He frequently failed at school, so how did the ‘weirdo’ teenager Bill Gates go on to found Microsoft and become a billionaire by 31? He talks about his memoir, Source Code - and what happened when he met Donald Trump in December.
“When Kent died, I didn’t know who to sit next to at lunch any more,” Bill Gates tells me. “He was my best friend. We spent hours writing code, working out whether we wanted to be an ambassador, a general or a scientist. We used to scour the biographies of famous men and later CEOs and wonder what it would be like to have $15 million, whether you could even stuff that many notes in a car. We’d read Fortune magazine to get tips on how to succeed. He helped give me direction. Then, suddenly, he was gone. I thought, ‘I am alone now,’ which was hard. I wasn’t thinking I needed to live for the two of us. But why was I the one who got to go forward?”
The two nerdy, awkward kids in the school, tall Kent with his briefcase, spindly Bill with his squeaky voice, had formed a strong bond. Kent Evans had been on a climbing trip at the weekend, promising to call when he returned. “I still know his number off by heart and remember the moment when the headmaster rang to tell me that he had died. He said there had been an accident. Kent had fallen. A helicopter search and rescue team had picked him up and transported him to a hospital. I waited for him to tell me when I could go visit him. ‘Unfortunately, Bill, he didn’t make it. Kent died last night,’ he told me. I have no memory of hanging up the phone.” At his memorial, the 16-year-old Gates, known as Trey to his family (his father was Bill Gates II), sat on the steps of the school chapel and cried, unable to speak. His voice trails off once again.
We are wandering round Gates’s old high school, Lakeside, in his home town of Seattle - “Though it used to baffle me it was nowhere near a lake,” says the hyper-factual Gates. A pupil in the Seventies, he is showing me where he had his first cigarette, where he got drunk on whisky for the first time (“I still can’t touch the stuff”) and had his first joint. We end up at what his youngest daughter calls the shrine, a room with an ancient terminal attached to an early computer and the desk where Gates spent hours writing code with Kent and an older pupil, Paul Allen, who had sideburns and knew about Jimi Hendrix.
“There’s a picture of me trying to look cool, but I’ve never been cool,” he says, in his uniform of grey slacks, blue shirt and jumper. “Sadly, there’s no picture of Kent. None of us expected I would do this well - even he didn’t, and he had grand plans for us to be famous. I remember when the first Forbes Rich List came out as I dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft, thinking Kent would get such a kick out of this thing. I thought I would like to be on that list. Then seven years later I was at the top.” By 31, he was a billionaire and in his forties was worth nearly US$100 billion (today his net worth is just over US$100 billion, or $177 billion). “We’d have laughed about stuffing that in a car.”
‘I don’t like to look back much - but it’s been fun’
Gates has just finished the autobiography of his early life, Source Code, which is why he is in uncharacteristically reflective mode, trying to make sense of his astonishing career. “I suppose I am turning 70 this year, Microsoft is 50 and the Gates Foundation is 25, so I decided to take a crack at it. I don’t like to look back that much because there is so much stuff to look forward to - the innovations in vaccines, AI, nutrition, clean energy - but it’s ended up being fun.”
The last time we met, it was as the pandemic was ending and Gates was suffering empty (vast) nest syndrome. His marriage of 27 years to Melinda French had just ended, his three children had left home for college and he was rattling around his 66,000sq ft Lake Washington mansion, nicknamed Xanadu 2.0, with its 6 kitchens and 24 bathrooms, its sand from the Caribbean and Leonardo da Vinci manuscript in the library, living on takeaways. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would soon just become Bill’s. They no longer had their joint book club, meditated together or went on walks where he would brush away the cobwebs in her path. “I’m more cheerful now,” he says. As one of the few billionaires who managed to have anything resembling a normal family life, he almost appeared to have it all. “That was the mistake I most regret,” he admits of his unravelled marriage.
The book is surprisingly moving about how the brilliant, neurodiverse coder came to set up Microsoft with the sideburned Paul Allen and lead the tech boom before deciding to rescue the world, giving away more than US$59 billion ($104b) through his foundation to help eradicate polio and eliminate malaria and HIV, fuelled mostly by Diet Coke.
