This
appeared last week:
Bill Gates’ memoir Source Code reveals how a boy genius conquered the world
Bill Gates’ memoir Source Code delves deeply into his
childhood with an undiagnosed gift, as he seeks to explain (and perhaps
understand) his own, unique operating system.
Caroline
Overington
12:00AM February 01, 2025.
Updated 8:52AM February 01, 2025
Bill Gates has written a memoir in which he says he would
probably be diagnosed with autism were he a kid in school today.
Looking back, he can see how fidgety in class he was. He
remembers how he liked to be left alone to nut out knotty problems. Other
kids may have dipped excitedly into the Encyclopedia Britannica; by the age of
nine, the young Bill Gates had read through every volume, A to Z. He knew the
different heights of all the world’s penguins, and could talk about that for
hours.
“And I had that rocking habit,” he writes, which he used to
soothe himself.
“But, you know, no terms (like autism) were applied in those
days,” says Gates, in a Zoom interview with Inquirer ahead of the launch of
his book, and while many adults are these days seeking a formal diagnosis, he
won’t be one of them.
Bill Gates reflects on his new book Source Code: My
Beginnings, sharing insights into his childhood, early passion for computers,
and the experiences that shaped Microsoft. He discusses his learning style,
social challenges, and the possibility of being on the…
“I’m not going to start taking medicine or something,” he
says. “That learning style I had, of intense concentration, was very beneficial
to me, even though the social things were much more difficult … For kids
nowadays, you know, is it better or worse that they are diagnosed?”
Gates stops short in his book of describing his autism – if
that is indeed what he has – as a gift, or superpower. He thinks it only partly
explains his success as a computer programmer who started Microsoft, invented
Windows, and became, at least for a time, the world’s richest man. His book,
which covers only the first 25 years of his life, delves deeply into all
aspects of his childhood, as he seeks to explain (and perhaps understand) the
development of his own, unique operating system. In that sense, the title,
Source Code, is perfect, and I’m keen to know if Gates himself came up with it.
“No, but I approved it,” he chuckles down the line.
Gates explains the book is “a collaboration” with a former
journalist from The Wall Street Journal, who “typed more words than I did”. He
told the stories, and says Gates “ended up doing quite a bit of editing because
things like my relationship with my mum, nobody else can really get … those are
complex topics”.
The result is a surprisingly tender account of an
all-American childhood in Seattle, in the wildly optimistic post-war boom
years. Gates, 69, was one of three kids born to middle-class parents who
encouraged good manners (“don’t put your elbows on the table, don’t eat in
front of the TV”). He had his own room in a pleasant neighbourhood, where he
could hear the crack of baseball bats through his bedroom window. A keen hiker
and boy scout, he liked to play cards as a kid; he clearly remembers the moon
landing and the arrival of the Jetsons on TV. That said, his parents recognised
quite early “that the rhythm of my mind was different from that of other kids”.
He could go days without speaking, “emerging from my room
only for meals and school”. One teacher said that he did not know – or seem to
care – how to “put on his own coat”.
His parents sought the help of a psychiatrist, who “just
talked to me” about ways of managing school work and friendships. His parents
also decided to send him to a small private school – Lakeside, in North Seattle
– where he was “given the opportunity at age 13 to play around with a computer
funded by a mother’s club rummage sale”.
He was soon obsessed.
“I loved how the computer forced me to think. It demanded
that I be logically consistent and pay attention to details. One misplaced
comma or semicolon and the thing wouldn’t work,” he says.
He spent hours, days, weeks writing code, without the aid of
guidebooks, because there simply weren’t any. So, he was a complete nerd, then?
Well, no. Readers of his book may be surprised to hear that he smoked pot as a
kid, dropped acid as a college student, and once spent a night in jail. He
liked girls, too. There is a lovely moment in the book where he works up the
courage to ask a pretty student to the prom. She says she’ll think about it,
but ultimately turns him down and goes with a quarterback instead. It makes his
heart hurt, but what’s a geeky kid to do? Boys like Bill just weren’t
considered boyfriend material. His awkwardness with women accompanied him to
Harvard. Gates still remembers attending “mixers” in 1973 – the year that Roe v
Wade guaranteed the right to abortion, and the start of America’s slow exit
from Vietnam – dressed in “an expensive brown leather jacket that I paired with
blue velvet bell-bottoms (but) I never had any luck meeting women at these
parties … Guys in our wider circle would come back (from the mixers) claiming
they had. Almost in unison the rest of us would stammer, “How do you do that?”
Then, in 1987, at a trade fair in New York, Gates met
Melinda French, who had just started working for Microsoft, the company he had
founded with a former school friend, Paul Allen. They married in 1994, and
stayed married for 25 years, raising three children. That marriage has since
ended, and the terrain here is tricky, since Gates has acknowledged an
affair, and poor behaviour. Given that he had always looked up to his
parents, who had such traditional values, does he regret that his own marriage
ended?
