Microsoft has created 4 billionaires and an estimated 10,000 millionaires Microsoft made four men billionaires: Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer and Charles Simonyi.
Gates and Allen co-founded Microsoft in 1975, and Ballmer — who knew Gates at Harvard — got a slice of the company when he joined in 1980.
Simonyi ran applications programming, starting with Microsoft Word. He became a space tourist, going into space twice, and endowed the Simonyi Professorship of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, first held by Richard Dawkins.
Microsoft also reportedly created about 10,000 millionaires, though this may not be a reliable number. According to the New York Times in 2005:
"While the exact number is not known, it is reasonable to assume that there were approximately 10,000 Microsoft millionaires created by the year 2000," said Richard S. Conway Jr., a Seattle economist whom Microsoft hired to study its impact on Washington State. "The wealth that has come to this area is staggering." Some of them were secretaries….
This doesn’t count Markus "Notch" Persson who sold Minecraft to Microsoft for $2.5 billion.
Also, when Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26 billion, co-founder Reid Hoffman’s share was worth $2.7 billion.