Bill Gates’s BaZi: Ren Water Under Seven Killings, and How It Became the World’s Richest Man

This is the third weak-chart richest person in the world in this series. Bill Gates’s BaZi is Yi-Wei, Bing-Xu, Ren-Xu, Xin-Hai (乙未 丙戌 壬戌 辛亥): a Ren Water Day Master born in the Xu month at the end of autumn, when Earth is at its heaviest. His day branch is Xu as well, so the chart’s Seven Killings (Earth) pile up layer on layer, and the Day Master finds only one root, in the Hai Water of the hour branch. How does a chart pressed down like this carry Microsoft? And why are he and Steve Jobs, born the same year, a perfect pair of Water and Fire?

Birth data: two accounts, one double-hour

There are two accounts of Gates’s birth time: he himself says 10 p.m. sharp, while the 1992 biography Hard Drive says “shortly after 9”. Several earlier charts in this series sat right on an hour boundary; this one is lucky. Seattle’s longitude puts the clock about 9 minutes ahead of the sun, but the equation of time in late October pushes the sun about 16 minutes the other way. The two partly cancel, so 10 p.m. becomes about 22:07 in true solar time, and even the biography’s “after 9” gives 21:12. Both accounts fall in the Hai hour (21:00–23:00), so there is no dispute over the hour pillar.

Four pillars and Ten Gods

Our strength engine: below 0.35 reads weak, above 0.55 reads strong. The Officer share is the proportion of the whole chart held by a single Ten God, from the engine’s “illness and remedy” check.

The engine reads the chart as weak: out of season, rooted only in the Hai hour branch, and although Xin Metal (Direct Resource) supports it, it cannot hold up against the Seven Killings of two Xu branches and a Wei branch. There are three favorable elements, each with its own job:

• Metal (Resource): transforms Seven Killings and feeds the Day Master. Seven Killings feed Resource and Resource feeds the Day Master, turning pressure into support; the tradition calls this “Killings and Resource feeding each other”.
• Wood (Output): restrains Seven Killings. A weak Day Master normally dislikes Output because it drains strength, but this chart’s illness is too much Earth, so the engine moves Wood from unfavorable to favorable as the “remedy” that attacks Earth; the tradition calls this “Eating God restrains Killings”.
• Water (companions): supports the Day Master directly.

A life led by Seven Killings: always in competition and in court

Seven Killings is the force that presses on the Day Master: strong rivals, high-pressure environments, power and lawsuits. A chart heavy with Seven Killings often looks like a lifetime of fighting: either being pressed or pressing others.

Young Gates’s Microsoft was famous for playing hard, and its battles with Netscape, Apple and IBM were fierce. The most direct parallel is the US government’s antitrust case:

In 1998, a Wu-Yin year, the stem Wu Earth is Seven Killings, and unfavorable; that is the year the lawsuit began. In 2000, a Geng-Chen year, the branch Chen Earth is Seven Killings again, and Chen clashes with both Xu branches in the natal chart, shaking the day branch; that year he was ordered to break up the company and handed over the CEO job. Tradition has always linked Seven Killings with lawsuits, superiors and the pressure of power, and in both years Seven Killings stepped onto the stage.

Luck pillars: two fully favorable steps, then forty years of “favorable above, unfavorable below”

For a man born in a yin year (the year stem Yi is yin), the luck pillars run backwards, starting at age 8.

“fav / unfav” reads the stem first, then the branch: whether each one’s element is favorable (useful), unfavorable, or neither (neutral) for this chart.

Two things stand out:

1. From 1962 to 1981, the first two luck pillars are favorable in both stem and branch. Yi-You and Jia-Shen, Wood and Metal: one restrains Seven Killings, the other transforms them. He met computers at 13, founded a company at 19 and at 25 signed the IBM deal that changed an entire industry, all within these twenty years. The years 1975 (Yi-Mao) and 1980 (Geng-Shen) were also favorable in stem and branch. A weak Day Master got exactly what it needed most, for twenty years straight, at the age it needed it most.
2. For the next forty years, every luck pillar is “favorable stem, unfavorable branch”. Gui-Wei, Ren-Wu, Xin-Si, Geng-Chen: the stems are Water, Water, Metal, Metal, all supporting the Day Master, while the branches Wei, Wu, Si and Chen are all Fire and Earth, that is, Wealth and Officer/Killings. In these years he became the richest man in the world and was at the height of his fame, yet underneath there were always the antitrust case, public criticism and upheaval in his marriage. On the surface the line keeps rising; underneath, the pressure never leaves. This is one way to read it, offered for reference.

Another weak-chart billionaire

The world’s richest people we have cast so far in this series actually have charts of quite different strength:

Of the five, not one has a “strong Day Master with thriving Wealth”, and in almost every chart Wealth is unfavorable. This does not mean weak charts are better at making money. It shows once again that whether Wealth is favorable describes whether money is a burden or a help to that person, which is a separate question from how much money there is. What really decides whether they can carry it is which luck pillars bring Resource and companions.

Gates and Jobs: born the same year, one Water, one Fire

Gates and Steve Jobs were both born in 1955, a Yi-Wei year. They fought each other all their lives, and at times worked together. Looking at each man’s Day Master from the other’s chart gives an interesting contrast (a bit of fun, not a formal compatibility reading):

Bing Fire and Ren Water “clash” as heavenly stems. For Jobs, Gates as Ren Water is Seven Killings, the powerful rival pressing on him all his life: Windows beat the Macintosh in the personal computer market. For Gates, Jobs as Bing Fire is Indirect Wealth, a resource to draw on and to work with: early Microsoft wrote software for the Macintosh, and in 1997, after Jobs returned to an Apple on the brink, Microsoft invested US$150 million. One clashes, one draws: the two sides of their relationship.