“Sure,” he says, without hesitation.
I figure it must have occurred to him, at some point: “Hang
on, I’m the rock star now. I’m the quarterback. I’m the richest guy in the
world…” and maybe that led him into temptation?
He’s not sure about that, but says: “I do remember going to
a high school reunion once, and one girl – not the girl I asked out to the
prom, but another girl – came up and said, Bill, I didn’t even know you had a
personality.
“A lot of the time, when I was going into a cocktail party
or something, I would think, ‘Oh, God, will anybody want to talk to me?’ That
problem definitely did get solved.”
Gates’s former wife told Vogue magazine a few years ago that
she had forgiven Bill for his transgressions, but loathed her husband’s connection
to the vile sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, describing him as “evil personified”.
Gates has said that he, too, regrets the time he spent with
Epstein. He was a bit lost after the divorce, rattling around his $US200m
mansion on Lake Washington (it has 24 bathrooms and six kitchens, which he
knows is ridiculous; he says he offsets the enormous footprint of his house and
the near constant travel with carbon credits). He now has a new partner, Paula
Hurd, who is the widow of the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, Mark Hurd
(they came to Australia last January for the Open tennis) and his relationship
with his children seems good.
Of course, his memoir stops well short of any of those
developments, but he is likely to get to them, since Source Code is merely the
first volume of a planned trilogy.
Why three books?
Like many men approaching the final quarter, Gates is
thinking about his legacy, and it’s clear that he hopes to help shape it. You
can sense his frustration in that regard. He was a boy genius – his invention,
the Windows operating system, changed almost everything about the world in
which we live – and he’s ploughed tens of billions of dollars from the colossal
fortune he made into reducing poverty and curing malaria in some of the poorest
countries on earth. He loves doing it – he has a jet that he can use to travel
from one hot spot to another; he has teams of people working on all manner of
exciting breakthroughs – and yet, when
you go online, you’re likely to find his name linked with thousands of bat-poo
crazy conspiracy theories (Gates is trying to depopulate the world by
poisoning the water supply; Gates is using the Covid-19 vaccine to sterilise
women in poor countries; Gates is not preventing but actively spreading
viruses).
Does he try to counter these stories when they come up?
“Look, most of them are probably best to ignore,” he says.
“They are a few thousand people in some weird group … like, there was a recent
one about how I’m trying to change the weather … It’s such a fringe thing that
any notice I take of it would actually make it worse. They’d be like, ‘Oh, must
be true. He’s denying it’.
“But things that go mainstream, like the Robert Kennedy Jr
book (he doesn’t name it, but it’s called The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates,
Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, and it has sold
more than a million copies in the US) which says I’m making money from
vaccines, because it’s been widely read, I do feel the need to speak out and
say, ‘hey, this is completely the opposite of the truth’. I saw another story
where I was trying to track people’s location by embedding something in the
virus. I mean, you just have to laugh at some of it … You really do have to
have a sense of humour about it, because it’s so random.”
Does he have a view as to why he, in particular, has become
a target of such wild claims?
“Well, if you’re looking for simple explanations, the idea
that there’s a weird billionaire who somehow behind the scenes is manipulating
things is an (easy) story to understand,” he says.
Gates also now finds himself on the wrong side politically,
having donated $50m to Kamala Harris in her bid for the White House.
Was he surprised that Donald Trump won?
“I don’t pretend to be good at predictions. I wasn’t sure
who would win … and he won,” he says, grinning.
Plenty of other tech bros, like Mark Zuckerberg, who were
also once seen as progressive, are now sidling up to Trump, hoping for treats
and favours. That’s not really Gates’s style, but does he feel that he will be
able to work with the returning President?
“I had a chance to meet with him in Mar-a-Lago for a long
dinner,” he says, cautiously.
“He’s obviously getting input from tonnes of people.”
He’s not yet sure how Trump will respond to the idea that
the US should continue to support the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in its
vital work across the globe (they say they have halved the number of deaths
from malaria, and from HIV-AIDs, which is nothing to sneeze at).
As for the man who stole Gates’s title as the world’s
richest man, Elon Musk … does Gates have any thoughts about him?
“He’s an incredible genius,” Gates says, without hesitation.
“And he’s at the centre of the world right now. I’ve talked to him about
technology and about philanthropy … I hope he becomes a good philanthropist
too.”
Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates (Penguin
Books Australia, $55 HB) will be published on February 4.
Here is the
link:
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/bill-gates-memoir-source-code-reveals-how-a-boy-genius-conquered-the-world/news-story/6af0f2ab547e46a2a7589f5c96b8ceaa
I suspect
this may be an autobiography that is worth reading for all sorts of reasons!
David.
