Whatever your opinion of the Microsoft co-founder, it has probably evolved over time. Anupreeta Das tracks the ups and downs of Bill Gates’s career in her eye-opening book, Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King. Not quite a biography, the author instead uses Gates as a way to examine the hidden influence of billionaires. There’s gossip about Gates’s divorce and disintegrating friendship with Warren Buffett, but Das, a finance journalist, also explains the structures behind his philanthropic foundations and investment firms. It makes for compelling reading.
Das chronicles his early success. Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 to co-found “Micro-Soft” as a teenager, frantically coding through the night after promising a company software that he hadn’t yet written. The company went public 11 years later, and a year after that Gates became a billionaire — at 31, the youngest in the US and the first from tech. He is now worth more than $154 billion, making him the fifth richest person in the world.
That story has been told before, but it is a useful reminder to see his business ruthlessness laid out in detail. For instance, he is accused of trying in 1983 to buy out with a low-ball offer his co-founder and childhood best friend, Paul Allen, who had just been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Because Allen had reduced his hours, Gates argued he should have a smaller stake. Gates’s sharkish reputation was such that “there was wild celebration on the Intuit campus, cheering literally from each of the buildings” when regulators in 1995 halted Microsoft’s acquisition of the smaller software company.
Microsoft’s refusal to allow Netscape access to Windows 95 sparked a long-running antitrust battle with the government, which accused it of illegally monopolizing the Web browser market, that ended in a settlement in 2002. By 2001 Microsoft had been sued more than 200 times in the US because of monopolistic conduct highlighted by the Justice Department.
After those legal woes, Gates began to step away from Microsoft, shifting fully into philanthropy in 2008, though keeping a board position. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a $75 billion cash pile and a $8.3 billion annual budget — nearly two billion dollars more than the World Health Organization. That has powered an incredible second act for Gates. In 2010 he set up the Giving Pledge with Buffett to encourage billionaire philanthropy and during Covid he became a leading pro-vaccine voice. Accolades and awards flowed in, but not, Das says, the one that Gates’s team wanted: the Nobel Peace Prize.
Bill Gates is accused of trying in 1983 to buy out with a low-ball offer his co-founder and childhood best friend, Paul Allen, who had just been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Still, not bad for a nerd. Das labels Gates the “ur-nerd”, the classic model for tech founders — a college dropout with bad hair and dandruff-covered jumpers. In 2014 his fellow tech pioneer Marc Andreessen tweeted: “Silicon Valley is nerd culture, and we are the bro’s natural enemy.” That hasn’t lasted. The nerd billionaire personified by Gates has given way to the tech bro. Jeff Bezos, once a “baby-faced founder of an online bookstore”, has become a buff jock in aviator sunglasses. Even Gates’s mentee Mark Zuckerberg hit the gym, won jujitsu competitions and last year agreed to have a cage fight with Musk. We’re still waiting.
Gates and Bezos do have in common multibillion-dollar divorce settlements. Das tackles this with empathy for Melinda French Gates, whom Gates married in 1994. In this telling she tolerated all she could before walking away in 2021. Asked about reports of his affairs, she merely answered: “Those are questions Bill needs to answer.” He has not as yet, but it’s been reported that French Gates allowed him to take annual holidays alone with another woman.
Despite the nerd persona, Das claims he was known for womanizing at both Microsoft and the foundation: staff apparently warned colleagues not to send the young and pretty interns to his office, although if a woman refused his “cringeworthy” pursuit, supporters note, she would suffer no apparent career damage. How generous. Das suggests Gates’s association, limited though it may have been, with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein was discouraged by French Gates, and may have been the final straw.
Anupreeta Das labels Gates the “ur-nerd”, the classic model for tech founders — a college dropout with bad hair and dandruff-covered jumpers.
Beyond relationship rumors, Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King is full of intriguing tidbits about Gates — he loves The Great Gatsby, fast cars and paid $30 million for a Leonardo da Vinci manuscript. In the early 1990s he built a 66,000 sq ft mansion (including a trampoline room), nicknamed Xanadu 2.0, in Medina, a lakeside suburb of Seattle. But Das’s book is most compelling when she digs into the finances of it all, revealing how difficult it can be to spend all that money.
Das details, beyond charity, the activities of Gates’s private investment companies, notably Cascade Asset Management, set up to manage his personal fortune, which employs 150 people. It owns an urban development in Tampa as well as 270,000 acres of farmland, making Gates the largest private owner of farmland in America. Das also unpicks the structure of the Gates Foundation, peeking inside its operations and structure. It is designed to eventually “spend down” its funds and disappear rather than live forever via an endowment.
When Covid hit, Gates became a high-profile advocate for a vaccine. Many of the leading public health organizations managing the Covid response were largely co-founded and funded by the Gates Foundation. But the drawback of his influence was that Gates decided to protect vaccine IP rather than back license-free mass production to speed up coverage.
Das spends less time on this era of Gates’s life, which is a shame as it neatly captures how the digital world that Gates helped to build is a monster that turns on its makers. The conspiracy theories that emerged during the pandemic about him wanting to microchip the population or that he knew a pandemic was coming clearly bewildered him. “I am experiencing the greatest pushback ever in my life, and [am] somewhat unsure how to deal with that,” Gates told The Washington Post at the time.
But maybe we should have pushed back sooner. Though Gates’s philanthropy makes his flaws and foibles easier to forgive and looks admirable compared with billionaires busy trolling prime ministers or planning midlife crisis trips to the moon, surely it’s not good for society to have such extreme concentrations of wealth. This is certainly something that Gates’s father, Bill Gates Sr, believed. As Das points out, Gates Sr, a lawyer, campaigned against a Republican plan to abolish inheritance tax, because he believed “wealth creation was a collaborative effort with society” and taxation was “the right way” to pay it back. “‘You earned it’ is really a matter of ‘you earned it with the indispensable help of your government,’” Gates Sr told PBS.
Das notes that Gates went to Lakeside, a Seattle private school, where he used computers before most adults, let alone their children. He could fearlessly drop out of Harvard because he knew he could easily resume his studies. And he was handed a key introduction at IBM early on in his Microsoft career because his mother served on a charity board alongside the chairman of IBM. “Did Gates reach the economic stratosphere solely on the jet fuel of his brilliance? His father wasn’t so sure,” Das writes.
Although her in-depth reporting digs deep into the history and structure of our billionaire-friendly financial world, Das’s clear writing makes for an entertaining story. It may not quite be a beach read, but it will surely be read on yachts.
Nicole Kobie is a London-based journalist and the author of The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow’s Technology Still Isn’t Here
