Chronology File · Case #005

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$ sort ./events --chronological --by-year

Bill Gates Timeline

919 verified milestones in strict chronological order spanning 000s–990s— from a Harvard dorm room and the Altair 8800 to TerraPower, CRISPR cures, and the Foundation's 2045 sunset plan. The whole arc, year by year.

Milestones · 919Span · 000s–990sOrder · Chronological

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2026

Business

2026

Gates Foundation Trust Sells Off the Last of Its Microsoft Stock

In the first quarter of 2026, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust sold its remaining Microsoft shares, fully exiting a position in the very company that created Gates's fortune — capping a long, deliberate diversification away from the stock. The endowment that funds Gates's philanthropy, managed separately from its grant-making through Cascade, is now anchored instead by Berkshire Hathaway, Waste Management, railroads, and heavy-equipment makers. The sale underscored how thoroughly Gates's giving had decoupled from Microsoft's day-to-day fortunes.

Climate & Energy

2026

Gates-Backed Commonwealth Fusion Installs Its First Magnet, Racing Toward 2026 'First Plasma'

Commonwealth Fusion Systems — backed by Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy — hit a major hardware milestone heading into 2026, installing the first of 18 powerful high-temperature superconducting magnets in its SPARC tokamak near Boston. CFS is racing to achieve 'first plasma' in 2026 and net energy gain in 2027, aiming to prove that commercial fusion power is possible. It is among several fusion ventures Gates has funded in his long search for an 'energy miracle' to fight climate change.

Climate & Energy

2026

TerraPower Begins Building America's First Utility-Scale Advanced Reactor in Wyoming

On April 23, 2026, Bill Gates's nuclear company TerraPower formally began nuclear construction of its first Natrium reactor in Kemmerer, Wyoming — billed as the first utility-scale advanced nuclear power plant built in the United States. The milestone followed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's approval of the construction permit, and came after earlier work on non-nuclear facilities and a multi-year delay caused by the loss of Russian fuel supplies. The 345-megawatt sodium-cooled reactor, with molten-salt energy storage, is central to Gates's bet that next-generation nuclear can deliver clean, around-the-clock power.

2025

Global Health

2025

Gates-Funded Monoclonal Antibody Shows Early Promise as a Single-Shot Malaria Shield

A Gates-funded effort to prevent malaria with a single shot showed early promise in 2025. In a first-in-human trial sponsored by the Gates Medical Research Institute, a long-acting monoclonal antibody called MAM01 protected volunteers against malaria with no serious side effects — none of those in the highest-dose group developed the parasite after deliberate exposure. The approach aims to give months of protection to the most vulnerable, especially young children and pregnant women, complementing the malaria vaccines the Gates Foundation has long funded.

Global Health

2025

Gates Joins a $600 Million 'Beginnings Fund' for Mothers and Newborns as Aid Is Cut

In April 2025, the Gates Foundation joined a coalition of philanthropies to launch the Beginnings Fund, a nearly $600 million initiative to curb maternal and newborn deaths across Africa — pointedly created as wealthy governments were slashing foreign aid. Anchored by a major grant from the Mohamed bin Zayed Foundation for Humanity and based in Nairobi, the fund aims to prevent more than 300,000 avoidable deaths by strengthening care for mothers and babies in up to ten African countries.

Personal

2025

In His Memoir, Gates Says He Would Likely Be Diagnosed Autistic Today

In his 2025 memoir 'Source Code: My Beginnings,' Bill Gates wrote that 'if I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum.' Reflecting on a childhood in which his parents 'struggled with their complicated son,' Gates noted that neurodivergence was poorly understood at the time and the term itself would not be coined until the 1990s. The candid disclosure — which he chose to address explicitly in the book's epilogue — was widely covered as a notable public reflection on neurodiversity by one of the world's most recognizable figures.

