Bill Gates doesn’t like to dwell on the past.
For much of his career the Microsoft-founder says he even shied away from celebrating milestones and anniversaries.
“I remember when Microsoft was turning 25, I was like, ‘hey, how much time are we going to spend on this?’ ” he says. “I just wanted to survive to see year 26.”
As he approaches his 70th birthday, the 50th anniversary of the software giant’s founding, and the 25th year of the Gates Foundation, however, he’s making an exception, in the form of a memoir.
Available tomorrow, “Source Code” tells the story of an intellectually curious child with a tendency to question the status quo, often resulting in clashes with authority — most notably his teachers and parents.
Eventually, the subject’s persistence, brilliance and hard-headedness are channelled into the then-nascent field of computer software.
In what is planned as the first of a three-part series, Gates explores the people, places, and decisions that shaped his early life. It also showcases a side most haven’t seen, as he opens up about the loss of his best friend Kent Evans, experimenting with drugs, dumpster diving for source code with future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, nearly getting kicked out of Harvard and some speculation over his own neurodiversity.
In the book Gates explains how these people, places and experiences served as the “source code” — or operating instructions, in computer lingo — to who he becomes. All proceeds from Source Code will be donated to the United Way, an ode to his mother Mary Maxwell Gates, who served as the non-profit’s first female executive committee chair.
The Star spoke to Gates remotely from his office in Palm Desert, California — via Microsoft Teams, of course — about why he’s suddenly feeling nostalgic, his earliest memories as an overachieving class clown, whether high levels of intensity are necessary for entrepreneurial success, Canada’s contribution to the development of artificial intelligence (AI), and a recent meeting with President Trump.
Why this book, and why now?
When I did the Netflix series “Inside Bill’s Brain,” I thought the main thing people would be interested in is nuclear energy, or polio, or the toilet thing — all of which are still up in the air — but a lot of interest was driven by the biographical elements. That surprised me.
Sadly, my parents are gone. So are a lot of people in this phase of the story. I enjoyed the opportunity to show my admiration for my dad and how he handled things, and even my mom, who I had a very intense relationship with — I felt she was kind of tough on me and I was tough on her — and how that pushed me to exceed her expectations. It was interesting reflecting on that, and how lucky I was in terms of when I was born and how I was raised.
In the book you suggest that if you were growing up today you would have been diagnosed with autism. When did you come to that realization and what was it like confronting it?
I never got any diagnosis, but I was obsessive. If you’re writing a 200-page essay on Delaware when the class assignment is to write 10, there’s something going on there. I was extreme with my curiosity, and not a natural in terms of social skills. At the time nobody was taking ADHD medication, but I probably would have been prescribed that. Would it have helped? We’ll never know, but my kids have some of those characteristics and have been diagnosed.
Do you think your parents and grandparents would have been, too?
It’s hard to say. My parents and my two grandmothers were very smart. I underappreciated how smart my father was because the women in the family were so much better at cards, and that was my proxy. My maternal grandmother was by far the best; she was the one who read to me massively and was really good at cards and puzzles.
As a class clown, how did humour help you navigate your childhood?
Being intellectual includes being quick, and there is a form of humour based on the unexpected that, when your brain is moving a little faster, you can say something ironic that people aren’t expecting.
I was a decent class clown, and my parents got contradictory data from teachers; at one point one teacher said I should be held back, and another said I should be skipped ahead. That’s why they enrolled me in a private school with smaller classes and better teachers, which is where the computer shows up, and where I met Kent and Paul.
Can you recall any punchlines that got a big laugh?
My fourth-grade teacher used a lot of hair spray, and I wrote an essay about how I replaced her hair spray with green spray paint, and how over the course of the day her hair was turning greener, and the students didn’t know whether to tell her or not. Luckily, she thought it was funny.
Early in your career you were criticized for being impatient, demanding and aggressive. Do entrepreneurs need that kind of intensity to succeed?
Hopefully not. People like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison, all had that persistence.
It takes a fair bit of maturity to realize the way you motivate yourself — criticizing yourself for making mistakes or not working hard enough — is not the way to manage other people. Early on, you’re best at managing people like yourself who have something to prove and are willing to work insane hours. Over time you realize you need to get other people in with other skills. Then you learn that managing those people, in terms of intensity, is very different from how you push yourself.
Is that why Microsoft gained a reputation as an industry bully?
I don’t agree with that term, at all.
We were so far ahead; we hired better people, we made better software tools, we thought about things on a more global basis. We were such a broad, deep and global company that people used the Department of Justice to go after us. We went out of our way to be a nice company, but if you’re as strong as we were, you’re never going to be perceived that way.
Back in 1995 Apple was very weak, and we didn’t have the kind of industry we have today with Apple, Google, Amazon and Meta. Now there’s lots of strong companies that take each other on in terms of hiring, capital spending and innovation.
Speaking of Apple, what were you thinking in 1997 when Steve Jobs suggested you’d be more creative if you dropped acid when you were younger, given that in this book you admit to doing so in high school?
I clearly got the wrong batch. He got the “you can design beautiful products” batch and I got the “you can write great code” batch. I wish I had both.
The book describes early interactions with Artificial Intelligence in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Did the technology evolve the way you had anticipated?
When I was at Lakeside (High School), Stanford Research Institute had a robot that could go grab something and bring it back, so I thought we were on the verge of matching humanlike capabilities like visual recognition and speech recognition in those early days. When I left Harvard, I literally wrote a letter to Paul saying I hope they don’t make too much progress on AI before we get a chance to be part of it.
Only later did we begin to appreciate how incredibly good humans are at doing these things. It wasn’t until Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, and the pioneering work you guys are doing in Canada, that we developed these rich large language model techniques, and it’s been mind-blowingly fast since.
When I saw (OpenAI’s) ChatGPT-3, I was not that impressed. Then with ChatGPT-4, I was like “wow, this is phenomenal.” So, AI progress was much slower to start with, and more recently, much faster than what I predicted.
Why did you recently request a meeting with President Trump?
I met with Trump a lot during his first term, too. Just by happenstance, I met with Trump more than Biden, although I met with a lot of people in the Biden administration.
The Gates Foundation, in our global health work, is partnering with governments — including Canada and the United States — on things like global funds for HIV medicine, malaria and TB. These programs are very dependent on the U.S. as a partner, whether on the research or delivery side.
We’ve had an incredible role in reducing childhood death over the years, and the foundation will work with whoever is president. I met with President Bush back in 2003, he raised global health spending, and that’s been maintained on a bipartisan basis ever since. But with the tight budget and a sentiment of, you know, “what are we getting from our overseas relationships?” we’re reminding people about the work we’re doing.
So, I was absolutely interested in updating President Trump on HIV, polio, energy and AI-related topics, and he was very generous to host my chief of staff and I at Mar-a-Lago for a three-hour dinner.
What advice can you offer parents raising a brilliant but defiant child?
Understand why the kid is being defiant and try to redirect that energy. Hopefully you can apply it to something they really enjoy doing and put that extra energy toward developing strong skillsets. I also think you can never beat reading to put that energy towards better understanding the world.
