surprising facts about Bill Gates

surprising facts about Bill Gates

Most people know three things about Bill Gates:

1. He is one of the richest men in the world.
2. He cofounded one of the most successful tech companies of all time in Microsoft.
3. He's an extremely generous philanthropist through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

But despite his philanthropic efforts and online presence, there are a lot of things about Gates that many are unaware of.

Here are 17 facts you probably didn't know about Bill Gates:

1. As a teen at Lakeside Prep School, Gates wrote his first computer program on a General Electric computer. It was a version of tic-tac-toe where you could play against the machine.

2. Once his school discovered Gates' coding abilities, they let him write the school's computer program for scheduling students in classes. Gates slyly altered the code so he was placed in classes with a "disproportionate number of interesting girls."

3. Gates also read the entire "World Book Encyclopedia" series during his teenage years.

4. Gates scored a near-perfect 1590 out of 1600 on his SATs.

5. Like many other successful tech entrepreneurs, Gates was a college dropout. He left Harvard University in 1975 to fully devote himself to Microsoft.

6. Two years after he dropped out of Harvard, Gates was arrested in New Mexico. He was driving without a license and ran a red light.

At Microsoft, Gates used to memorize employees' license plates to keep tabs on their comings and goings. "Eventually I had to loosen up, as the company got to a reasonable size," he said.

8. Speaking of cars, Gates has quite the Porsche collection. The headliner is his Porsche 959 sports car, which he bought 13 years before the car was approved by the US Environmental Protection Agency or the US Department of Transportation.