185 Highly Recommended Books by Bill Gates On 19 Different Topics

William Henry Gates III is an American business magnate, software developer, and philanthropist. He is best known as the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation. At age 31, Bill Gates became the youngest American billionaire, a record that held from 1987 until 2010, when Mark Zuckerberg became a billionaire at age 23. Bill and Melinda Gates have given $45.5 billion to charitable causes, including the eponymously named Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, since 1994, CNBC reported, citing the Chronicle of Philanthropy. In 2019, the couple donated $589 million to charity, making them the seventh most philanthropic people last year.

Bill Gates is an incredibly busy man, but he always makes time to read. “Reading books is my favorite way to learn about a new topic,” he wrote on his blog. “I’ve been reading about a book a week on average since I was a kid. An avid lifelong learner himself, Bill Gates knows a thing or two about studying. He reads about 50 books per year, which breaks down to one per week and frequently updates his book reviews on his blog. He takes steps to ensure that he actually absorbs all the material he’s read – he takes notes while reading, which helps him reflect on the material. In 2019, Gates read more fiction than usual. “It wasn’t a conscious decision, but I seemed to be drawn to stories that let me explore another world,” he wrote on the blog.

Gates has written three books:

• The Road Ahead written with Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold and journalist Peter Rinearson, was published in November 1995. It summarized the implications of the personal computing revolution and described a future profoundly changed by the arrival of a global information superhighway.
• Business @ the Speed of Thought was published in 1999, and discusses how business and technology are integrated, and shows how digital infrastructures and information networks can help to get an edge on the competition.
• How to Avoid a Climate Disaster to be published in 2021, Gates shares what he has learned in over a decade of studying climate change and investing in innovations to address climate problems.

In this post, we’ve compiled a total of 185 books that Bill Gates have read in the last decade. Feel free to click on the book cover for a larger version with the full book title and author. This is not a “free ebook” list but just a list of books on what you can read next. We hope you do enjoy this collection and stay tuned for more similar posts in the near future!