It’s a fascinating portrait of a complicated, challenging child who would be diagnosed “on the autism spectrum” if he were growing up today, he explains. “My parents had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects, missed social cues and could be rude or inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others.” He still rocks back and forth like a metronome as he talks, but he’s learnt to embrace being different. “This might help those raising a kid who doesn’t fit the norm,” he agrees.
Tony Blair once told me that extraordinarily successful people like Gates usually have a traumatic event from their childhood that spurs them on. “That’s true,” says Gates. “But the only negative thing that happened to me was Kent’s death and my competitive nature was there before. My childhood was easy; I was lucky with two loving parents. I was the tricky one in the family.” His comfortable early life in Seattle with his two sisters, Kristi and Libby, sounds like the American dream. They wore matching pyjamas at Christmas, went to improving plays and concerts, had music lessons and two sets of jigsaw puzzles so they could compete to see who finished first. The other Silicon Valley giants, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk, he says, had to overcome far harsher beginnings. “I wasn’t an orphan like Steve Jobs.” In the book, Gates is more blunt, “We were bred and raised to win.”
But in Gates’s case, he thinks his superpower is his neurodiversity and ability to hyperfocus - he can remember all the numberplates of his first employees - combined with an insane drive and energy. “You need stamina. I was also optimistic and not risk-averse and my appetite for, ‘Let’s go try this thing,’ is high.” He still loves a rollercoaster ride as much as setting up a new company.
Female role models
For Gates, it all started with cards. “My maternal grandmother was around a lot, taking us to the library and playing a huge number of games like gin rummy and hearts that she played to win. Cards are a mix of skill and luck - you can’t win 100 per cent of the time. But when I got slightly better than her, it was an amazing feeling and it taught me how to outthink your opponent.” He was six.
His mother, however, was the real driving force and clearly an early tiger mum prototype. “My mum is the central person for me. My dad, who was a lawyer, left really early and came home at dinner. He set us an example of always being on top of things and giving back and working really hard. But the idea of getting dressed properly, having good manners, ‘I’m embarrassed if you don’t do well,’ was all my mum. Her expectations were very high.” Even, it seems, for the dog.
All their watches ran on “Mumtime”, eight minutes early, and she had an intercom installed in the kitchen so she could call them when meals were ready and remind them to make their beds. But Gates’s room was always messy, he often refused to put on his coat, got Bs and Cs at junior school and became the class clown. There was even discussion he might be “retarded”, he explains. “There were moments when they said, ‘Hold this kid back.’ I had nervous energy; I was fidgeting. I was disorganised.”
The young Gates would hide in the library or hole up in his bedroom. “There were times as a child I thought, ‘I will completely fail just to befuddle my mother.’ But in the end, I thought, ‘I’ll do so darn well she’ll have to admit I’ve leapt over her bar.’ Even when they decided to save up money and signed me up to [the private school] Lakeside, I thought should I just fail the entrance exam as I’d heard kids had to work hard. But I did go and that was another piece of incredible luck. There were 15 kids in a class compared with 30 in public schools, but I got 20 per cent of the teacher’s attention, I was so demanding.”
The small skinny boy with the Barbie blond hair found it hard to fit in. “The grand notion that I was different didn’t occur to me, but you’d see it at times. I was still goofing around, then one day I had to do a report on a state and I turned in 200 pages on Delaware, when the other kids turned in fewer than ten. I knew I could focus when I was curious. But it signalled me out as a weirdo. My social skills were slow to develop with my peers.”
His parents tried their best. His mother encouraged her unsporty son to sign up for tennis lessons, skiing, Scouts and football. “I only won the wheelbarrow race. We had adults around a lot and she pushed me to serve hors d’oeuvres and coffee and chat.” The young Gates became increasingly belligerent and withdrawn. “They found me difficult and uncommunicative, but that turned out to be a good thing as they took me to a therapist, and he focused me away from battling my parents to battling the world.”
