Bill Gates Height 2026: How Tall Is the Microsoft Founder?

Last updated: November 4, 2026  ·  By Nathan Cole

Bill Gates is 5 ft 10 in tall in 2026. That is 177–178 centimetres, or 1.77–1.78 metres, for a man who turned 71 on October 28, 2026. The Microsoft co-founder’s fortune sits at an estimated $108 billion to $120.3 billion as of November 2026, anchored at about $120 billion on Forbes real-time data dated November 4, 2026.

One honest caveat belongs in the first paragraph, not buried at the bottom: no official Microsoft biography and no Gates Foundation biography publishes Gates’s height. The 5 ft 10 in figure is a reported listing, traced to his IMDb profile at 1.77 m, and the biography listings that round it up. This profile gives the number, shows the conversion math behind the small disagreement between sources, and then covers the life that made the question worth asking — Lakeside School, the Harvard exit, Microsoft, the long step back from the company, the foundation’s plan to spend itself out of existence by 2045, and the family that will inherit less than 1% of the fortune.

The Short Answer: Bill Gates Height in Every Unit

Bill Gates stands 5 ft 10 in tall. In metric units that is 177–178 cm, or 1.77–1.78 m. In inches alone, 70 inches. The spread of one centimetre is not a disagreement about his body. It is a rounding difference between sources that start from the same 1.77 m listing and round it in different directions.

For readers checking the number against a doorway or a driver’s licence form: 5 ft 10 in is the figure to use, and 178 cm is its metric twin. Anyone quoting 5 ft 9 in has usually truncated the 9.7-inch conversion instead of rounding it, and anyone quoting 5 ft 11 in has rounded twice.

Why Some Listings Say 5’9¾” and Others Say 5’10”

The split comes from one conversion. IMDb lists Gates at 1.77 m. Multiply out: 1.77 m is 177 cm, and 177 divided by 2.54 is 69.69 inches — 5 ft 9.7 in, which some height sites print precisely as 5’9¾”. Biography roundups then do what roundups do and print 5 ft 10 in.

Neither camp is inventing a number. They are describing the same measurement at different levels of precision. The 178 cm variant arrives the same way: 5 ft 10 in converted back to metric is 177.8 cm, which rounds to 178 cm. Once you see the chain, the “disagreement” dissolves into arithmetic.

One more wrinkle deserves a plain label. A height-analysis site, FootwearHeights, argues Gates measured close to 5 ft 10 in first thing in the morning in his youth, held about 5 ft 9.75 in through the day, and now stands nearer 5 ft 9.5 in after a typical age-related loss of a quarter to half an inch. That is an analyst’s estimate from photographs and public appearances, not a measured record, and this article reports it as such. It does not change the anchored figure, but it explains why older readers may remember him as a fraction taller.

How 5 ft 10 in Compares: Average Men and Fellow Founders

At 5 ft 10 in, Gates stands about an inch above the average American man, who measures roughly 5 ft 9 in. He is not a tall man by the standards of public life, and he never presented himself as one. The photographs that make him look short usually pair him with genuinely tall company — basketball players at foundation events, or six-foot-plus executives on stage.

Against his peer group the picture is mixed. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is listed at about 5 ft 7 in, which puts Gates roughly three inches above him. That comparison is the one that surprises readers most, because Bezos’s public image runs larger than his frame. Gates sits squarely in the middle of the tech-founder pack: above Bezos, below the six-foot-plus founders, and almost exactly at the average for American men of his generation.

Early Life: Seattle, Lakeside School, and Paul Allen

William Henry Gates III was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, Washington, to William H. Gates Sr., a lawyer, and Mary Maxwell Gates, who served on corporate boards. He attended Lakeside School, a private preparatory school in Seattle, where the school’s early computer access — rare for any school in the late 1960s — put a terminal in front of teenagers who otherwise would have waited a decade to touch one.

Paul Allen was two years ahead of Gates at Lakeside, and the friendship formed there became the partnership that built Microsoft. The two spent their school years hunting for computer time wherever they could find it, including a deal in which they traded programming work for access. Gates later described himself in his memoir as a restless, argumentative kid who clashed with his parents and struggled to fit in — the raw material, by his own account, of the adult who would argue his way through boardrooms.

