stocks and lawsuits bring his Gates' net worth down to $53 billion - still good enough for #1 on Forbes list
2003 - Microsoft releases Windows Server 2003

2006 - Microsoft releases Windows Vista?

Bill Gates Personal Life
Bill Gates married Melinda French of Dallas, Texas on January 1, 1994. Melinda has given birth to three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (1996), Rory John Gates (1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (2002). Bill Gates' house is one of the most expensive houses in the world, and is a modern 21st century earth-sheltered home in the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington in Medina, Washington. According to King County public records, as of 2006, the total assessed value of the property (land and house) is $125 million, and the annual property tax is just under $1 million. Also among Gates's private
acquisitions are the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci which
Gates bought for $30.8 million at an auction in 1994, and a rare Gutenberg Bible.

In 2000, Gates founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization, with his wife. The foundation's grants have provided funds for college scholarships for under-represented minorities, AIDS prevention, diseases prevalent in third world countries, and other causes. In 2000, the Gates Foundation endowed the University of Cambridge with $210 million for the Gates Cambridge Scholarships. The Foundation has also pledged over $7 billion to its various causes, including $1 billion to the United
Negro College Fund; and as of 2005, had an estimated endowment of $29.0 billion. He has spent about a third of his lifetime income on charity. Journalist Greg Palast suggests that the Gates Foundation is used to make tactical donations to hide media sensitive humanitarian side effects of treaties, such as the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which Gates has supported. TRIPS requires countries to agree to respect drug and other patents, therefore preventing the local manufacture of existing pharmaceuticals still under patent such as AIDS drugs in Africa.

Gates has received two honorary doctorates, from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden in 2002 and Waseda University in 2005. Gates was also given an honorary KBE (Knighthood) from Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom in 2005, in addition to having entomologists name the Bill Gates flower fly, Eristalis gatesi, in his honor.

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer has stated that Gates is probably the most "spammed" person in the world, receiving as many as 4,000,000 e-mails per day in 2004, most of which were junk. Gates has almost an entire department devoted to filtering out junk emails. In an article, Gates himself has said that most of this junk mail "offers to help [him] get out of debt or get rich quick", which "would be funny [given his financial state] if it weren't so irritating".

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