Then Gates met Kent, got the top result in a regional maths exam and the school received a computer. “I went from being the joker or the kid who couldn’t care less to minding when they thought I was rubbish. I realised I was being paired up with kids I thought weren’t very intelligent and I thought, ‘Holy shit, they actually think I’m stupid,’ ” says a man who doesn’t suffer fools lightly. “So, in ninth grade [aged 14-15] I decided to be the best student in the school. Kent helped. He got good grades in everything and was diligent. I bought two sets of books, one for home, so no one would realise I was working in my bedroom.”
Both his parents have died, but he now feels empathy and gratitude for their patience with a clearly challenging child. “My mother would never use the word ‘precocious’ without the word ‘brat’ when I was being most obnoxious, so I thought it was an insult until my adviser used it at Harvard. My dad once threw water over me. In my entire childhood, he only got upset three times, but that was scary. I realised I had crossed a line.”
In the Seventies, no one understood about neurodiversity. “If they ever invent a pill where they could say, ‘OK, your social skills will be normal, but your ability to concentrate would also be normal,’ I wouldn’t take the pill. Maybe I am forgetting how painful it was, but I needed my neurodiversity to write that software; I could do all that stuff in my head. That takes a lot of concentration. I wrote my first code as a young teenager on a hike in the snow when I was tired and wet, and I used it later for Microsoft.”
Gates was soon teaching his peers computer studies, while also being paid to find a way to computerise the school timetable. “He was just a little kid who’d grasped the importance of this machine. He was also a great gamer and hacker. But without that computer, he could have gone off the track,” his old maths teacher, Frederick Wright, told me.
Harvard days
Harvard was the obvious next step. “I took twice as many courses as everyone else - I nearly killed myself. Even my Greek writing class was super-interesting.” But for the first time he realised he wasn’t going to be the best mathematician, however hard he tried. Every kid in his advanced maths class was the best in their school. “It was, ‘Oh shit, there may be people better than me at math.’ ” Would he have preferred to win a Nobel prize instead of becoming a billionaire? “There is no Nobel prize in math - that is an interesting thing, because Nobel’s wife had an affair with a mathematician,” he says.
“My friends were like, ‘You are lucky [that word again], you are the best at computing.’ But for ages I was like, ‘It’s too easy.’ ”
Within days of arriving, Gates was at Harvard’s computers, putting in 674 hours one March, only remembering to wash his sheets once every six weeks. Harry Lewis, his Harvard professor, who taught him applied mathematics, tells me, “He was more mature than the other students and willing to question adults. The first day I showed them the pancake problem [a mathematical sorting question involving different-sized pancakes] and two days later he came back to show me he could do it better. He always wanted a challenge. I wasn’t surprised when he dropped out - I just wish I’d invested in him.” Gates smiles at this.
That was another difference between Gates and the other Silicon Valley titans of Google, Facebook and Apple: he was a coder. “Steve [Jobs] with his long black hair was a genius too, but the amount of overlap in terms of what we were both good at was pretty small. Being crazy at seeing things in the future and being a pied piper who can get people to work long hours, having ambition, we both had that. But if you showed him a piece of code, he wouldn’t know what he was looking at and if you asked me, ‘Is this computer aesthetic?’ that is not my natural thing. Steve once said, ‘If Bill had taken more acid, his computers would be way more usable and attractive,’ and I say, ‘I did take acid, but it wasn’t the batch that taught you how to do design.’ I am an engineer, he was a designer, but he was such a unique person in terms of skills.”
What about his partner, Paul Allen, who originally thought up the hyphenated name Micro-soft, when he was 23 and Bill was just 20, for the software they created for the first home computers? “He was a thinker. His intelligence was different again. If someone put something up on the board, I usually knew if it was wrong. Paul wasn’t like that; he would read and consider. He was cerebral but chilled. He cared about rock’n’roll, played the guitar. There was always some tension. He worked less - I would call him up in the morning and say, ‘Hey, why aren’t you here?’ and have to do his tax returns.” Gates doesn’t feel guilty he insisted on owning the majority of the shares in the company when they first set it up. “Not really. I worked insanely hard.”
But he keeps coming back to the word lucky. “You don’t end up with a Microsoft result, being on top of the world, unless an unbelievable number of things converge: the year I am born, the way my parents are, being a white male in the United States, having a grandmother shaping my competitive vibe, teachers who said, ‘Your kid is weird but smart,’ my marriage to Melinda that kept me grounded.”