Harvard, the Dropout Decision, and Microsoft’s Founding

Gates entered Harvard in 1973 and left in 1975, at age 20, before finishing his degree. The trigger was the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which featured the Altair 8800, an early personal computer kit. Gates and Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the machine, flew to Albuquerque to show it to its maker, MITS, and stayed. Microsoft was founded on April 4, 1975.

The first year was small by any measure. The Associated Press, reporting on Gates’s memoir in February 2025, put Microsoft’s 1975 revenue at $16,005, with Gates and Allen paying themselves about $9 an hour. Traf-O-Data, their earlier school venture reading traffic tapes, had been the rehearsal. Microsoft was the performance, and it moved to Seattle in 1979, back to the city where both founders grew up.

Windows, the CEO Years, and Becoming a Billionaire at 31

Microsoft’s deal to supply an operating system for IBM’s personal computer, followed by MS-DOS and then Windows, turned a small Albuquerque software shop into the company that set the terms for personal computing. Gates led the company as chairman and chief executive, and after Microsoft went public in 1986 he became a billionaire in 1987, at 31.

The Windows years made Gates the richest man in the world for much of the 1990s and 2000s, and they also made him a public figure in a way programmers rarely become. The antitrust case brought by the United States government in the late 1990s, settled in the early 2000s, marked the end of that first era — the founder as industry ruler — and the start of the slower handover that followed.

Stepping Back: CEO in 2000, Chairman in 2014, Board in 2020

Gates stepped down as Microsoft chief executive in January 2000, handing the role to Steve Ballmer, and became chief software architect while staying on as chairman. He left his day-to-day role in June 2008 to spend his time on the foundation. On February 4, 2014, he stepped down as chairman and became technology adviser to the newly appointed chief executive, Satya Nadella.

The final break came on March 13, 2020, when Microsoft announced Gates had left its board, along with his seat on Berkshire Hathaway’s board, to devote more time to philanthropy — climate, global health, development and education. He had served on Microsoft’s board for 44 years. The sequence matters for readers who still picture him running the company: he has not held an operating role there for nearly two decades.

The Gates Foundation and the 0 Billion Plan to Close in 2045

The Gates Foundation, founded in 2000 by Bill and Melinda Gates, is now the centre of Gates’s working life. On May 8, 2025, marking the foundation’s 25th anniversary, it announced it would spend more than $200 billion over the next 20 years and close its doors on December 31, 2045. Gates wrote that he would give away virtually all his wealth through the foundation in that period, and that his personal fortune would fall by about 99% by the closing date.

The foundation’s January 2026 release put the machinery behind the pledge in numbers: an approximately $9 billion annual payout, the end of a four-year ramp to that budget. The first 25 years had already given away more than $100 billion, with support from Warren Buffett’s gifts. The second 25 years, compressed into 20, are designed to spend the rest. Melinda French Gates resigned from the foundation in May 2024 and now runs her own organisation, Pivotal, focused on women and young people in the United States.

Bill Gates Net Worth in November 2026: 8 Billion to 0.3 Billion

Height articles usually borrow a stale fortune figure and move on. This one dates it. Forbes’s 2026 World’s Billionaires list, built on share prices from March 1, 2026, put Gates at an estimated $108 billion, ranked 19th. Forbes’s real-time tracker then moved with the markets: about $109.7 billion on August 28, 2026, $114.7 billion on October 10, 2026, and $120.3 billion on November 4, 2026, ranked 17th.

The honest range for November 2026 is therefore $108 billion to $120.3 billion, anchored at about $120 billion on the freshest Forbes real-time data. The gap between the March snapshot and the November figure is market movement, not new income: most of the fortune now sits in Cascade Investment’s diversified holdings, since Forbes estimates his remaining direct Microsoft stake at under 1%, after share gifts to the foundation’s trust in 2022. Forbes also reports lifetime giving to the foundation above $59 billion — money already gone from the fortune, which is why a man who once held the number-one rank now sits in the high teens while giving away more than almost anyone alive.

Family: Melinda, Jennifer, Rory, Phoebe, and Paula Hurd

Gates married Melinda French, a Microsoft colleague he met in 1987, in 1994. They announced their separation in May 2021 and finalised the divorce that August, ending a 27-year marriage. Both have since spoken about the split in public; Gates has called it his biggest regret, and Melinda has described it as necessary.