Where does the chart miss his real life?

There is one more thing BaZi cannot explain. Roughly ten thousand boys were born worldwide in the same double-hour on 28 October 1955. In 1968, when he was 13, his school happened to buy a terminal that could connect to a mainframe computer, something extremely rare at the time. The column for timing and opportunity is not in the chart.

Now: the Ji-Mao luck pillar from 2022

From 2022 he entered the Ji-Mao luck pillar: the stem Ji Earth, Direct Officer, is unfavorable, while the branch Mao Wood, Hurting Officer, is favorable, the reverse of the previous forty years: now “unfavorable above, favorable below”. When Mao Wood arrives it joins the natal Hai and Wei to complete the “Hai-Mao-Wei three-harmony Wood combination”, so Output forms a full combination, the very Wood this chart needs most to restrain Seven Killings. We make no predictions and only describe the chart: this is the luck pillar with the strongest restraint on Seven Killings in his life.

Zi Wei Dou Shu chart

The same birth time, cast in Zi Wei Dou Shu (San He school, the same engine as our Zi Wei chart tool, using the same true solar time as the BaZi chart above). BaZi weighs the five elements and what the chart favors; Zi Wei looks at which stars fall in which palace. The two systems ask different questions, so the Zi Wei chart is shown on its own first, followed by where it agrees and disagrees with the BaZi reading.

The gold frame is the Life Palace; the shaded palaces are its three-sides-and-four-directions (Wealth, Career, Travel). Solid badges are the birth-year transformations (Lu, Quan, Ke, Ji), red names are the six malefic stars, and the small word after a major star is its brightness.

Both accounts of Bill Gates’s birth time fall in the Hai hour, so the Zi Wei chart is the same either way: Tai Yin in the Life Palace in Hai, a placement the classics call “the bright moon at Heaven’s Gate”, with Tai Yin brilliant. For someone born in a Yi year, Tai Yin Ji also falls in the Life Palace, and Wen Chang sits there too. Tai Yin is a meticulous, planning, accumulating star; Ji adds fixation and turning things over again and again; Wen Chang adds a scholarly air. It is a textbook Life Palace for a deep specialist. BaZi reads him as weak Ren Water favoring Metal, Wood and Water, and Tai Yin also belongs to Water, so the two systems agree on “inward-looking and intellectual”. The Career Palace holds Tai Yang and Tian Liang together, with Tian Liang Quan and both stars brilliant; Tai Yang with Tian Liang is a combination of care and public good, which makes it easy to think of the foundation that filled his later life, but hindsight warnings apply here too. The most obvious miss is the Wealth Palace: the richest man in the world has an empty Wealth Palace. An empty palace does not mean no money; it means the Wealth Palace has no major star and is read by borrowing from the opposite palace. This is a good reminder that the Zi Wei Wealth Palace describes how a person makes money, not how much they end up with.

With the other birth-time versions, the Zi Wei chart becomes:

In BaZi the hour pillar changes every two hours while the day pillar and above stay put. In Zi Wei the Life Palace is set by the lunar month and the hour, so a different hour moves the Life Palace, the Body Palace, the bureau and every major star at once. The same dispute over a birth hour therefore usually matters more for Zi Wei than for BaZi.

For school, leap-month and Zi-hour settings see the Zi Wei chart page; for how the two systems differ see BaZi vs Zi Wei Dou Shu. The hindsight warning applies here too: once you know the outcome, any star can be made to explain it.

Western astrology chart

The same moment of birth, cast as a Western natal chart (tropical zodiac, Placidus houses, the same engine as our natal chart tool). A natal chart uses the sky at the moment of birth, so it needs no true-solar-time correction, but it does need the latitude of the birthplace to fix the Ascendant and the houses. BaZi and Zi Wei are both derived from the Chinese calendar, while a natal chart computes planetary positions directly. Because the three systems start from different places, the chart is listed on its own below, followed by where it agrees with the BaZi and Zi Wei readings.

Sun in Scorpio, Moon in Aries, Cancer rising. The chart ruler, the Moon, sits in the 10th house (career) in fiery, competitive Aries: emotions bound up with work and a need to come first, much like early Microsoft’s notoriously combative style. Jupiter and Pluto are conjunct in Leo, 0.6° apart, in the 2nd house (money). Astrologers read a Jupiter–Pluto conjunction as enormous expansion and power, and this is probably the most “richest man in the world” feature of the whole chart. Both birth-time accounts give Cancer rising with the chart ruler in the 10th house. Where it does not fit: not one of the ten planets is in an earth sign, which is usually read as someone who is not very practical, yet what he is most praised for is his grip on detail and on business models.

With the other birth time, the chart becomes:

Planets move very little in a day, so the Sun and Mercury through Pluto are almost identical in both versions. What changes most is the Ascendant and the houses: the whole wheel turns by roughly one house every two hours.

Domicile, exaltation, fall and detriment in brackets are the classical categories for how comfortably a planet works in a sign; they are not verdicts of good or bad. For how to read the big three, the ten planets and aspects, see rising sign, Moon sign, the ten planets and aspects. The hindsight warning applies here too: once you know the outcome, any sign can be made to explain it.

Who helps carry the load in your chart?

The four pillars, Ten Gods, strength score and luck pillars on this page all come from the same engine as the chart on our home page. Enter your birth details to see whether your Day Master is strong or weak, which Ten God puts the most pressure on your chart, and in which luck pillars Resource, companions and Output appear.