His parents lived happily together for 45 years. Did he want to replicate their marriage and his childhood for his own family? “Absolutely. I encouraged Melinda to be a little calmer than my mother was, but we were both quite driven. I spent more time with the kids than my dad did, but the ratio was still 10:1, with Melinda doing most things for the kids. We had a great time.”
They always appeared to be a good match. She teased him when he appeared distant and distracted, and got him to lay the table and help with homework. He said he felt lucky in life and love too. “There is a certain wonderfulness to spending your entire adult life with one person because of the memories and depth of things you have done and having kids together. When Melinda and I met, I was fairly successful but not ridiculously successful - that came during the time that we were together. So, she saw me through a lot. When we got divorced it was tough and then she made the decision to leave the foundation - I was disappointed that she took the option to go off.”
Gates was accused of having met Jeffrey Epstein before he died, a man Melinda called “evil personified”. Overnight he seemed to slip from sainthood to sinner. But having interviewed Gates six times over the past few years, he’s a hard billionaire not to like as he enthusiastically bombards you with figures and graphs. He is punctilious, polite and rational - his mind is constantly whirling as he doodles away on a notepad - though he rarely makes eye contact.
Is his divorce the only failure in his life? “You would have to put that at the top of the list. There are others but none that matter. The divorce thing was miserable for me and Melinda for at least two years.” Now he is with Paula Hurd, the widow of the former Oracle boss Mark Hurd. “Melinda and I still see each other - we have three kids and two grandchildren so there are family events. The kids are doing well. They have good values.”
A moral grounding
Gates was brought up by a family who had strong morals. Before his mother married his father, she wrote to Bill Gates Sr saying she wanted to create a family with values that prized success but never pushed another man down. His grandmother never cheated, instilling in him the importance of “fairness, justice and integrity”.
Gates is unusual among the billionaire class in having pledged so much of his earnings to his charity. “I hope everyone making extreme wealth eventually comes round to that idea of giving back again rather than using their profits for themselves or to influence events. My four grandparents were very religious Christian Scientists. My father wasn’t particularly religious, but he felt you had a moral duty to give back to society; my mother believed strongly in community service. I went to Sunday school.”
He still strives, he says, to adhere to their ideals, even nearing 70. “I try to be a moral person - looking at the way a market-led system does or does not achieve moral aims is fascinating. I remember thinking, how fulfilling will philanthropy be compared with setting up Microsoft? Worrying that other philanthropists had already picked the important goals. Then I realised so many kids were dying and so little was being done about it and I could save hundreds of thousands of lives by tackling diseases.”
When I interviewed Gates about his philanthropy in Ethiopia eight years ago, he told me he had the most sleepless nights thinking about pandemics. I barely mentioned it in the interview. Then the pandemic hit, and he was one of the few who was well prepared, but he became the centre of a hate campaign, treated as a pariah when he helped to create the vaccines that would tackle Covid. “Robert Kennedy Jr called me a child killer trying to make billions of dollars. You have to have a sense of humour. The world is not logical now and you have to accept that you might be treated as the Antichrist for trying to help,” he says, still sounding mildly bewildered. “But vaccines were the obvious solution. During the pandemic people came up and yelled at me that I was tracking them. I was like, ‘Wow, there really are people stupid enough to believe that.’ ”
Now he is battling myriad conspiracies about him and has just seen the inauguration of a president who not only may believe some of them but is appointing Kennedy as his health secretary. Gates backed Kamala Harris for the White House last November, reputedly donating US$50 million to her campaign. Yet Donald Trump only a few weeks ago was posting on Truth Social that Gates was coming to see him in Mar-a-Lago. Gates doesn’t deny it. “Yeah, on December 27 I had a three-hour dinner with Trump… It was quite an engaging conversation where he listened to me talk about HIV and the need to stay generous and to innovate to get a cure. I talked a lot about polio and energy and nuclear, and he wasn’t dismissive.”
