Bill Gates may not strike you as an actor, certainly not a comedic one. But he can be a funny guy, as evidenced by his 2018 cameo on “The Big Bang Theory.” Even when he was arrested at the age of 21, his mugshot smile makes you think there was a lot more going on in that head than computer calculations. What was the offense? “It was driving from Albuquerque up to Seattle that I got three very serious speeding tickets,” he said.
“You got three? On that one trip?” I asked.
“On that one trip. But, it’s a long trip!” he laughed.
We were relieved to learn that the top speed of his all-new, all-electric Fiat RED is only 100 miles an hour. That car was a birthday gift from Bono (yes, that Bono, as if there’s any other). “We’ve been working together on this global health stuff for a long time,” Gates said.
These days, Gates is known largely for his philanthropic work, especially on global health issues. To date, the Gates Foundation has given away nearly $80 billion in grants – most of that from Gates and his former wife Melinda‘s own pocket.
But for most of us, he’ll always be the Microsoft guy, even though he stepped down as CEO a quarter-century ago. “The one thing that really held me back was, what if I leave and the company’s doing very poorly? A) I’ll feel bad, and B) I won’t know whether to jump back in or not,” he said. “But, you know, fortunately I’ve never had to even think about it because my successors have been amazing.”
He was the boy wonder – the Harvard dropout who became a billionaire in his 30s – by focusing not on building computers, but on selling the software than ran them. By the time he launched Windows 95, he was at the top of the world.
CBS News
He had every right to be dancing to The Rolling Stones and yucking it up with the likes of Jay Leno. During his software’s launch event, Gates cracked, “Windows ’95 is so easy, even a talk show host can figure it out!”
But on this day, as he drove us to his favorite drive-in – BurgerMaster, a Seattle institution – Gates seemed less like one of the world’s richest men, and more like the kid who used to come here with his dad, decades before he would be calling sports heroes, rock stars and world dignitaries his friends.
“My social skills were very slow to develop,” Gates said. “So, except for a few boys similar to me, I didn’t have that many friends.”
He’s not saying that for sympathy; he’s just being analytical. It’s the way his mind works – and it’s the way “Source Code: My Beginnings,” the first of his three part autobiography, is written. “Here is the set-up, the source code that almost certainly was going to lead to some pretty amazing impact,” he said.
Knopf
Bill Gates knew he was different. So did his parents. So did his teachers. Had he been growing up today, he says he likely would have been diagnosed as autistic. “Well, when I’m concentrating now, I’ll actually sometimes start rocking, which bothers people without my even, you know, sort of being aware of it. I haven’t even outgrown that type of behavior. It’s a habit. I mean, [my parents] did put me on a rocking horse to help me go to sleep, they put me in a cradle. So, it’s definitely their fault!”
Whether he is or isn’t on the spectrum matters little, he says: “I mean, even today there’s not, like, some magic medicine that gets rid of the bad part and lets you keep the good part.”
He writes that his parents took him to therapy, sent him to private school, and tried to unglue him from his books by getting him into sports, like skiing and even football. “I was forced to,” Gates said. “There were three teams. There was the varsity, the JV, and then even below JV. And so, we were the lowest tier. And amongst that third tier, I was semi-decent! But that’s all that can be said.”
Almost everything he viewed through the prism of mathematics.
I asked, “When you talk about math and being good at math and how that kind of revealed all these hidden structures in life and gave all the chaos of the world a certain amount of order – [whereas] if you’re like me, who is not good at math, all I see is sometimes chaos. I don’t see the patterns. I don’t see the structures.”
CBS News
“Well, you know, I think science is a beautiful thing – physics, chemistry, biology,” Gates replied. “The more you learn, the more kind of the pieces fit together, because all these topics connect.”
In conversation 40 years ago with Jane Pauley, William Gates III made it clear he was in charge of his destiny. “I’m used to having a company where the ideas that I have are something that I can easily pursue,” he told Pauley on the “Today” show in 1985.
Is he competitive? “Yes, and people would say I’m competitive,” Gates said. “Yes, definitely. I mean, there was an industry panel once where everybody was disagreeing with me. And at the end of the panel, one of the competitors says, ‘Look, Bill is wrong. Bill works so much harder than we do. He’s going to succeed. We might as well just give in!'”
You don’t get to be part of that 1% club without making a few enemies along the way. He is a complicated guy. Some say he was ruthless in his business practices, and there are plenty of charges that today he’s part of a new American oligarchy.
CBS News
There were glimpses of his determination even as a freshman at Harvard. He almost got kicked out for breaking the rules in the computer lab. “It turned out I had used by far the most computer time,” Gates said. “And so, they’re like, ‘Well, what are you doing? You know, you’re an undergraduate. What the heck?'”
His computer science professor Harry Lewis remembers him well. Years ago, he dug out the original code that Gates started writing over Christmas break in 1974. “This was a work of beauty,” he said.
Those pages of BASIC interpreter code became the Bible of the software revolution.
CBS News
The 69-year-old Gates says he’s made plenty of mistakes, including meeting with financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Although the tabloids had a field day with his divorce, he now says that was one of his life’s biggest regrets.
But for every critic, there are just as many who speak of Bill Gates in the same breath as Thomas Edison.
Like his BurgerMaster burger, sometimes Bill Gates has bitten off more than he can chew in his life – maybe it was a way to challenge himself even in the face of those who still want to challenge him. “I’ve been unbelievably lucky, and led a very interesting life – and it’s not stopping!” he laughed.
READ AN EXCERPT: “Source Code: My Beginnings” by Bill Gates
For more info:
Story produced by John Goodwin. Editor: Ben McCormick.
