Gates co-founded Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker. The Redmond, Washington-based company had revenue of $245 billion in 2024. The rest of his fortune is managed through closely held Cascade Investment, which has stakes in dozens of publicly traded companies, including Canadian National Railway, Deere and Ecolab.
The majority of Gates's fortune is derived from Cascade Investment, a holding company that was created with the proceeds of Microsoft stock sales and dividends.
Based on an analysis of Bloomberg data, Gates has received more than $60 billion in stock and dividends from Microsoft and other companies, including a $3.3 billion payout from Microsoft in 2004, which he donated to his philanthropic foundation.
The value of Cascade is based on an analysis of asset sales and purchases, taxes and market performance. Market performance is based on a hybrid of indexes that capture sectors including hedge funds, bonds and equities. It includes the value of Cascade's investments in closely held businesses, including real estate and energy assets. Cascade also owns stakes in dozens of public companies, which are valued individually using disclosed share counts.
The appreciation rates used in the calculation were lowered on July 3, 2025 to better reflect Gates' outside charitable giving and the wealth estimate provided in a May 8, 2025 Gates Notes blog post. These changes led to a reduction in Bloomberg's wealth valuation of about $50 billion.
He has about 1% of Microsoft, the world's largest software maker. He stepped down as a director of Microsoft in March 2020 and his stake is not disclosed in subsequent proxy statements. Shares held by the Gates Foundation, a charitable enterprise, aren't included.
Bill and Melinda French Gates announced in 2021 an intention to divorce. Company filings around the time of the announcement and subsequent tax filings for French Gates' philanthropic foundations have showed a transfer of more than $8 billion in stocks to Melinda French Gates, and these have been removed. The analysis was updated in January 2026 to remove an additional $12.5 billion that Gates had agreed to give French Gates for charity work, based on a Bloomberg News report.
Bridgitt Arnold, a spokeswoman for Gates, said he declined to comment on his net worth.
Born to successful parents -- his father was a lawyer, his mother was president of the local United Way -- Gates developed an interest in computers shortly after his admittance to Seattle's Lakeside School.
After scoring a 1590 on his SATs (out of a possible 1600), he enrolled at Harvard University, where his Lakeside friend, Paul Allen, persuaded him to take a leave of absence to help him build an operating system for the Altair 8800, a new computer developed by Micro Instrumentation & Telemetry Systems. The result: Microsoft, now the world's largest software maker by revenue.
In 1994, Gates married Melinda French, a Microsoft employee whom he had met seven years earlier at a press event in New York. Six years later, after his Microsoft stake topped $100 billion, Gates stepped down as the company's chief executive and began focusing on philanthropic efforts through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He intends to give the majority of his wealth to charity, a commitment he reaffirmed by signing the Giving Pledge in 2010. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama in November 2016.