Microsoft Billionaire And Space Explorer Still Goes To Work Every Single Day In His 70s | Celebrity Net Worth 2026

Charles Simonyi spent two decades at Microsoft. He developed the Microsoft Office suite of software. He's been to space twice. He left Microsoft to found a startup, which Microsoft bought three years ago. He has a net worth of $1.5 billion and is 71 years old. Simonyi has no plans to retire. In fact, he still goes to work every day and still collects a paycheck from Microsoft. These days, he's building an app called Microsoft Whiteboard, which is essentially a digital version of a whiteboard. At a recent meetup in Seattle, he said that work gives meaning to his existence. As long as he can keep contributing, he will keep going to work. Of course, it helps if you're passionate about what you do for a living, something Simonyi makes clear.

Simonyi was born in Budapest, Hungary in September 1948. While in junior high school in the early 1960s, Simonyi worked as a night watchman part-time in a computer lab. The lab oversaw a large Soviet Ural II mainframe. He took an interest in computing. He learned to program from one of the laboratory's engineers. When he was 17, he left Hungary on a short-term visa and did not return. In 1966, he was hired by A/S Regnecentralen in Denmark to work on the RC 4000 minicomputer. In 1968 he moved to the U.S. to attend the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated with his B.S. in Engineering Mathematics and Statistics in 1972. From there he was recruited to work for Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center on the development of the Xerox Alto, one of the first personal computers. At Xerox, he also worked on the Bravo word processing software. While at PARC he realized a computer revolution was coming and he did not think Xerox was the company that would make the most of it. During this time he was also working on his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. He graduated in 1977.