In his new memoir, 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.
As he paints it, Gates’ Seattle childhood hit all the notes of a ’50s 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’ mom found their son’s behavior “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 favorite 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 (though 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 cofounded 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 percent 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 organization he founded in 2015 to help fund climate tech. 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 demonized 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 reimmerses 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, 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 traumatized by your behavior. 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 mom, 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 center 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, though 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?
You bought yourself a Porsche in your early twenties.
I clearly didn’t fit their normal pattern. We kept enough cash around that Paul was able to come down and bail me out.
Speaking of cash, on the recent Netflix series you host, you did an episode about inequality. You didn’t condemn the idea of billionaires but advocated for more equality. How would that work?
The world economy has created some hyper-rich people. Like me. And maybe 50 or 60 others. Elon Musk is at the head of that list, but with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, there’s a lot of people with a stunning level of wealth. I think that’s OK. I would have a much more progressive tax system, so I would have about a third as much money as I have. It would still be a gigantic fortune.
The New York Times reported that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is on track to avoid $8 billion in estate taxes. When you read that, did you think, “I should consult his tax lawyer”? Or say that this is not a good thing?
I’m quite certain I’ve paid more taxes than anyone alive—over $12 billion. There are techniques I could have used, like to borrow against my Microsoft shares and not sell them. But if people are getting away with paying less in taxes in a legal way, blaming them is a little strange. We ought to change the tax system.
They are culpable because they use political pressure to preserve their loopholes and cut funding for the IRS.
The votes of these billionaires shouldn’t influence our tax system. Also, several of the 50 hyper-rich are for more progressive taxation. I’ve been surprised that even the Democratic Party hasn’t gone very far to make tax stuff more progressive. I’m a huge defender of the estate tax, I think it’s a fantastic thing. I would make it even tougher to avoid it.
Let’s talk about artificial intelligence. You’ve been working with it for years, but you were slow to embrace the recent transformational breakthrough of generative AI. It wasn’t until OpenAI did a demo of GPT-4 at your home and aced an AP Biology test that you became bullish on it. What was the reason for your initial skepticism?
The idea of AI is pervasive throughout my whole history with computers. Bizarrely, when I left Harvard to start Microsoft, one of the things I thought I might regret was that the progress in AI in academia might move quickly while I was doing BASIC interpreters. That turned out to be so wrong. I expected that when we could encode knowledge in a rich way, where it could read a biology textbook and pass the AP exam, that we would explicitly understand how we’re encoding that knowledge. Instead, we discovered a weird statistical algorithm that we don’t understand. Why does GPT work? We don’t have a clue. But when OpenAI showed me GPT-4, it stunned me that they had crossed a very important threshold. We still have reliability problems, but we have a path now where I think those will all get solved.
Sam Altman says we will have AGI in the next few years. Do you agree?
Absolutely.
What will that mean for us?
Anybody who analogizes this to electricity, tractors, microcomputers, they don’t get it. This is not a productivity aid for humans. This is something that exceeds human capability. It is not bounded in any way, and it is happening very, very quickly. Just looking back on previous tech revolutions and saying, “OK, that all worked out,” is no guide for this one.
Do we need to regulate it?
Regulation will call for certain liability, for quality benchmarks. But the main thing people should say is, should we slow it down? It’s very hard to think how you would do that. Whenever somebody in the US says, OK, let’s regulate it, people say, “Well, what about other countries like China?” The key fact is, we don’t have a mechanism to slow it down.
We’re also developing weapons with it—there’s a literal arms race for lethal weapons controlled by AI. Do you think that’s a good idea?
Take what Elon essentially said about the F-35 fighter jet—having a human in it is value subtracted. He’s right. So if you use the logic of, “OK, I want to make the best airplane weapon,” AI is the state of the art.
What’s your relationship with the new administration? In an earlier interview, you told me that Donald Trump urged you and Anthony Fauci to meet with RFK Jr.
We did meet with him, and we discussed vaccine safety. It was four people—Robert Kennedy, [former National Institutes of Health director] Francis Collins, Tony Fauci, and myself—and we spent two and a half hours.
Are you excited that he has been named to head the Department of Health and Human Services?
Does he end up taking the job or not? There are people excited that he is willing to shake things up. If you shook it up the right way, maybe it could be better. But I think the National Institutes of Health works very well the way it is. So my counsel, if they are at all interested, is to not be too radical in changes to the NIH. But they’re in charge. At the very least, it’s going to be an interesting period.
Aren’t you terrified that an anti-vaxxer is going to be in charge of vaccines?
It’s hard to know. Many radical things get said, and very few radical things get done. In the world of health you have to have an outcome. Are you helping to make people healthy or not? The Foundation’s unique point of view is that we want to help the health of people all over the world, including in poor countries. The thing that I’m most worried about is, will the health needs of the poorest, particularly in Africa, continue to be a priority? The desire to reduce the deficit makes us have to stick up for those things even though the stuff I’m trying to stick up for is only like half a percent of the budget.
Elon might think that’s a waste of money.
I am worried about the relationship between the United States and the World Health Organization, since various people and politicians had complaints about the WHO during the pandemic. That should all be talked through. But I hope the US doesn’t defund WHO, because they play a very important role in coordinating things when there is a health emergency and preventing a pandemic. [In his first week in office—after this interview took place—President Trump announced that the US would leave the WHO.]
Are you going to make nice with the Trump people?
They’re the government of the United States. So I would say yes.
Let’s finish with the way you end your book. You write that sometimes you wish you were still that 13-year-old kid living inside your own head and driven by curiosity. With all your success, you really want to roll back the tape?
I’m not saying I want to go back and change something. I’ve been so lucky. But it was amazing to live through all that. I do miss that wonderful feeling where the whole thing was in doubt. There were days when I thought, “Oh, we are so messed up, and other people are ahead of us.” And, “Who do we think we are to have these wild dreams?” But step by step, we built this incredible thing.
Do people really change?
No. I think you moderate, you become wiser, and you grow. But I’m still 95 percent that same person.
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