11 Business Books Bill Gates Wants You to Read

Page 1 of 12

To get a glimpse of a genius mind, one needs to know the kind of book he reads, so today we’ll be looking at the 11 business books Bill Gates wants you to read. Industry leaders like Gates don’t rely on their wit and experience alone. They consult people, read books, and utilize various resources to increase their knowledge and understanding. Gates sees to it that he reads one book a week or roughly 50 books a year. He also writes thorough and insightful book reviews!

William Henry “Bill” Gates III is the co-founder of Microsoft along with Paul Allen. Microsoft is the world’s largest software company with a current market cap of $340.8 billion. Gates was born in Seattle, Washington on October 28, 1955. At age 17, his passion for computers peaked with his creation of a tic-tac-toe program that allows users to play against computers. He dropped out of Harvard to put up his own computer company.

Business Books Bill Gates Wants You to Read

Paolo Bona / Shutterstock.com

Fast forward to today, Gates is the richest man in the world with a real time net worth of $75.9 billion at the time of writing this article. He was named the world’s youngest billionaire in 1987 with a net worth of $1.25 billion before he turned 32. He was named by Time Magazine as one of the Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century and have been included multiple times in the annual Time 100 Most Influential People.

In 2008, the Microsoft co-creator resigned from the company he built so he could focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which he established with his wife back in 2000. They have been devoting their resources to helping alleviate poverty and improve healthcare in the world’s poorest countries. In 2010, they pledged $10 billion a year over the next decade to help in the research and development of vaccines in poverty-stricken countries.

We kicked off this series with the 11 investing books billionaire Warren Buffet wants you to read. Compared to Buffet, Gates’s reading list is a sundry of fiction and non-fiction books. But for this roster, we will only look at his recommended business-related books. We curated this list from Gates Notes, Time, Gates’s TED 2015 Recommended List and Personal Reading List, and the Observer. Let’s flip some pages!

Page 1 of 12