Gates, who turns 70 this year, is looking back a lot these days. Last week he published Source Code: My Beginnings, which examines his childhood. The first of three projected volumes of memoirs, the book has been in the works for at least a decade but arrives at an unusual moment, as the tech billionaires have been unleashed. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg — their success has given them power that they are enthusiastically, even gleefully, using in divisive ways.
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Thirty years ago, Gates created the model for the in-your-face tech billionaire. Microsoft in the 1990s supplied the operating system for the personal computers that were increasingly in every home and office, and the company had big plans for this new thing called the web. Gates and his company were perceived as powerful, ruthless and ubiquitous. Silicon Valley was terrified and even regulators were alarmed, suing Microsoft.
The anti-Microsoft sentiment in popular culture peaked with the 2001 movie Antitrust, about a tech CEO who murders people in his quest for world domination. Reviewers underlined the allusions to Gates, although they largely panned the film.
The ire is long gone and Gates has no recollection of Antitrust. Among billionaires who generate strong emotions, he said with a hint of relief, “I’m not at the top of the list. The current tech titans would elicit a stronger negative reaction.”
He is a counterpoint to the moguls in the news.
“We don’t have a club,” he said. “Nor do we have consensus. Reid Hoffman” — the co-founder of LinkedIn, a Microsoft board member and vocal supporter of former Vice President Kamala Harris — “is a billionaire. You can ask for his point of view. He’ll be glad to critique.”
Hoffman, who the Times reported in November was considering leaving the country after Harris’ election loss, did not respond to emails asking for his point of view. But plenty of others in Silicon Valley are watching the transformation of the billionaires into would-be overlords with a horrified fascination.
“It’s a steady subject of dismal conversation around here,” said Paul Saffo, a longtime tech forecaster. “The consensus is that Bill Gates looks sainted compared to the awfulness afoot.”
When we talked a few weeks ago, Gates was sitting on the other side of an office table in a rented suite in Indian Wells, California, next to the resort town of Palm Springs. Why were we here? It was cold in Seattle, still Gates’ home when he is not on the move. That was reason enough.
Despite giving many billions of dollars to the Gates Foundation, his philanthropic juggernaut, Gates remains the 12th-richest person in the world, with personal wealth of over $US100 billion ($162 billion), according to Forbes. But his physique isn’t jacked, he does not have his own rocket fleet, and he seems eager to point out that he does not have all the answers.
Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg (left) watches the inauguration next to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his partner, Lauren Sanchez; Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Tesla boss Elon Musk.Credit: Bloomberg
After we spoke, Gates was going to President Jimmy Carter’s funeral. Carter was an inspiration and a partner; Gates’ foundation became a big funder of the Carter Centre.
Should billionaires be outlawed?
Gates is the opposite of the reclusive billionaire hidden away on his estate. He recently brought out his second Netflix series, What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates.
The fourth of the five episodes, “Can You Be Too Rich?” had people, including Senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont, saying definitively yes. It was a mild but real form of self-criticism that few other billionaires would subject themselves to.
Working on the show didn’t change his mind, though. “Should we outlaw billionaires?” Gates asked. “My answer to that, and you can say I’m biased, is no.”
But he supports a tax system that is more progressive. Every year, he adds up the taxes he has paid over his lifetime. He figures he has paid $US14 billion, “not counting sales tax.”
Under a better system, he calculates, he would have paid $US40 billion. Released in September, “Can You Be Too Rich?” already seems from another era. The answer to Gates’ question, in an administration staffed by billionaires, is no.
Gates tries to be nonpolitical but he thought the consequences of the 2024 election were so significant he got involved financially for the first time. He gave $US50 million to Future Forward, the principal outside fundraising group supporting Harris, the Times reported in October. He didn’t talk publicly about it then and won’t now.
After our conversation, it came out that he had a three-hour dinner with the president-elect at the time, Donald Trump, about world health challenges such as HIV and polio. “He showed a lot of interest in the issues I brought up,” Gates told The Wall Street Journal.
