18-Year-Old Bill Gates’ Resume Shows A $15,000 Salary In 1974

Everybody has to start somewhere. Bill Gates currently has a net worth of $67 billion, but less than 40 years ago he was making just $15,000. The Living Computer Museum showed off their collection of Microsoft paraphernalia at an event on Tuesday, including co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allens’ resumes from 1974.

The resumes are a real find, for a few reasons. First of all, Gates and Allens’ current salaries are seemingly listed as $15,000 and what looks like $12,550, respectively. Compared to their current net worths, this is, of course, hilariously low. but at the time, these numbers are pretty darn impressive. Using an inflation calculator, you can see that $15,000 in 1974 is equal to about $68,880 today. An 18-year-old that is making $68,880 a year? That’s amazing.

It also looks like Allen and Gates made their resumes together, since the formatting is so similar. Perhaps they made the decision to include their heights and weights on their resumes together as well. Was it common to include your height and weight on your resume in the 1970′s? We can see that Gates was clearly not spending that $15,000 on lavish meals, since his height and weight give him a BMI of 18.7, which is nearly underweight.