Microsoft paid no dividend for its first 17 years as a public company, finally starting one in 2003 — and it has paid, and raised, one every year since.

Microsoft was a Windows-and-Office company until Satya Nadella bet it on the cloud in 2014. Azure and cloud services now drive its growth far more than desktop software ever did.

Bill Gates has a published mathematics paper. As a Harvard undergraduate he co-wrote “Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal” (1979) on the “pancake sorting” problem with professor Christos Papadimitriou — and the bound he proved stood as the best known for roughly 30 years.

One of Bill Gates’s own coding credits is DONKEY.BAS, a crude driving game he co-wrote in 1981 (with Neil Konzen) to ship with the first IBM PC. Apple’s Macintosh team later singled it out as an embarrassment.