Bill Gates made his fortune in the Software market, not by investing a single dollar in any market.

He made his dollars from scratch,
but he had rich parents. Probably richer than 99.9% of other youngsters. Bill Gate’s grandfather, Maxwell founded Seattle’s National City Bank in 1906. Bill Gate’s father, William Henry Gates, was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. Bill Gates’ mother Mary Maxwell Gates was a corporate lawyer. It is easier to take entrepreneurial risk when you have a million-dollar trust fund to fall back on if things do not work out.

Bill Gates’ education:
Bill Gates went to Lakeside, Seattle’s most exclusive prep school where tuition in 1967 was $5,000 (Harvard tuition that year was $1760). Typical classmates included the McCaw brothers, who sold the cellular phone licenses they obtained from the U.S. Government to AT&T for $11.5 billion in 1994. There he was able to “play around” with some expensive computers, a minicomputer, remember this was 1967 and there was not a computer on every desk. He later went on to study at Harvard, where he got to know Paul Allan and Steve Ballmer but dropped out as we all know about.

When everybody talking about what a great achievement it was for Bill Gates to become a bazillionaire, he had the odds stacked against him being a privileged kid. In comparison some guy off the street would have a hard time to meet the same people, and devote the time to the same things.

Is Microsoft a good investment?
It has had a good steady growth, it has had a long term upward drift, there is a future for the product, they are focused on earning money. We do not give buy and sell advice, but it is probably not the worst stock in the IT-world. It has one problem, Microsoft is a giant.