There is no documented IQ score for Bill Gates. The “160” is uncited. His reported SAT of about 1590 is a real data point, but an SAT score is correlated with IQ, not interchangeable with it.
One SAT score, a wide band of IQs
People with the same SAT score land across a range of IQ scores. Pick a score and see how wide the band of plausible IQs is, even when the two tests agree well on average.
Illustrative simulated data (r ≈ 0.8), not real test-taker records. Real conversions also depend on the SAT version and year.
Gates grew up in a well-off Seattle family, his father a lawyer, his mother a civic leader. At Lakeside School he and friends traded programming work for free computer time, and he was asked to write the school's class-scheduling program.
With Paul Allen he started Traf-O-Data, a small business analysing traffic-counter tapes, while still a teenager.
The education behind the myth
The strongest academic paper trail of any tech founder on this site, short of an actual IQ test.
From Harvard to Albuquerque
Lakeside's terminal was paid for by the Mothers' Club, and Paul Allen, two years older, was his closest collaborator there. Gates entered Harvard in 1973.
In 1975 he and Allen wrote Altair BASIC and founded Microsoft in Albuquerque. He left Harvard to run it.
The report card people quote
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.”
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
Timeline
The one real number
Gates's reported SAT result, about 1590 out of 1600, is the only test figure attached to him with any provenance. It measures readiness for college-level reading and maths, on a scale built for high-school students applying to university. It is not an IQ scale and was never designed to be one.
Why the two get blurred
SAT scores and IQ scores do correlate, so people reach for conversion tables. But those tables give a range, not a point, and the range is wide at the top, a near-perfect SAT is consistent with IQs from the 120s to the 140s and beyond. Rounding that to “160” adds a precision nobody measured.
What his record can tell you
Programming as a teenager, Harvard admission and a published mathematics paper as a student are real evidence of ability. Building Microsoft adds business judgment, timing and partnership with Paul Allen. None of it is an IQ test, and together they still don't produce one number.
The complete folder: software, books and foundations
13 entries, with what each one actually did.
About the 160
No named test, no record. The SAT result is real but measures something related, not identical, and can't be turned into a precise IQ.
Sources
- Wallace, J. & Erickson, J. (1992). Hard Drive. Wiley
- Gates, B. (2025). Source Code: My Beginnings
- What's Your IQ editorial review of circulated figures