Everyone who's ever used a computer knows exactly who Bill Gates is. Credited with “invented the internet,” Gates is the world's third richest man, with a net worth of $58-billion. Until a few years ago, Gates' fortune had a chokehold on the number-one position, but other fast movers manage to surpass the Microsoft founder.

Gates is also well known for dropping out of Harvard University and donating millions upon millions to a wide variety of charities around the world. He married wife Melinda Gates in 1994 and has four children. Gates has publicly stated that his children will only receive .01% of his fortune as an inheritance.

William Henry Gates III was born October 28, 1955 in Seattle, Washington. Even as a small child, a young Bill showed flashes of extreme intelligence. His father was a successful attorney and Gates enjoyed a well-to-do upbringing, attending the exclusive Lakeside School in the area.

He may have been lucky financially, but he was truly gifted mentally. He attended Harvard University in 1973 and met future partner Paul Allen. They began working on their computer programming language, BASIC, that was to work as the basis for MIT's Altair. Gates left Harvard in his junior year and went on to form the Microsoft Corporation.

The Microsoft Corp. had very humble beginnings. Though both Gates and Allen were geniuses, they needed to revolutionize far beyond the reaches of human imagination. Since computers were already a big part of life, they needed to create something to connect the world. Gates always believed that every home in the world should own a computer.

Eventually, Gates developed ways to make computers work easier, faster, and his technologies gave them substantially longer lives. Once the Information Super Highway (World Wide Web) became realized, Gates' fame exploded and so did the computers - which left his bank account busting at the seams.

Bill Gates was often criticized for being greedy and too aggressive, and he and his lawyers spent much time in the courtroom fighting lawsuits. Apple Computer, Opera, Netscape, WordPerfect and Sun Microsystems were among the companies to file suit against Microsoft, claiming that they had an unfair monopoly on the industry.

These other companies ended up becoming rather wealthy, and it had no affect whatsoever and Microsoft's ability to earn. By the mid 90s, Bill Gates was the world's riches man, a title which he kept until 2008 when he stepped down as the CEO to Microsoft.

In 2005, Gates received an honorary knighthood directly from the Queen of England, and in 2007, he was given an honorary diploma from Harvard. Gates has also created one of the world's largest charitable foundations, which has given away more than $1-billion a year since 2000. Warren Buffett, the man whose riches surpassed Gates in 08, pledged that he would give a substantial portion of his net worth to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Bill Gates now acts as the lead software designer for Microsoft and plans to retire soon.