I suspect Trump may have zoned out, but he says the he was all charm. “In some ways he is feeling more comfortable and vindicated than at any time in his life, so he is confident,” rather than chippy.
Why did Gates feel the necessity to make the pilgrimage and kiss the ring? He looks at me as though I’m being dim. “Well, he is the most powerful person in the world and his decision over whether to consider changing HIV funding alone would make the trip worth it, or to encourage Pakistan and Afghanistan to take polio eradication seriously.”
The two men clashed repeatedly over inoculations during the pandemic. “He can help drive innovation that I care deeply about or he can end it - he has a lot of ability to help me. I didn’t know if we would get to those things… But it was pretty constructive.”
Did Trump mind that Gates gave money to the Democrats to fight his campaign for the White House? It must have been mildly awkward. “He was very aware of that, but he was generous. He and I met about six times last time he was president - I actually saw him more times than President Biden. I had a lot of times when I would go to the White House and they would say, ‘We think you are going to see President Biden today,’ but six times in a row it didn’t happen. Instead, I would meet with Jake Sullivan [the national security adviser] or another member of staff.”
Was that because Biden was getting ill or too old and forgetful? “Maybe, it’s hard to say… But they were complex subjects, so maybe it was easier for someone to summarise them for Biden. I didn’t feel slighted, but Trump wants to hear my thoughts himself and he’s very hands-on.”
It sounds as though he has come to terms with a Trump presidency and might even welcome it. “There is so much up in the air with him - is he going to deport nine million or one million? Is he going to have 60 per cent tariffs or 5 per cent? Is he going to fund infectious disease innovation or end it? I need to stay close. Whoever gets to enthuse President Trump about the right things, that is God’s work.”
‘Musk? It’s insane that he can destabilise countries’
At the moment, it’s another, younger tech guru who has his ear. Does Gates wish he had got more involved in influencing politics like Elon Musk? “Not at all. I thought the rules of the game were you picked a finite number of things to spout about that you cared for, focused on a few critical things, rather than telling people who they should vote for… For me it’s only ever about aid. I did think Brexit was a mistake, but I wasn’t tweeting every day.”
Gates and Musk are from different generations, the responsible baby boomer versus the Gen X hustler, and their personalities couldn’t be more different although both want to conquer the world. Gates is on a mission to save lives now, but Musk wants to reach space as well and dominate both spheres. Gates doesn’t like the comparison. “I’m ultra-different. It’s really insane that he can destabilise the political situations in countries. I think in the US foreigners aren’t allowed to give money; other countries maybe should adopt safeguards to make sure super-rich foreigners aren’t distorting their elections. It’s difficult to understand why someone who has a car factory in both China and in Germany, whose rocket business is ultra-dependent on relationships with sovereign nations and who is busy cutting US$2 trillion in US government expenses and running five companies, is obsessing about this grooming story in the UK. I’m like, what?”
He’s particularly riled by Musk’s put-downs of democratically elected leaders and his discovery of the hard right. “You want to promote the right wing but say Nigel Farage is not right wing enough… I mean, this is insane shit. You are for the AfD [in Germany].” Is he embarrassed a billionaire techie has gone rogue? “We can all overreach… If someone is super-smart, and he is, they should think how they can help out. But this is populist stirring.”
Politics now worries him as much as another pandemic. “The whole political situation with polarisation is very dangerous. Certainly, if you think through my lens of ‘Let’s help the poor countries,’ there is a lot going on.” Now the left have swung right, he worries. “The Labour government came in and is less generous on aid than the Tories who came before it. Our problem is an ageing society, tight budgets and a right wing inward turning, with hatred of all foreigners, and hence refusing aid to them even if they’re not in your own country. We’re in a challenging situation.”
He could speak out as one of the most high-profile liberals or even run for office - he’s nine years younger than Trump, after all. “I am going to speak out, but not in the sense of telling people which party to vote for. I am going to speak out and say, ‘Hey, the UK aid that has funded vaccines, British voters should be proud of that.’ ”
Another tech bro, Mark Zuckerberg, has already retreated from fact-checking posts since Trump’s return, signalling a free-for-all. “The whole social media networking problem, including how it affects young people and allows crazy non-factual things to achieve critical mass, worries me. I am very disappointed that neither governments nor companies seem to be fixing or improving these things. This approach isn’t going to be very good. Take vaccine misinformation: that could get dangerous. Children can die of measles.”
