Microsoft was a Windows-and-Office company until Satya Nadella bet it on the cloud in 2014. Azure and cloud services now drive its growth far more than desktop software ever did.

Microsoft paid no dividend for its first 17 years as a public company, finally starting one in 2003 — and it has paid, and raised, one every year since.

Bill Gates has a published mathematics paper. As a Harvard undergraduate he co-wrote “Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal” (1979) on the “pancake sorting” problem with professor Christos Papadimitriou — and the bound he proved stood as the best known for roughly 30 years.

One of Bill Gates’s own coding credits is DONKEY.BAS, a crude driving game he co-wrote in 1981 (with Neil Konzen) to ship with the first IBM PC. Apple’s Macintosh team later singled it out as an embarrassment.