His story: How Bill Gates terrorised his parents, classmates, spent night in jail and joked it’s impossible to amass $15 million fortune

His story: How Bill Gates terrorised his parents, classmates, spent night in jail and joked it’s impossible to amass $15 million fortune

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In his new memoir, Microsoft founder and chief executive Bill Gates doesn’t mention any study of William Wordsworth’s writings. But when I read Source Code: My Beginnings, I thought of the English poet’s famous line from 1802: ‘The child is father of the man.’

Nearly the entire volume is devoted to Gates’ early years, with Microsoft’s origin story entering the narrative in the final chapters.

A second volume will discuss his company and a third will focus on his work with the Gates Foundation.

In more than 40 years of interactions with Gates, I have found him resistant to self-reflection. He’d often mock my attempts to engage him in a deep biographical mode by making flip comments or dodging the question. But in this book – his fifth – released this February, there are about 300 pages of Bill Gates’ personal journey, told in a somewhat unsparing first person.

The big interview with Microsoft Inc funder and Chief Executive Bill Gates

As he paints it, Gates’ Seattle childhood hit all the notes of a 1950s sitcom with loving, devoted parents and the trappings of the American Dream. But the family dynamic was fraught, often because of Gates’ personality quirks. His own father once told me that Gates’ mother found their son’s behaviour “traumatic” – he refused to submit to his parents’ wishes that he do his homework, listen to simple requests or even speak to them.

With his family, his teachers and his fellow students, Gates rejected the social contract. He cracked jokes or responded with sarcasm and his favourite phrase, “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard!” (Those words would later be as familiar to his employees at Microsoft as they were in the hallways of Seattle’s Lakeside School.)

At Lakeside, Gates learned that actually studying for class could pay dividends and that acting in a school play was a great way to get to know popular girls (although one turned him down for a prom date). Most importantly, he discovered that a computer terminal could open up a world to him – and ultimately, with his software, to hundreds of millions of others.

Gates’ description of how he and his friend Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft is a more familiar tale. It was the subject of my very first interview with Gates in April 1983, and in my book, Hackers, I told the story (as did others) of how, when Gates was 19, the pair created the first version of the BASIC computer language that ran on a microcomputer. But reading Gates’ side of the early Microsoft saga is illuminating.

He explains why after commandeering a 60 per cent stake in the company, he later browbeat Allen into accepting the butt end of a 64-36 split. Gates says he now feels badly about how he handled it, but that the arrangement reflected who was working harder and making more decisions. (In his own autobiography, Idea Man Allen would write that the incident “exposed the differences between the son of a librarian and the son of a lawyer.”)

Gates and I met at the Washington, DC, office of Breakthrough Energy, an organisation he founded in 2015 to help fund climate technology. The former teenage hellion – who once joked with a friend how crazy it would be to accumulate a $15 million fortune – is now a 69-year-old world-famous centibillionaire and a divorced granddad with his own complex family dynamic. He is respected by the global health establishment and literally demonised by anti-vaxxers and tinfoil paranoids. He has been interviewed thousands of times and sits stone-faced as he mics up for our session. But as he re-immerses himself in the past, he soon is rocking gently – and cracking jokes.

I know you’ve been thinking of an autobiography for decades. But I didn’t expect you to write a book about your childhood.

It’s a project I’ve been working on for some time. But it was only about 18 months ago that I decided to do a book on this first phase of my life – the 25 years up to the start of Microsoft – where my parents, my upbringing and the luck I was exposed to were the whole story. Once that idea came up, I got quite enthused. It was really fun to try and explain how amazing my father was, my mother, and my sisters. And how I found myself more enmeshed in programming than almost anyone by the time I’m about 20 years old.

This is very much a bildungsroman, your coming-of-age story. You hold a mirror to yourself. Sometimes the mirror doesn’t portray such a flattering image.

It’s not the Immaculate Conception. I had my ups and downs. There was the time I brought friends to the Harvard lab and used a computer and they were confused about what I was doing. [He was later admonished for improper use of the lab.] Microsoft’s first customer was MITS, and we ended up in a dispute with them. It’s hopefully a very human story.

It is a human story. I remember doing a profile of you in 1999, and your father told me that your mother was traumatised by your behaviour. You wouldn’t talk for days on end. As you say in the book, the things that really interested you were reading and math and being inside your own head. In some ways you weren’t kind to your parents, and you express remorse for this.