Their three children are adults. Jennifer Gates Nasser, the eldest, is an equestrian and a paediatrician in residency, married to equestrian Nayel Nassar, with two daughters. Rory Gates, the middle child, has pursued graduate study. Phoebe Gates, the youngest, graduated from Stanford and co-founded Phia, a fashion-tech startup, with Sophia Kianni. Gates has said publicly that his children will receive less than 1% of his fortune — a deliberate choice, repeated in a 2025 interview, on the grounds that a huge inheritance would not serve them.

Since 2022 Gates has been in a relationship with Paula Hurd, the widow of former Oracle chief executive Mark Hurd, who died in 2019. He called her his “serious girlfriend” on the Today show in February 2025. As of early 2026 there has been no reported engagement, and this article does not speculate about one.

Source Code: The 2025 Memoir That Revisits the Early Years

Gates published Source Code: My Beginnings on February 4, 2025, with Knopf, as the first volume of a planned trilogy. The book stops where most Gates biographies get going: it covers his childhood, his clashes with his parents, the death of a close school friend, and the decision to leave Harvard, ending with the drive back to Seattle in 1979. It does not cover the Windows years, the marriage, the divorce, or the foundation in any depth — those volumes are promised later, the second not before 2027 by Gates’s own estimate.

For a height article the memoir matters in one narrow way: it is Gates’s own account of the years when his adult height was set, and it says nothing about his measurements. The silence is consistent with everything else in this profile. Gates has written at length about his childhood, his company and his giving. His height has never been part of the story he tells about himself, which is why the number survives only as a listing.

Weight: Why This Profile Gives No Single Number

Readers who search for Gates’s weight will find a number within seconds, and that is exactly the problem. Published listings disagree by about 10 kilograms: one bio farm prints 63 kg (138.6 lbs), another prints about 70 kg (154 lbs), and a third prints about 160 lbs (73 kg). None of them traces to a weigh-in, a medical record, or an interview in which Gates states his weight.

A responsible profile does not pick the middle guess and print it as fact. Weight also moves with age, health and season in a way height does not, and a single undated figure for a 71-year-old would mislead more than it informs. The honest statement is that Gates’s weight is not reliably reported in public sources, and any article that prints one exact number without a source is guessing.

What People Get Wrong About Bill Gates’s Height

Three errors recur across the web. The first is treating 5 ft 10 in as an official statistic, like a passport entry. It is not. It is a listing, and the listing’s own source chain ends at a profile database, not at a measurement.

The second error is reading old photographs as evidence that he has shrunk dramatically. People lose a small amount of height with age as spinal discs compress, and a quarter to half an inch across a decade is ordinary. It does not turn a 5 ft 10 in man into a short one, and the photographs that seem to show a bigger gap usually pair him with taller people or shoot from below.

The third error is assuming height mattered to his career in any direct way. Gates’s advantage was never physical. It was timing — access to a school computer in 1968, a popular-electronics cover story in 1975, and a partnership with a friend who shared his obsession. A taller Gates would have written the same BASIC interpreter. A shorter one would have, too.

Sources & Reporting

This profile was reported on November 4, 2026, from live sources. Height: IMDb profile listing of 1.77 m, cross-checked via HeightComparative (verified September 28, 2026) and biography roundups from BoredPanda and InfoSeeMedia (June 2026). Net worth: Forbes World’s Billionaires list 2026 (March 1, 2026 prices) and Forbes real-time data as tracked November 4, 2026, with October 2026 and August 2026 checkpoints from FourWeekMBA and CEO Review Magazine. Foundation: Gates Foundation press release of May 8, 2025, and its January 2026 payout release. Career timeline: Associated Press reporting on Source Code (February 3, 2025) and Microsoft’s March 2020 board announcement. Family: Hello! Magazine and People reporting (2024–2025), the Today show interview of February 2025, and The Wealth Advisor (October 20, 2026).

Where sources disagreed — the 177 cm versus 178 cm rounding, the March versus November fortune figures, the weight listings — the article prints the range and names the reason, rather than picking the tidiest number. Corrections are welcome via the site’s contact page, and any confirmed official measurement would replace the reported listing at once.

Bill Gates Height: Frequently Asked Questions