2024

Personal

2024

Gates's Guilty Pleasure: 'Cheeseburgers Are My Favorite Food'

Bill Gates has a confession that sits awkwardly with his climate crusade: 'Cheeseburgers are my favorite food,' he has written, 'but I wish they weren't.' A well-documented fan of fast food, Gates loves the animal fat that makes a real beef burger taste good — even as he warns that beef's methane footprint is a climate problem and invests in plant-based and lab-grown alternatives trying to recreate it. The tension between his palate and his principles has become a recurring, self-aware theme in his writing.

Philanthropy

June 2024

Melinda French Gates Resigns From the Gates Foundation With $12.5 Billion for Her Own Philanthropy

On May 13, 2024, Melinda French Gates announced she would resign as co-chair of the foundation she had helped lead since 2000, effective June 7, 2024. Under an agreement with Bill Gates, she received $12.5 billion to direct toward her own philanthropy — chiefly women's and families' health and rights through her organization, Pivotal Ventures — saying she had 'a different vision' for the next chapter of her giving. Her departure followed the couple's 2021 divorce and the organization's renaming earlier in 2024 from the 'Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation' to simply the 'Gates Foundation,' leaving Bill Gates as sole chair of the world's largest private charitable foundation.

Personal

2024

Netflix premieres 'What's Next? The Future with Bill Gates'

In September 2024 Netflix premiered 'What's Next? The Future with Bill Gates,' a five-part documentary series executive-produced by Oscar winner Morgan Neville, in which Gates explores pressing global questions: the promise and peril of artificial intelligence, misinformation, climate change, income inequality, and the future of disease. Featuring interviews with figures from scientists to celebrities, the series positioned Gates as a public explainer of the forces shaping the coming decades.

2023

Philanthropy

2023

Investigative Book 'The Bill Gates Problem' Challenges the 'Good Billionaire' Image

In November 2023, investigative journalist Tim Schwab published 'The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire,' an extended critique drawn from his award-winning reporting for The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review and the BMJ. The book argues that Gates uses philanthropy to exercise vast, unaccountable political power — shaping public policy, scientific research, markets and the news media — and portrays him as fundamentally the same monopolist he was at Microsoft. It compiles criticisms that Gates-funded programs in education, agriculture and global health have often been undemocratic and ineffective, and that the foundation's funding of researchers and journalists creates conflicts of interest. The Gates Foundation has defended its work and transparency. The book became the most prominent book-length scrutiny of Gates's philanthropy.

Business

2023

IRS Says Microsoft Owes $28.9 Billion in Back Taxes Over Offshore Profit Shifting

In October 2023, Microsoft disclosed that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service was seeking about $28.9 billion in back taxes, plus penalties and interest, over how the company allocated profits among countries between 2004 and 2013 — years when Bill Gates was Microsoft's chairman. The dispute centers on 'transfer pricing,' including a Puerto Rico manufacturing arrangement that the IRS said let Microsoft shift a large share of U.S. revenue into lower-tax jurisdictions. Microsoft said it disagreed with the IRS's position, believed it had followed the rules, and would contest the claim through the agency's appeals process and potentially the courts — a fight expected to take years. It ranks among the largest tax disputes in U.S. corporate history.

Personal

2023

Gates Cultivates a Decades-Long Relationship With China's Leadership, Hailed by Xi as an 'Old Friend'

Over decades of Gates Foundation work in China, Bill Gates built unusually warm ties with the country's leadership. In June 2023 President Xi Jinping welcomed him to Beijing as an 'old friend' — a designation China reserves for favored foreigners — making Gates the first American business figure Xi had met privately in years. Xi had earlier thanked Gates personally for the foundation's COVID-19 funding. The closeness has drawn both praise as pragmatic engagement and criticism from those wary of legitimizing Beijing; Gates frames it as essential to global-health cooperation.

