Bill Gates

In 1968, the Lakeside School in Seattle bought time on a computer terminal, and a thirteen-year-old Bill Gates became obsessed. He and an older student, Paul Allen, spent nights writing programs, and they were briefly banned from a local company's computer for exploiting bugs to get extra time. In 1975, Gates dropped out of Harvard, and the two friends founded Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

He was born on October 28, 1955, in Seattle, at about ten in the evening, a time Astro-Databank gives an A rating. His Sun is in Scorpio, sitting in the fourth house, the most private sector of all, tied to foundations, roots and the inner life. Scorpio is strategic, secretive and intensely focused. A Scorpio Sun in the fourth describes someone whose power works from a protected base, and Gates was famous for an intense, private, sometimes ruthless focus on building Microsoft.

Jupiter and Pluto sit together in late Leo in his second house of money and resources. Jupiter expands and Pluto concentrates power, and in the house of wealth they describe extraordinary accumulation. For most of the years between 1995 and 2017, Gates was the richest person in the world.

Cancer is his rising sign, with Uranus in Leo in the first house. Uranus is the planet of technology and innovation, and in the first house it describes someone whose identity is bound up with invention and disruption. Microsoft's MS-DOS operating system, licensed to IBM in 1980, and then Windows put software on hundreds of millions of personal computers.

His Moon is in Aries, placed in the tenth house, where a career plays out in public. An Aries Moon is competitive and combative, and there its fighting spirit is on full display. Gates was known for aggressive business tactics, and in 1998 the United States government sued Microsoft for antitrust violations, a case that ended in a settlement.

Mercury, Mars and Neptune, all in Libra, fall in his fourth house as well. Libra concerns balance and partnership. In 2000 he stepped down as Microsoft's chief executive and, with his then-wife Melinda French Gates, created the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which became one of the largest private charitable foundations in the world, funding work on vaccines, polio eradication, malaria and global health.

Venus and Saturn, in Scorpio, sit in his fifth house. Saturn there describes serious responsibilities in matters of love and children. Gates and French Gates, who married in 1994 and had three children, divorced in 2021. His past association with the financier Jeffrey Epstein drew heavy criticism.

In 2025 Gates announced that he would give away nearly all of his remaining fortune through the foundation, which would close in 2045. The Scorpio Sun built the empire in private; the Jupiter and Pluto in his house of money made it one of the largest fortunes in history.