Bill Gates

Early life and education

William Henry Gates III was born October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. His father was a prominent attorney and his mother served on corporate and charitable boards. He attended Lakeside School, a private preparatory school in Seattle, where he gained early access to a computer terminal and spent large amounts of time programming - meeting fellow student Paul Allen there. That access to computing time as a teenager was, by his own account, formative.

Gates enrolled at Harvard University in 1973. He is widely reported to have scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT - a near-perfect result frequently cited by biographers and by Gates himself in interviews. He left Harvard before graduating to start Microsoft, making him one of the most famous college dropouts in business history.

The SAT figure is a real, citable standardized-test data point. It is not an IQ score. SAT and IQ are correlated but measure different things on different scales, and there is no valid way to convert a 1590 into a "160 IQ." Strong test performance is consistent with high ability, but it is not a psychometric IQ measurement and does not produce the specific number that circulates online.

Microsoft and career

Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975, initially to write a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 microcomputer. The company's pivotal moment came in 1980 when it licensed an operating system to IBM that became MS-DOS, positioning Microsoft at the center of the emerging personal-computer industry. Windows, first released in 1985, went on to dominate desktop computing.

As chairman and CEO, Gates led Microsoft through decades of growth into one of the world's most valuable companies. He stepped back from day-to-day leadership in 2008 to focus on philanthropy, co-founding the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which directs large-scale funding toward global health, vaccination, and poverty programs. He also authored "The Road Ahead" (1995), a book on the future of computing.

This record reflects exceptional technical depth, strategic judgment, and ambition. It does not depend on, or reveal, any particular IQ figure.

The IQ question and where the number comes from

The figure of about 160 - and other figures hovering around 150 to 170 in different posts - appears widely on "celebrity IQ" list sites and social media. None of these sources cite a named test (Stanford-Binet, WAIS, Mensa-administered Cattell, etc.), a date, an examiner, or a documented administration. The numbers are presented without provenance.

This is the standard pattern for living-celebrity IQ figures: list-makers work backwards from a person's visible achievements to a plausible-sounding round number. In Gates's case the reasoning is sometimes dressed up by pointing to his near-perfect SAT - but the SAT is a different instrument on a different scale, and converting it into an IQ figure is not psychometrically valid. IQ is defined as a normed position relative to a population on a specific test; it cannot be inferred from a resume or read off an SAT slip.

Gates has not claimed a specific IQ in any verifiable record. Absent a published, named, dated test result, the honest answer to "what is Bill Gates's IQ" is: unknown - there is no measurement. The one thing that is real and citable is the reported 1590 SAT, and that is a standardized-test score, not an IQ.

Why celebrity IQ numbers are usually wrong

Three recurring problems make figures like this unreliable:

• No instrument. A score has no meaning without the test it came from. A 160 on a high-ceiling research test is a different population position than a 160 on the WAIS-IV.
• No administration. Real scores come from a documented sitting: where, when, scored by whom. Celebrity figures have none of this, and an SAT score does not fill that gap.
• Reverse inference. Assigning an IQ based on someone being successful - or based on a high SAT - is circular: it assumes the conclusion (high ability) and dresses it up as a measurement.

For how real scores are produced and why they are not comparable across tests, see our methodology page and the historical IQ tests archive.

Frequently asked questions

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