Many people think Bill Gates' story is a rags to riches tale. Those people are sorely mistaken. I know this because I spent a few years working next door to the Mary Gates III research hospital (a nearly kilometer long building) at the University of Washington, named after his well-known mother.

Bill was born with a multi-million $ trust fund. His company was both duplicitous and inept from its very first business transactions. Here's a great history of the early days: https://web.archive.org/web/20051013072349/http://www.vanwensveen.nl/rants/microsoft/IhateMS_1.html

Despite his broad lack of ethics and technical competence, Bill's nascent company, Micro Soft, was still 'successful' financially (at least) thanks to what was surely the biggest & dumbest business blunder in history - the IBM VP who gifted Gates a monopoly on the IBM PC and its clones.

@lightweight "gifted" ??? I think you do have to give Gates credit for finding an OS to present and selling Microsoft's ability. Privilege and luck got him into position, but the sale still had to be made.
Also, the Microsoft monopoly was formed in addtion to this arrangement, but not solely because of it.
The "blunder" part is also questionable, because of IBM's own antitrust burdens. They had to be seen as not bundling HW and OS at that time.

@lwriemen I honestly don't respect Gates or rate his intellect. Almost every single major advance in tech in the past few decades has caught Microsoft (i.e. Gates) with their pants down.