2022

Philanthropy

2022

Gates-Backed AGRA Drops 'Green Revolution' From Its Name After Years of Failure Claims

In 2022, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa — a flagship Gates Foundation agricultural initiative — quietly dropped 'Green Revolution' from its name, rebranding simply as AGRA under the tagline 'Sustainably Growing Africa's Food Systems.' Critics, including African food-sovereignty groups, called the change a tacit admission of failure, pointing to independent evaluations finding that after some 15 years and hundreds of millions of dollars, AGRA had not delivered the promised gains in yields or farmer incomes, while hunger rose across its target countries. AGRA framed the rebrand as reflecting a broader strategy rather than a retreat. The move intensified scrutiny of the Gates Foundation's industrial-agriculture model in Africa.

Climate & Energy

2022

Gates's Breakthrough Energy Backs the World's First Alcohol-to-Jet Fuel Plant

In 2022, Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy made the first project investment from its Catalyst program — a $50 million grant to LanzaJet's Freedom Pines plant in Soperton, Georgia, the world's first commercial facility to make sustainable aviation fuel from ethanol via an 'alcohol-to-jet' process. Designed to cut aviation emissions by at least 70% versus fossil jet fuel, it embodied Gates's strategy of using catalytic funding to push first-of-a-kind clean technologies across the 'valley of death' to commercial scale.

Technology

2022

Gates Leads Repeated Funding for Satellite-Antenna Maker Kymeta

Bill Gates has been the driving investor behind Kymeta, a Redmond, Washington company he helped start in the 2010s that builds flat-panel 'metamaterial' antennas — which steer a satellite signal electronically, with no moving parts — to deliver internet to vehicles, ships, and remote sites. Gates led an $85 million round in 2020 and another $84 million round in 2022, backing a long-running bet that such antennas could knit together satellite and cellular networks for connectivity almost anywhere.

2021

Climate & Energy

2021

Gates Says 'All Rich Countries Should Move to 100% Synthetic Beef'

In a February 2021 interview with MIT Technology Review promoting his book 'How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,' Bill Gates said that 'all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef' to curb the greenhouse-gas emissions of cattle, while suggesting the world's poorest countries would keep eating conventional meat. Critics derided the remark as elitist and out of touch — and noted a potential conflict of interest, since Gates is an investor in plant-based and lab-grown meat companies such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat that stand to profit from such a shift. The comment, widely circulated, became a recurring example of perceived hypocrisy given Gates's own resource-intensive lifestyle and vast farmland holdings.

Philanthropy

2021

African Civil-Society Groups Urge the Gates Foundation to Stop Funding AGRA

Beginning in 2021, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) and a coalition of some 200 organizations publicly called on the Gates Foundation and other donors to stop funding the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, arguing it pushed expensive commercial seeds and synthetic fertilizer that trapped smallholder farmers in debt while failing to cut hunger. The campaigners pointed to an independent evaluation that, they said, confirmed AGRA had fallen short of its goals, and urged a shift toward agroecology. The Gates Foundation defended AGRA's work and continued its support. The campaign marked an unusually direct revolt by African civil society against one of Gates's signature development programs.

Global Health

2021

COVAX, Co-Founded by the Gates Foundation, Falls Far Short of Its Vaccine Pledge

COVAX — the global initiative to vaccinate poorer nations against COVID-19, which the Gates Foundation helped design and fund — badly missed its 2021 targets, delivering only a fraction of the two billion doses it had promised as wealthy countries bought up supply and a key Indian manufacturer halted exports. By the end of 2021, the vast majority of people in low-income countries remained unvaccinated. Critics tied the shortfall in part to the intellectual-property-protective approach championed by Gates, who had publicly resisted waiving vaccine patents. Backers said COVAX was undermined chiefly by vaccine hoarding by rich nations. The failure became a touchstone in debates over vaccine equity.

