Microsoft company's shares reach its highest value since December 1999. In 2018, Microsoft surpassed Apple as the most valuable publicly traded company in the world after being dethroned by the tech giant in 2010. Childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen sought to make a business utilizing their shared skills in computer programming. In 1972 they founded their first company, named Traf-O-Data, which sold a rudimentary computer to track and analyze automobile traffic data. While Gates enrolled at Harvard, Allen pursued a degree in computer science at Washington State University, though he later dropped out of school to work at Honeywell.
Bill Gates Sr. (b. 1929), whom he met at UW, and they remained married until she died in 1994. They had three children: Kristianne, Bill, and Libby. In 1996 Gates married Mimi Gardner Gates (b.1943), who was the director of the Seattle Art Museum. William H. Gates Sr. serves as an Honorary Co-Chair for the World Justice Project. The World Justice Project works to lead a global, multidisciplinary effort to strengthen the Rule of Law for the development of communities of opportunity and equity . Bill Gates Sr. William Henry Gates II (born November 30, 1925), better known as Bill Gates Sr., is