11 Interesting Facts About Bill Gates, One Of The Greatest Living Legends Of Modern Technology

Bill Gates isn’t just one of the richest men in the world, he’s actually so much more than that. Aside from being a tech icon, his philanthropy efforts across the globe are unrivalled. So here are a few things you should know about the unassuming billionaire.

1) Bill Gates has held the top spot on the list of richest people in the world for years now, maintaining the crown for 18 of the last 23 years. According to Forbes, he’s currently valued at a staggering $88.9 billion, miles ahead of even number #2 Warren Buffett, who’s valued at $75.6 billion.

2) As one of the co-founders of Microsoft, as well as its CEO for a time, he’s responsible for an estimated 1 billion Windows computers around the world. He’s been on the company’s board of directors ever since it was founded in 1975.

3) Alongside his wife Melinda, he chairs the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest privately owned charitable foundation. The group regularly works to save lives and improving health and education around the world. One of their biggest campaigns is their fight to eradicate polio.

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4) In 2009, Gates and Buffett founded The Giving Pledge, where they and other billionaires made a pact to give at least half of their wealth to charity.

5) Gates and his wife can be considered “old school” parents, having refused to give their three children mobile phones until they turned 14. In addition, even today, they have a ban on Apple devices in their home.

6) Gates studied pre-law at Harvard, before he dropped out after two years to start Microsoft. Eventually, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2007, aside from other colleges as well.

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7) At the age of 22, Bill Gates was infamously arrested for a traffic violation in New Mexico in 1977, for driving his Porsche extremely fast and over the speed limit. This mugshot of his went instantly viral at the time, revealing Gates' bad boy image.

8)?At Microsoft, Bill Gates was known to have memorized employees' license plates just to track their comings and goings to work. "Eventually I had to loosen up, as the company got to a reasonable size," he later said, confirming the odd fact.

9) What would've happened if Microsoft hadn't taken off? Well, according to Bill Gates, he probably would've been a researcher for artificial intelligence.

10) Bill Gates is a voracious reader.?According to him, he reads 50 books a year -- that's close to a book every week. "Reading is still the main way that I both learn new things and test my understanding," he says.

11) And lastly, his name isn’t actually Bill at all, he was born William Henry Gates III.