Early on in Microsoft founder Bill Gates’s unexpectedly engrossing memoir, he reveals a childhood cognitive shift, one that his father said happened abruptly.
“Most kids go through a rebellious phase when they reach adolescence. I got there a lot sooner than most. I was about nine,” writes Gates.
By his account young Bill had been a shy, amenable child, close to his grandmother and loving, quirky parents. But Bill soon discovered his precocious abilities in the “ironclad certainty” of mathematics, an unfolding world of structure and elegance. With maths, “the intellectual divide between adults and me had collapsed”. Though undoubtedly other factors were involved, Gates snr told his son that he “became an adult overnight, an argumentative, intellectually forceful, and sometimes not very nice adult”.
And that, by most accounts, is exactly what Gates has remained. Many have noted his temperamental brilliance and lack of emotional intelligence. Gates’s disdain for those who didn’t see the world from his or Microsoft’s perspective was displayed memorably when he ill-advisedly took the stand during the US department of justice’s epic antitrust case against Microsoft 25 years ago. His haughtiness probably bolstered the landmark ruling against the company.
A breakthrough era for women’s writing, from Edna O’Brien’s risks to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter debut
Jonathan Sumption’s The Challenges of Democracy: Strong arguments on the political consent required to maintain order
The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride: Author experiments to draw readers in, not to keep them out
Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates – An engrossing and surprisingly honest memoir
So aversive has this image of Gates been for me that in the 1980s I firmly became Team Apple. Go figure – it’s not as if Steve Jobs was an exemplar of kinder, gentler leadership, though he had that mesmerising aura, noted by Gates here on a first encounter. My perspective on Gates has tempered over time, and yes, Gates also is now prominently associated with philanthropic work.
But more recently he has faced serious criticisms, both bizarrely imagined (mRNA vaccines as a Gates plot to inject controlling particles into your bloodstream), and real – in particular, his still-unclear association with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. All this makes it easy to prejudge Source Code as a suspect PR exercise that conveniently dodges current controversy. The first in a planned memoir trilogy, Source Code only takes the reader up to the late 1970s and a nascent, 12-employee Microsoft.
Only in his epilogue does he note that, given these characteristics and his well-known habit of rocking rapidly when thinking, he would probably be diagnosed as neurodivergent now
Taken on its own merits, however, Source Code is a great read: absorbing, introspectively tough and surprisingly honest. It’s also a lively, valuable addition to the historical record of this microchip-driven, transformative social and economic period and a man who came of age with computers. While self-flattering, Gates doesn’t shy away from his unattractive qualities, but convincingly shows that he’s more intriguingly multilayered than the enduring caricatures and shows flashes of sharp, self-deflating humour.
Only in his epilogue does he note that, given these characteristics and his well-known habit of rocking rapidly when thinking, he would probably be diagnosed as neurodivergent now. It allows a more understanding biographical context, though he doesn’t attempt to excuse his capacity for occasional ghastliness.
Early chapters are somewhat indulgent, if interesting in their exploration of childhood and early markers of who Gates would become – especially of that quite extraordinary mind, and his fateful, formative teen introduction to coding. The memoir really takes off midway, as teen Gates starts to foresee possibilities for computers and companies, and drops out of Harvard, where his choice outfit was pricey leather jacket and blue velvet bell-bottoms, to form Microsoft. That tale has featured in many books chronicling the history of technology, Microsoft or other companies, but having it from Gates himself is fascinating, more detailed, and potentially corrective.
A wholly unexpected Gates steps forward at times, one hinted at by that often-shared mugshot from a 1977 arrest (so seeming unlikely that it has its own Snopes entry). He admits to early run-ins with the law (think fast cars). Gates was also an avid youthful hiker, loved drama and acting, and, at the behest of his groovier, older schoolmate and Microsoft co-founder Bill Allen, smoked a few joints and even dropped LSD while at Harvard, once when he regrettably forgot he had to undergo dental work the next morning while still hallucinating. Gates, tripping? Another surprising affinity with Jobs.
Least convincing is a subtly grating thread reiterating family (and by extension, his own) philanthropy, stressed in an inside cover blurb, too. Gates has embraced philanthropic causes and created the dauntingly powerful Gates Foundation, but only after years of criticism and no charitable lean, despite long-time staggering personal wealth. Perhaps later volumes will delve into his belated conversion.
Gates’s success in some part arose from his dutifully acknowledged privileged, cushy, white upbringing and its opportunities, plus being in the right place at the right time. However, without his relentless drive, ambition, focus and forward vision, he would probably just have been an irksome tech bro. With computers, he writes, “I felt like anything I could imagine, I could create” – ultimately, one of the most valuable companies in history. The pace of his truly wild ride never relents.