The conspiracies about him, he says, rolling his eyes, are also batshit. “There was the tornado in North Carolina and people said I was modifying the weather, and I am still waiting to figure out how I caused the fires in LA… It worries me this is getting out of control.”
But Gates has always been an optimist. “The world is getting more chaotic. I work in innovation, new ways of doing drugs, AI, vaccines, understanding malnutrition, climate change - that is all going better than I expected… But it is the world in which that innovation is being delivered - whether it’s US polarisation or European, or instability in China, Russia and Africa, that worries me.”
‘AI and robots could replace us’
Social media, he thinks, may have reached a tipping point. His son winds him up with what Musk is doing on X. Gates hasn’t posted for two months. “My youngest daughter is very much on social media. But I’m glad it wasn’t around when I was young. The amount of time you can waste on it now… As a teenager I could have wasted my life away.”
As we chat to a group of students about the astonishing and disruptive possibilities of AI, he’s still engaged in new projects and innovations, but I suspect he wouldn’t have wanted to be born now. “We were intent on making humans more productive; AI and robots could replace us,” he tells them. “I may have to think of the period from the millennium to the pandemic as a heyday when we all became more connected and created the global fund, when we had everyone working together to solve stuff. Now it’s all about yourself. Maybe we have become more selfish and self-obsessed, but the pendulum always swings back. I think people do care.”
Gates has no desire to prolong his life like some of his west coast contemporaries desperate to manipulate mortality - he won’t freeze his body and isn’t searching for an elusive elixir. “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB.” He keeps active playing tennis and golf, but he still likes a drive-thru burger. His life continues to be timetabled to the minute. Is he going to slow down at 70? “If you compare me with my twenties, they were insane - I didn’t believe in weekends or vacations. In my thirties I backed off a bit and met Melinda and had kids, but I was still incredibly hard-working. Now I take vacations - after the election I took some time off to get my mind around it.”
He’s also less embarrassed about discussing his personal wealth now. “I have three houses. I used to fly coach and make people share hotel rooms and think having a private plane was a waste.” He admits he enjoys his money, buying horses and Leonardo notebooks, but won’t talk about his greatest extravagances. He doesn’t want to look too blingy, preferring to discuss his favourite recent TV show - Slow Horses - and book, The Women by Kristin Hannah.
His mother again? Would she be looking down favourably now? “That is interesting. Would she think I was being profligate or showing off? Should I try to do my foundation work without a private jet? That would be inefficient. I may sound arrogant, but it wouldn’t be practical. I spend US$9 million a year on CO₂ offsets.” He pauses. “My house in Seattle, I admit, is gigantic. My sisters have downsized. I can’t. I like the houses I have. My kids like to come back - that is a luxury. I don’t cook, I don’t make my own bed, but I don’t mind if no one has made it - I wouldn’t notice.”
Gates is not the richest man in the world any more and he won’t be the first trillionaire - would his mother have asked why he was no longer No 1? “Money wasn’t her greatest interest. There was one time my father, who was getting Alzheimer’s, said, ‘Son, I heard you’re the richest person in the world. Is that true?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s true,’ and he said, ‘That’s incredible.’ Because he grew up in the Depression, his behaviour about money was anxious. But otherwise, no one mentioned mine.”
The first Bill Gates went out west to find his fortune in the gold rush, but never found a nugget. It took the fourth to hit gold. “My grandparents collected every paper bag, every piece of string and leftover - they were frugal people. Now our family have made it, I don’t have that. I throw bags and string away all the time. You should see us at Christmas throwing the wrapping paper away.”
There is still much to do in the next 30 years before he hits 100, he says as we say goodbye, but he finally seems to be relaxing. “The foundation is doing well. The kids have their own goals. My oldest grandchild is only two years old. She isn’t playing card games yet, but we’ll start soon and I won’t be letting her win.”
Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates (Allen Lane, £25) is out now.
Written by: Alice Thomson
© The Times of London