1. BILL GATES – Net Worth: $79.2 BILLION
The richest man in America is Bill Gates with a current net worth of $79.2 Billion, as you may have guessed.William Henry Gates on his full name, the American business magnate, philanthropist, investor, computer programmer and inventor is the former chief executive of Microsoft.
Microsoft is the world largest personal-computer software company, which he co-founded with Paul Allen.
The 59-year old computer programmer was the wealthiest from 1995 to 2009 (excluding 2008) on the Forbes list of richest people in the world.
Gates is perhaps the most famous entrepreneur of the PC era.
Born in Seattle, Washington, as the son of William H. Gates and Mary Maxwell Gates. His father was a well-known lawyer and his mother was one of the board members of First Interstate BancSystem.
And of course they’d have wanted Bill to go on the same way as his father and become a lawyer. But he wanted something else.
When he was in eighth grade, he took an interest in programming the General Electric system in BASIC, and was excluded from math because of that.
Bill wrote his first computer program on the machine which was an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly.
He enrolled at Harvard College in 1973, and while he was there he met Steve Ballmer, the man who’d later succeed Gates as CEO of Microsoft. The idea of Microsoft we all know today came one day in the Poker Room in Currier House at Harvard University to Gates and Allen.
Now, that idea is worth billions.
Who is your favorite? Who has the most touching story? This ends our Top 10 Richest People in America 2016 article!
