25 interesting and funny facts about Bill Gates (26 photos)

For better or worse, we live in Bill Gates' world. After all, he helped create the digital world we take for granted every day. In appearance, he is a typical bore and cracker, but these facts may change your opinion about him (or not).





1. Bill Gates once held up the line at the supermarket looking for a 50-cent discount coupon.



2. When Bill Gates got married, he bought out all the available hotel rooms on Lanai so there would be no reporters there, and hired all the helicopters on Maui to prevent aerial filming.





3. Warren Buffett, the third richest person in the world with a net worth of $75 billion, took Bill Gates to McDonald's and paid for his food with coupons.



4. Bill Gates has succeeded in his fight against the sanitation crisis in many parts of Africa and India. He created a toilet that costs $350, is powered by worms, and doesn't require a sewer connection.



5. Bill Gates bought Leonardo da Vinci's Codex for $30,802,500



Three years later, he scanned its pages into digital image files, some of which were later distributed as screensavers and wallpaper files on a CD as part of Microsoft Plus! for Windows so everyone can enjoy them.

6. 9-year-old Pakistani girl Arfa Karim was the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) until 2008



When she suffered cardiac arrest in 2011, Bill Gates assembled an international team of doctors to advise local doctors treating her and offered to pay for treatment in the United States.

7. Bill Gates has a McDonald's gold card with unlimited free fast food.



8. Bill Gates predicted that the rise of educational software would gradually replace textbooks.



However, a 2018 survey of college students by the trade publication Library Journal found that 75% say reading print books is easier than reading e-books.

9. Before he proposed to Melinda, Bill Gates gave her a whiteboard that listed the pros and cons of getting married.



10. Shortly after Bill Gates decided to start Microsoft, a Harvard professor who worked with him recalled:



“He moved to Albuquerque... to run a small company writing code for microprocessors. I remember thinking, “Such a brilliant mind. What a waste of time and effort."

11. Hospital staff were stunned when Bill Gates made a surprise visit in 2010 to the dying Dr. Ed Roberts, his first employer and developer of the first commercially successful personal computer.



12. When Steve Jobs accused Microsoft of stealing the idea for Windows from the Mac, Bill Gates responded:



"Well, Steve... I think it's more like we both had a rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal a TV and found out that you had already stolen it."

13. Bill Gates has donated over $50 billion to charity.



14. In 1989, Bill Gates answered a call to Microsoft technical support and introduced himself as "William" and then solved the caller's problem. The client called back later, specifically asking for William



15. The silhouette in Microsoft Outlook 2010 is taken from a photograph of a young Bill Gates



The photo was taken in 1977, when Gates was arrested for impaired driving.

16. Bill Gates once released mosquitoes during a Ted Talk, saying that "poor people shouldn't be the only ones who have this experience."



17. Bill Gates' mother, Mary, knew John Opel, CEO of IBM, because they both served on the United Way national committee.



At Mary's request, Opel arranged a meeting with Bill Gates, the CEO of the then small software company Microsoft, to discuss the possibility of using PC-DOS for the IBM PCs that were about to be released.

18. Bill Gates defended his experience with LSD: “I never missed a day of work.”



19. Solitaire was created by a Microsoft intern who was not paid to play the game. Bill Gates liked the idea, but complained that it was too difficult to win



The original version also included a fake Excel spreadsheet so you could hide the game from your boss.

20. When Sega discontinued the Dreamcast in 2001, company president Isao Okawa offered his assets to Microsoft so that the Xbox could be backwards compatible with Dreamcast games and the console could somehow live on



Okawa met with Bill Gates several times before negotiations fell through.

21. Bill Gates became involved in charity work after he and his wife accidentally stumbled upon extremely poor people while sightseeing. Now he says charity is 'the best job in the world'



22. Bill Gates wrote a computer program for his school to schedule students' classes. He edited the schedule so that he ended up sitting with the students



23. The keyboard shortcut Control+Alt+Delete was used to log into Windows



According to Bill Gates, a single button could have been made for such a command, but the IBM keyboard designer did not want to give Microsoft a single button. Therefore, Microsoft decided to use “Ctrl+Alt+Del” to log into Windows.

24. Nebraska's highest honor is to be an "Admiral of Nebraska," despite being the only landlocked state in the United States. This award has been presented to numerous Presidents, Bill Gates and Bill Murray, as well as the Queen



25. One Atari executive recalled showing Bill Gates a game and beating him 35 out of 37 times. When they met again a month later, Gates won or drew every game. He studied the game until he understood it thoroughly