Bill Gates: Microsoft co-founder reveals he was taken to visit child psychologist

'I was a bit disruptive. I started early on sort of questioning; were their rules logical?'

Bill Gates speaks candidly about his childhood experiences on Radio 4 (AFP)

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has revealed his parents sent him to see a psychologist at the age of 12.

Talking on Desert Island Discs on Radio 4, the 60-year-old said he was “disruptive” as a teenager and challenged authority.

“I was a bit disruptive. I started, early on, sort of questioning - were their rules logical, and always to be followed?" he said.

"So there was a tiny bit of tension there, as I was kind of pushing back.

“The [psychologist] they sent me to was very nice, and got me reading a lot about psychology and Freud and stuff like that. He convinced me that it was kind of an unfair thing that I would challenge my parents and I really wasn't proving anything”.

But within two years, Mr Gates had made considerable progress and begun to embark on his career in computing.

“So by the time I was 14 I got over that, which is good because then they were very supportive as I started to really engage in writing software and learning different computer things”.

As a teenager, Mr Gates demolished books and would routinely spend five hours a day reading up on programming and missing class to study computing.

This fanaticism continued and by the time Mr Gates was 23, Microsoft was making $2.5 million a year.

“I was quite fanatical about work," he said.

"I worked weekends, I didn't really believe in vacations ... I had to be a little careful not to try and apply my standards to how hard they [his employees] worked.

“I knew everybody's licence plate so I could look out in the parking lot and see when did people come in, when were they leaving. Eventually I had to loosen up as the company got to a reasonable size.”

Before long, Microsoft became the world’s largest PC software company and the Seattle-born entrepeneur became the richest person in the world, a title he still holds.