By Bill Gates during a visit to London in June 2015. Photo: DFID - UK Department for International Development / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
Bill Gates built the world’s best-known software company, then spent the next quarter century giving away a large share of the fortune it produced. One of his more closely watched bets now sits in Wyoming, in the coal town of Kemmerer, where a nuclear reactor he helped fund entered construction this spring.
From Seattle to Microsoft
William Henry Gates III was born Oct. 28, 1955, in Seattle to Bill Gates Sr. and Mary Maxwell Gates. At 13 he enrolled at Lakeside School, where he met Paul Allen. Gates entered Harvard in the fall of 1973 and left in 1975 to start Microsoft with Allen. Their early work centered on a version of BASIC for the Altair computer, demonstrated at the offices of MITS in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Microsoft name was registered in New Mexico on Nov. 26, 1976, and the company moved to Bellevue, Washington, on Jan. 1, 1979.
The breakthrough came from IBM. The company approached Microsoft in July 1980, and Microsoft supplied the operating system for the IBM personal computer for a one-time fee of $50,000. Microsoft released Windows on Nov. 20, 1985, and went public in 1986. A year later, at 31, Gates became the world’s youngest billionaire. In 1999 his net worth briefly topped $100 billion, making him the first centibillionaire.
Gates served as Microsoft’s chief executive for 25 years. Steve Ballmer succeeded him in 2000, and Gates became chief software architect, a role he held until 2008. He stepped down as chairman in February 2014 to serve as a technology adviser to Satya Nadella, and he left the board in 2020.
Philanthropy and climate work
In 2000, Gates and his wife, Melinda French Gates, merged their family foundations into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, endowed with stock then valued at about $5 billion. The couple co-chaired it until 2024. Their marriage, which began in 1994, was dissolved in 2021, and the organization has since been renamed the Gates Foundation, with Gates as sole chair. They have three children.
On Dec. 9, 2010, Gates and Warren Buffett launched the Giving Pledge, which asks wealthy donors to commit at least half their wealth to charity. In a 2025 BBC interview, Gates said his giving had reached $100 billion, about $60 billion of it to the foundation. In 2015 he founded Breakthrough Energy, a network of climate and energy ventures. His memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings, was published in 2025.
His investments are managed largely through Cascade Investment, which also holds farmland. According to Wikipedia, those holdings total about 242,000 acres across 19 states.
The Wyoming connection
Gates is a leading investor in TerraPower, the nuclear design company he chairs. In June 2021 TerraPower and PacifiCorp, a Berkshire Hathaway Energy subsidiary that operates in Wyoming as Rocky Mountain Power, announced plans for a joint Natrium reactor. On Nov. 16, 2021, Kemmerer was named the preferred site. It was one of four Wyoming candidates, along with Gillette, Glenrock and Rock Springs, each tied to a coal plant. The reactor is slated to stand near the Naughton plant at Kemmerer.
The Natrium design pairs a 345-megawatt sodium-cooled reactor with a molten salt storage system. The storage lets the plant raise output to 500 megawatts for about five and a half hours. Cost estimates were about $4 billion, with the U.S. Department of Energy covering half and Gates reportedly contributing $1 billion.
TerraPower applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a construction permit on March 28, 2024, and broke ground that June on a sodium test and fill facility. The agency’s final environmental impact statement, issued in October 2025, found no adverse impacts. On March 4, 2026, the commission issued the construction permit, the first it has granted for a non-light-water reactor. Reactor construction began in April 2026.
The project is far from finished, and a plant of this type has not been operated commercially in the United States. For Kemmerer, a town long defined by coal, it is the most visible link to a man better known for software and global health.
Sources: Wikipedia entries on Bill Gates and TerraPower.
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