The beats of Bill Gates' lore are familiar and quintessential to the American entrepreneurial dream: A brilliant math whiz, Gates was 19 when he dropped out of Harvard and cofounded Microsoft with his friend Paul Allen in 1975. Nearly 50 years later, he's one of the richest and most famous men on Earth.
Gates, who Forbes estimates is worth about $106 billion, stepped down from Microsoft's board in 2020. He's cultivated his brand of philanthropy with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, his endeavor with Melinda French Gates, now his ex-wife.
Their three children, Jennifer, Rory, and Phoebe, have largely avoided the spotlight and now seem mostly engaged in academic pursuits.
An equally important part of Gates' story is his own illustrious heritage.
Gates grew up in a well-to-do and well-connected family, surrounded by the rarefied personal and professional milieu of his parents, whose circle included a Cabinet secretary and a governor of Washington, according to "Hard Drive," the 1992 biography of Gates by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. (Brock Adams, who went on to become the transportation secretary in the Carter administration, is said to have introduced Gates' parents.)
His parents' professional lives even influenced his social calendar — the 2019 Netflix documentary "Inside Bill's Brain" describes Gates accompanying his father, William Gates Sr., a prominent corporate lawyer in Seattle, to American Bar Association meetings.
The elder Gates, the president of the Washington State Bar Association, became a name partner at the firm K&L Gates; a statement in 2020 about his death says it was formed when a firm he'd helped form merged with another.
Bill Gates' mother, Mary Gates, came from a line of successful bankers and sat on the boards of important financial and social institutions including the nonprofit United Way. It was there, according to her New York Times obituary, that she met the former IBM chairman John Opel — a fateful connection thought to have led to IBM's enlisting of Microsoft to provide an operating system in the 1980s.
"She was very big in the social scene in the Seattle area," Bill Gates said of his mother in "Inside Bill's Brain."
Discussions about "nepo babies," a term enshrined in the popular lexicon thanks to a New York magazine story about who achieves success in Hollywood, can be controversial. But beneficiaries of the financial stability and connections often acknowledge their own good fortune.
Gates has reportedly said he plans to leave each of his three children $10 million — a fraction of his fortune.
"My parents were well off — my dad did well as a lawyer, took us on great trips, we had a really nice house," Gates said in "Inside Bill's Brain."
"And I've had so much luck in terms of all these opportunities," he said.
Meet Gates' own lucky children below.
Gates and his children did not respond to requests for comment for this story.