2020

Global Health

2020

Scientists Slam the Gates-Funded IHME's Influential but Inaccurate COVID Models

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a University of Washington center launched in 2007 with a roughly $105 million Gates Foundation grant, produced some of the most widely cited — and widely criticized — COVID-19 forecasts of 2020. Public-health experts argued in outlets such as STAT that the IHME's model used flawed statistical methods, swung wildly between projections, and gave a false sense of precision; one assessment found its next-day death predictions fell outside their own stated ranges most of the time. Because policymakers leaned on the forecasts, critics warned the inaccuracies could distort pandemic decisions. The controversy spotlighted the influence of Gates-funded institutions over global-health data and modeling.

Global Health

2020

Federal Regulators Halt a Gates-Funded Coronavirus Testing Program Over Consent Rules

In May 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ordered a pause to the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN), a home-testing and disease-surveillance project funded in part by Bill Gates and praised by him as a model for tracking COVID-19. Regulators said the program needed separate emergency authorization before it could continue returning test results to participants who had collected their own samples. Researchers — who said they had been working with the FDA for weeks to secure approval — suspended testing and resumed weeks later after addressing the regulatory requirements. The episode drew attention to oversight questions surrounding fast-moving, privately funded pandemic research.

Business

2020

Gates Steps Down From the Berkshire Hathaway Board

In March 2020, Bill Gates resigned from the board of Berkshire Hathaway, where he had served since 2004 alongside his close friend Warren Buffett, at the same time he left Microsoft's board. Gates said he was stepping back from corporate boards to devote more time to philanthropy. Former American Express chief Kenneth Chenault took his Berkshire seat. The departures marked Gates's near-complete exit from formal corporate governance, even as Berkshire stock remained the largest holding funding his foundation.

2019

Climate & Energy

2019

Study Ranks Bill Gates Among the Top Celebrity Carbon Emitters From Private Jets

A 2019 peer-reviewed study by Swedish researcher Stefan Gössling, examining the air travel of high-profile public figures, estimated that Bill Gates emitted roughly 1,600 tonnes of carbon dioxide from flying in a single year — among the highest of the celebrities studied and thousands of times the average person's annual footprint. The study, covered by The Guardian and others, cited Gates's frequent use of private jets and argued that the conspicuous travel of the wealthy normalizes high-carbon lifestyles. Gates, who has acknowledged his large personal carbon footprint and says he buys offsets and funds clean-energy solutions, became a recurring example in debates over climate hypocrisy among billionaire environmental advocates.

Global Health

2019

Gates-Funded Project Releases Genetically Modified Mosquitoes in Burkina Faso, Sparking Backlash

In July 2019, the Gates Foundation–backed Target Malaria consortium carried out the first release of genetically modified mosquitoes in Africa, freeing sterile male insects in a village in Burkina Faso as an early step toward 'gene drive' technology meant to crash malarial-mosquito populations. Civil-society and environmental groups opposed the project, raising concerns about informed consent, biosafety, and unknown ecological effects of altering wild populations. Target Malaria said it had obtained community agreement and that the released mosquitoes posed no gene-drive risk. Years later, citing biosafety and sovereignty concerns, Burkina Faso moved to halt the program. The episode became a flashpoint in the debate over Gates-funded genetic experiments in the developing world.

Personal

2019

Gates Is Repeatedly Named the World's Most Admired Man

Bill Gates has repeatedly been named the world's most admired man in YouGov's global survey, topping the poll every year since the firm began ranking men and women separately in 2015 — ahead of figures such as Barack Obama and Jackie Chan. The 2019 survey alone polled more than 42,000 people across 41 countries. The recurring No. 1 ranking reflected the global reputation Gates built through the Gates Foundation, even as he also became a lightning rod for conspiracy theories.

2018

Philanthropy

2018

Stanford Scholar Argues Mega-Philanthropy Like Gates's Undermines Democracy

In his 2018 book 'Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better,' Stanford political scientist Rob Reich argued that large private foundations — with the Gates Foundation as a prime example — wield unaccountable, plutocratic power that is also subsidized by taxpayers through the charitable deduction. Reich contended that big philanthropy is 'an exercise of power' warranting democratic scrutiny rather than automatic praise, and that a foundation whose assets rival the wealth of nations can steer public policy without public accountability. The book became a touchstone for academic and political critiques of how billionaires like Gates convert fortunes into influence over education, health and science.

