Bill Gates

b. 1955 · Microsoft co-founder · author of The Road Ahead (1995)

Bill Gates founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen in 1975 and ran it as chief executive for roughly its first twenty-five years, handing the job to Steve Ballmer in 2000 and resigning as chairman in February 2014. The Road Ahead, written with Microsoft technologist Nathan Myhrvold and journalist Peter Rinearson, was his first book — a 1995 forecast of what he then called the information highway. He has since written Business @ the Speed of Thought, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic and the memoir Source Code: My Beginnings (2025).

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8 quotes we’ve traced to Bill Gates

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Often misattributed to Bill Gates

Famous lines widely pinned on Bill Gates that we’ve traced to someone else.

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