When I first heard rumors that Bill Gates had been working on a memoir, my curiosity was piqued.
The tech mogul and philanthropist has cut an unusual figure, and not just because of his pioneering role in the software boom as the co-founder of Microsoft, or the billions he has poured into global health through his foundation. In 2021, his 27-year marriage to Melinda French Gates ended after she filed for divorce. Reports trickled out about overtures to female staffers and extramarital affairs. Beginning in 2011, he met several times with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who by then had pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution of a minor. Gates has since explained that he only agreed to meet Epstein in order to discuss philanthropy, and expressed regrets for doing so.
Unlike a new generation of tech billionaires, Gates has not gone MAGA (though he did have a three-hour-long dinner with Donald Trump after the 2024 election, and came away “impressed”).
Gates, who turns 70 in October, has published other books, but these were dutiful volumes about technology and pandemics and climate change. A memoir would offer him the chance to reflect and expand on what has been an undeniably eventful life. What might he have to say?
Not much, it turns out — at least not yet. “Source Code,” the first of three projected volumes, begins in earnest with his birth in Seattle, in 1955, and ends before 1980, when the young startup Microsoft embarked on the road to personal-computing dominance with the MS-DOS operating system. Such a limited time frame allows Gates to roam freely in the memory palace of his youth without getting tangled in the thickets of his later life.
The voice in this book is upbeat, wryly self-deprecating and unflaggingly congenial. (In his acknowledgments, Gates credits Rob Guth with “extracting, guiding and giving form to my memories.”) His early years are recounted with wholesome scenes of jigsaw puzzles and gunnysack races. Gates spent lots of time with his Gami, his mother’s mother, who fed him Ritz crackers with peanut butter and taught him how to excel at card games. He recalls the stirrings of the relentless competitiveness that would later make him rich (and arguably get Microsoft into some antitrust trouble) when, at the age of 8, he helped raise money for the Cub Scouts by selling 179 pounds of nuts.
Gates knows he had a charmed upbringing, and he takes pains in this book to say so. As he acknowledges, he grew up with the “unearned privilege” of “being born male and white” at a time when Seattle was still cleaved by racial segregation; his mother came from money, and his father made up for his more straitened childhood by becoming a partner in a law firm.
Gates’s mother would eventually join the boards of publicly traded companies, but until then she poured her ambitions and skills into organizing her household, raising her children and teaching them how to be good citizens. For a family trip to Disneyland she used her state-of-the-art IBM Selectric to type out a travel log for 7-year-old Gates and his older sister to fill in, with categories that included “land forms” and “population distribution.”
“Source Code” contains plenty of nicely rendered details, but as far as narrative tension goes, for the first 50 pages or so there is hardly any. “If my parents sound a little virtuous, and resolute about volunteering, giving back and all that, I can’t help it,” Gates concedes. His rebellion therefore comes as a relief. Gates recounts how his budding math talent gave him a confidence that “the world was a rational place” filled with “answers that I could find if I applied my brain to them.” He started to question the authority of the grown-ups around him, becoming a “bratty wiseass” who talked back. “I became an adult overnight — an argumentative, intellectually forceful and sometimes not very nice adult,” he writes. “I was about 9.”
There would be another 11 years before Gates, a student at Harvard, founded Microsoft, in 1975, with his friend Paul Allen. The rest of the book recounts childhood battles with his parents over bad grades, seeing a therapist who helped him process his arrogance and anger, and getting precious access to a rare computer at his private school. Along with a few high school classmates, an enterprising Gates started doing computer work for fun and profit.
As a teenager, Gates would sneak out his bedroom window to code all night at a computer lab. At Harvard, trying to make room for studying as well as programming, he “could be awake for 36 hours at a stretch.” He admits that his schedule “seemed extreme to my friends,” but like a lot of tech entrepreneurs, he is also evidently proud of it. This grinding, round-the-clock approach to work is why he would later insist on splitting ownership of Microsoft with Allen 64-36 — bumping up Gates’s share from the 60-40 split that Allen had already agreed to. He feels “bad” about it now, but he still thinks it was right.
When Gates was a child he used to believe that “if you truly were smart, you’d be able to get an A with as little effort as possible.” Trying to seem “cool,” he hid the effort he put into school, even going so far as to procure two sets of textbooks, so that he could leave one set at school and waltz into tests as if he never deigned to do anything so dreary as study. “Reading a lot, being smart, showing an interest in what teachers said — those were considered girl things.” “Source Code” highlights all the women who played a formative role in Gates’s coming of age — his mother, his Gami, his elementary-school teachers, the beloved librarian. But when he gets to computers, the book describes a man’s world.
Throughout “Source Code,” Gates slips in glancing references to his habit of rocking in place “anytime I got to really thinking about something.” In an epilogue, he speculates that if he were growing up today, he would probably be identified as someone on the autism spectrum.
“For most of my life, I’ve been focused on what’s ahead,” Gates writes in his last paragraph. “As I grow older, though, I find myself looking back more and more.” It’s the kind of valedictory ending one would expect from a politician’s memoir: wistful, inoffensive and completely banal. He says that he still feels like a “kid alert and wanting to make sense of it all.” Given that the memoir stops at a date 45 years in the past, we’re left waiting for the grown-up Gates to make sense of it all, too.
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