Personal

2018

An 'Impatient Optimist,' Gates Champions Steven Pinker's Case That the World Is Improving

Bill Gates calls himself an 'impatient optimist,' and few books capture his worldview like Steven Pinker's data-driven arguments that human life has steadily improved. Gates declared Pinker's 'Enlightenment Now' (2018) his 'new favorite book of all time,' and the year before had given every U.S. college graduate who wanted one a free digital copy of Pinker's 'The Better Angels of Our Nature,' calling it the most inspiring book he'd read. His evangelism for measurable human progress underpins how he frames the Gates Foundation's mission.

Global Health

2018

Gates Foundation Creates the Gates Medical Research Institute, a 'Nonprofit Biotech'

In 2018 the Gates Foundation launched the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute (Gates MRI), an unusual 'nonprofit biotech' in Cambridge, Massachusetts, seeded with an initial grant of about $273 million. Its mission: develop drugs and vaccines for diseases of the world's poorest — tuberculosis, malaria, and diarrheal illness — that commercial drugmakers neglect because there is little profit in them. The institute runs early-stage research itself before partnering with industry to manufacture, and is behind work such as the MAM01 malaria antibody.

2017

Global Health

2017

Politico Dubs Bill Gates 'the World's Most Powerful Doctor' Over His Sway at the WHO

A 2017 Politico investigation, 'Meet the world's most powerful doctor: Bill Gates,' documented how the Gates Foundation's enormous, earmarked donations had made it one of the World Health Organization's top funders, giving an unelected private foundation outsized influence over global-health priorities. The article reported that some WHO insiders and health advocates worried Gates's money skewed the agency's agenda toward his favored initiatives — and coined the term 'the Bill Chill' for a reluctance to criticize him openly. Others feared that because the foundation's wealth comes from corporate investments, it could act as a 'Trojan horse' for business interests. The foundation and WHO defended the partnership as advancing global health, but the piece crystallized concerns about accountability.

Global Health

2017

India Cuts the Gates Foundation From Its Vaccine-Policy Body Over Conflict-of-Interest Fears

Personal

December 1977

A 22-Year-Old Bill Gates Is Arrested in Albuquerque, Producing His Famous Mugshot

On December 13, 1977, Bill Gates — then 22 and running the young Microsoft out of Albuquerque, New Mexico — was arrested after being pulled over for driving without a license and running a stop sign, reportedly in Paul Allen's car. The booking produced the grinning mugshot that became one of the most recognizable images in tech lore; Microsoft later nodded to it by using the silhouette as a default profile picture in Outlook. It was not Gates's first such incident — he had also been cited in 1975 for speeding and driving without a valid license, reflecting a youthful reputation for fast driving. Snopes and contemporaneous records confirm the mugshot's authenticity.

1976

Business

February 3, 1976

Bill Gates Brands Early PC Hobbyists Thieves in His 'Open Letter to Hobbyists'

On February 3, 1976, a 20-year-old Bill Gates published 'An Open Letter to Hobbyists' in the Altair users' newsletter of MITS, accusing the early personal-computer community of rampant software piracy. 'As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software,' Gates wrote, estimating that fewer than 10 percent of Altair BASIC users had paid for it and asking, 'Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?' The letter — provoked by hobbyists freely copying Micro-Soft's Altair BASIC — drew an angry response from a computing culture built on sharing, and became an early, defining statement of Gates's hard-line stance on commercializing and protecting software.

