Here’s The First Big Purchase Bill Gates Made When Microsoft Started Taking Off

With a net worth that exceeds $ 91 billion, Bill Gates can pay for almost anything he wants.

After taking his first leave of absence from Harvard (later he would retire altogether), Gates moved to Albuquerque, NM, with his partner Paul Allen in 1975, where the pair began working at its fledgling company, Microsoft, on time. full. Only three years later, the company's year-end sales amounted to more than $ 1 million.

In 1987, Gates, 31, became the youngest billionaire in history, and his fortune only continued to rise, until he finally won the title of the richest man in the world for decades.

In 1979, when Gates began earning large sums of money with Microsoft, he decided to splurge on a luxury car: a Porsche 911 supercar, to be exact, as Business Insider pointed out.

"I bought something that was a bit wasteful," Gates told David Rubenstein about the trip during a Bloomberg interview in 2016. "It was used, but it was an incredible car."

The car also did not accumulate dust in Gates' garage: he loved to test his speed with non-target units around the New Mexico desert. After a particularly strident night, he even had to call Allen to get him out of jail, according to a 1997 Time profile.

"Sometimes, when I wanted to think at night, I would go out and drive at high speed," Gates told Rubenstein. "Fortunately, I did not commit suicide by doing that."

When Microsoft moved its headquarters from New Mexico to Bellevue, Washington, in 1979, Gates accumulated three speeding tickets only on the disk, including two from the same police, Time reports.

And shortly after arriving in Seattle, the Microsoft co-founder added some brighter cars to his collection, including a Porsche 930 Turbo, a Jaguar XJ6 and a Ferrari 348.

Gates is not the only successful person who spends his first big salary on a new set of wheels. After the star basketball player Shaquille O'Neal signed his first professional contract, he surpassed one million dollars in less than an hour.

O'Neal's first purchase: a $ 150,000 Mercedes Benz for him. He immediately followed with a match for his father and a smaller one of $ 100,000 for his mother. O'Neal also paid for his mother's house and started doing "what all home-owners do: buy rings, diamonds and earrings, and this and that," he told Business Insider.