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A trial to his parents
Writing an autobiography is another way Gates is different from his peers, few of whom seem so introspective. His childhood, in an upper-class enclave in Seattle in the 1960s and early 1970s, is not inherently dramatic.
“A lot of people have the story of what a tough childhood they had, and how that is partly why they’re so competitive,” he said. “I don’t have that.”
What he did have was his mother, Mary Gates. She was remarkably accomplished in an era when most upper-class women were encouraged by society to stay home. The first female president of King County’s United Way, she later was on the board of the United Way of America; in 1983, she was the first woman to run it.
“She was almost too intense for me,” Gates said. His father, a lawyer, was more removed but was drawn into the battle of wills.
There was a period when Bill — he was in sixth grade — was supremely difficult. “I could go days without speaking, emerging from my room only for meals and school,” he writes in Source Code. “Call me to dinner, I ignored you. Tell me to pick up my clothes, nope. Clear the table — nothing.”
“I was provoking them,” he said in our interview. “I didn’t think they had any logic for why I had to show respect for them. My mom was pretty pushy about ‘Eat this way,’ and ‘Have these manners,’ and ‘If you’re going to use the ketchup you have to put the ketchup in a bowl and have to put the bowl here.’ She thought of me as pretty sloppy. Because I was.”
It was not really about the ketchup, of course. “I didn’t have any negative feelings toward her but I could pretend to not care what she said in a way that definitely irritated her,” he said. “What was I trying to prove?”
Gates said that if his teenage self were diagnosed now, he would probably be told he was on the spectrum. Maybe his mother intuitively understood what he needed. “I wanted to exceed her expectations,” he said. “She was pretty good at always raising the bar.”
Raising the bar is what he consistently did when he and his friend Paul Allen started a company in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1975 to produce software for the Altair 8800, a rudimentary personal computer. Gates was barely out of his teens. He soon moved the fledgling operation to the Seattle area, closer to his mother.
Microsoft founders Bill Gates, left, and Paul Allen in 1981.Credit: AP
Stewart Alsop covered Gates when he was the editor of InfoWorld, an influential tech magazine of the era. “Bill gave the privilege of having dinner with him solo in Seattle every six months; the price was always coming up with something he hadn’t thought of,” Alsop said. That was easy as “he had a hard time seeing the world outside of his life.”
If Gates is on the spectrum, he now thinks it gave Microsoft an edge. “I didn’t believe in weekends; I didn’t believe in vacations,” he once said. He knew the licence plate numbers of his employees so he could check if they tried to go home. It was a model for thousands of tech startups to come.
On the downhill side
Source Code ends with the beginning of Microsoft. Spreadsheets, databases and word processing were primitive tools, but users got an edge in productivity. The future would be better. “We really didn’t see much downside,” Gates said.
He kept his optimism for a long time. In 2017, he reviewed the book Homo Deus, by Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harari. Gates took issue with the author’s warning about a potential future where the elite upgrade themselves through tech and the masses are left to rot. “This future is not preordained,” Gates wrote.
Now he is reading Harari’s latest book. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI is a critical analysis of our reliance on technology.
“Every smartphone contains more information than the ancient Library of Alexandria and enables its owner to instantaneously connect to billions of other people throughout the world,” Harari writes. “Yet with all this information circulating at breathtaking speeds, humanity is closer than ever to annihilating itself.”
Gates took Nexus personally. Harari “makes fun of people like myself who saw more information as always a good thing,” Gates said. “I would basically say he’s right and I was wrong.”
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(Harari was unavailable for comment because he was attending a meditation course.)
To be clear, Gates is not apologising. He remains a believer in the power and goodness of tech. But for all he resisted them initially, his mother’s lessons are evidently still with him. Mind your manners. Try and do good. And try not to get carried away.
As a billionaire, other people invest you with huge powers, Gates said. Because you are successful in one sphere, he mused, “they think you’re good at lots of things you’re not good at.”