Business

1976

Bill Gates publishes his 'Open Letter to Hobbyists' decrying software piracy

In February 1976 a 20-year-old Bill Gates published his 'Open Letter to Hobbyists,' rebuking early personal-computer enthusiasts who copied Microsoft's Altair BASIC without paying. 'Who can afford to do professional work for nothing?' Gates wrote, arguing that rampant copying would prevent good software from being written. The letter outraged a hobbyist culture that saw software as something to share freely, but it became an early and influential articulation of the idea that software is intellectual property worth paying for — a principle central to Microsoft's future.

1975

Personal

1975

History's Most Famous 'Dropout' Actually Just Took a Leave From Harvard

1968

Personal

1968

Wrote his first software program at age 13 at Lakeside School

At age 13, Bill Gates wrote his first software program — a tic-tac-toe game in BASIC — on a General Electric time-sharing terminal at the Lakeside School in Seattle. The Mothers' Club had sold rummage-sale proceeds to fund the terminal, giving Gates and Paul Allen their first exposure to interactive computing. Gates later recalled that accessing the computer was the pivotal experience that set the direction of his life.

1955

Personal

1955

William Henry 'Trey' Gates III is born in Seattle

William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, into a prominent, competitive family — his father a leading attorney, his mother a civic powerhouse. Nicknamed 'Trey' for the III in his name, young Gates was a voracious reader and fiercely driven, channeling that intensity into computers as a teenager. The combination of an affluent, achievement-oriented upbringing and early access to scarce computer time helped set the stage for the company he would co-found at 19.

990

Personal

1990s

Gates keeps a collection of rare and classic cars

Despite his reputation for frugality in some areas, Bill Gates has long indulged a passion for cars, assembling a collection that has included several Porsches — among them the 911 he has owned for decades and the storied 959 — as well as other classics. His automotive tastes, and the saga of importing the then-illegal 959, are among the more colorful footnotes of his personal life.

Personal

1990s

Gates retreats for solitary, twice-yearly 'Think Weeks'

For years Bill Gates retreated twice a year to a secluded cabin for a solitary 'Think Week,' during which he read stacks of papers, books, and employee proposals with no interruptions, emerging with strategic memos that shaped Microsoft's direction. The ritual became famous as a model of deep, focused thinking by a busy executive, and was credited with helping spark major pivots — including Microsoft's embrace of the internet. Gates carried the habit of voracious, deliberate reading into his philanthropy.

Bill Gates is a serious and competitive bridge player, a passion he shares with his close friend Warren Buffett; the two have played together for years and have funded efforts to teach the card game in schools. Gates has competed in tournaments and credits bridge with sharpening the kind of probabilistic, strategic thinking he applies to business and philanthropy.

[FAQ.LOG] · grep 'when did bill gates'

The Questions Everyone Asks

QUERY_01

When did Bill Gates found Microsoft?

April 4, 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, together with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Gates was 19 and had just left Harvard. Their first product was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800; the company moved to the Seattle area in 1979 and went public in March 1986.

QUERY_02

When did Bill Gates become the world's richest person?

He first topped the Forbes list of the world's richest people in 1995, at age 39. He held the number-one position for 13 of the 16 years between 1995 and 2009, peaking at roughly $101 billion in 1999 during the dot-com boom — the first 'centibillionaire' in the modern era.

QUERY_03

When did Bill Gates step down from Microsoft?

In stages. He handed the CEO role to Steve Ballmer in January 2000 and became Chief Software Architect; he moved to full-time work at the Gates Foundation in July 2008; and he left Microsoft's board of directors entirely in March 2020 — 45 years after founding the company.

QUERY_04

When was Bill Gates born?

October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, as William Henry Gates III. He attended Lakeside School — where he wrote his first program at 13 — then Harvard College from 1973 until 1975, when he left to start Microsoft.

QUERY_05

When did the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation start?

In 2000, formed by consolidating earlier Gates family charities (the William H. Gates Foundation, founded 1994, and the Gates Learning Foundation). It became the largest private charitable foundation in the world and has announced it will spend down its entire endowment and close permanently by December 31, 2045.

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