I give my parents a lot of credit for how they shaped me. My dad was much more setting an example, always being serious about his work. With my mother, it was far more intense. I was often falling short. “Oh, you didn’t get up here as soon as I wanted, or your table manners weren’t as good as I wanted.” She was always pushing me to do better. Eventually she was proud of what I achieved, but that was a complex relationship.

They were at their wits’ end with you, and took you to a therapist. At the end of the book you said that if you had grown up in this era, you probably would have been diagnosed on the autism spectrum. What led you to that conclusion?

Back then, the idea that kids were very different and needed some kind of intervention wasn’t commonplace at all. I was clearly somewhat hyperactive. I could concentrate a great deal. This guy, Dr Cressey, really got me thinking about what I was trying to achieve in this conflict with my parents. Did I really have some thought in mind, or was I just trying to make trouble? I think the fact I did get to see that therapist was good. Who knows what it would have been like if I’d been diagnosed? Kids now are much more looked over. I was able to go off to the computer centre or spend all that time alone, even going out on hikes.

I couldn’t believe how you and your preteen friends went on epic, dangerous, multi-day hikes. Now you’d have a GPS tracker.

Very late in the book you acknowledge how much privilege is part of your story. You say that you were advantaged as a white male, and your family was well off. But in a sense your life is charmed. Everyone is watching out for you. At several points your father swoops in to give you legal help. Teachers went out of their way to take an interest in you. People had your back at every turn.

I was so lucky in those things. I had at least five or six teachers who saw a spark in me and really engaged with me. My parents were well off, but compared to the kids at this private school I’d say we were below average. They had bigger houses and they had wealth. [This wasn’t apparent to Paul Allen, who wrote in his book, “Bill came from a family that was prominent even by Lakeside standards … I remember the first time I went to Bill’s big house a block or so above Lake Washington, feeling a little awed.”] I actually had a little chip on my shoulder – “Hey, you guys, your parents gave you a car and you didn’t have to work in the summer.” But you could hardly design a better childhood, you know – including a time-sharing computer terminal showing up at the school when I’m 13 years old.

You recount how you acted like the class clown and often responded to people by being, as you diplomatically say, a “smart aleck.”

Look, there’s a certain clever-boy shortcut use of sarcasm that allows you to communicate efficiently. That whole kind of sparring can be funny. At Harvard, that was my go-to approach, my whole way of engaging with people – procrastination, and being super clever and sarcastic while tearing somebody’s argument apart. The underlying skill is actually worthwhile, but I tended to break those habits later, knowing when not to deploy it. That kind of dialog doesn’t work when you’re managing people.

Well, I’m thinking about the deposition you gave as a billionaire CEO before the trial for antitrust—you behaved just like a smart aleck kid!

You think I was a smart aleck? That lawyer, now that’s a smart aleck!

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers says that it’s possible to explain why some people are special. They practice at their special skill for 10,000 hours and are alive at the perfect time for their expertise to matter. You certainly spent more than 10,000 hours programming, and the time was right. But that’s true of a lot of people. And there is only one Bill Gates. I can’t crack the code for what makes a person extraordinary. Have you thought about that?

It’s not just the circumstances, although that’s gigantic. Yes, there’s still a few million kids who are in the same loop as I am. But through my father I saw the common sense of business. In my early engagement with Digital Equipment Corporation, which was this vaunted company, people embraced me and gave me reinforcement. And there’s something about my desire to succeed using my skill set. My friend Kent Evans helped really cement that.

He was your best friend, and more focused on his ambition than you were, reading business magazines as a teenager. His accidental death at age 17 haunts this book, and your life.

Kent helped shape me as a forward-looking person. And then Paul was reading about chip stuff, and he showed it to me. He was two years ahead of me but he sought me out.

Paul also gave you LSD. Steve Jobs once said that LSD was a formative experience and opened his mind in a way that helped him with creativity and design. I don’t get the impression that taking acid was life-changing for you.

I think the batch that Steve got must have really been good for product design and marketing. My God, just think if I’d had that batch! Yeah, I did some crazy things when I was young. Paul deserves some credit for that. By the time we got serious about work, we weren’t doing that anymore.

You also briefly write about the famous time you got busted for speeding. Were you freaked out by spending a night in jail?

No, it was just kind of a funny thing. They thought it was strange that somebody so young had a nice car – what was the story with this kid? Was I a drug dealer or something?

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