Little-Known Facts About Well-Known Leaders - Bill Gates

Everyone knows the most recent headlines about our country's greatest leaders. In this feature, we'd like to shed some light on the lesser-known facts about these folks in hopes of giving you a little greater insight as to what makes them tick.

Bill Gates

William Henry Gates was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, USA.
His father William was a corporate lawyer, and his mother Mary was a schoolteacher.
By the age of 17, Gates had sold his first computer program, a time-tabling system for his high school, for $4,200.
Gates scored 1590 on his SAT standardized test. The top score for the test is 1600.
Gates told his university teachers he would be a millionaire by age 30. He became a billionaire at age 31.
While at Harvard, Gates co-wrote Altair BASIC, which became Microsoft's (then called Micro-Soft) first product.
He met his wife, Melinda French, in 1987 at a Microsoft press event in Manhattan while she was a worker for the company. They would go on to get married on New Years Day in 1994.
In 2002, Bill Gates was considered more idolized than Chinese Communist leader Mao Tse-tung in a poll of teenagers in Hong Kong and China. The survey was conducted by the City University of Hong Kong.
In 2005, Gates was honored with the title Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II of England.
As of the March 2007 issue of Forbes magazine, Bill Gates has been listed as Number 1 on "Forbes' Richest People" list for 13 years in a row. His current net worth is about $56 billion.
Gates has recently announced that he will be reducing his involvement at Microsoft and will be devoting more time to his charity work.