Source Code, the Microsoft co-founder’s first of three memoirs, gives us a glimpse at the man behind the businessman – but there’s one real shame
Who is Bill Gates, exactly? You probably know him as the world’s former richest man; the co-founder of Microsoft who made billions of dollars before vowing to give it all away. The careful, considered nerd whose relentless work ethic and rarefied intelligence put a computer in every home.
But if Gates’ entire career has been defined by his ability to peer into the future, his latest venture requires him to meditate on his past. His new memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings, covers his early years and ends when he’s just 23 years old (no mean feat for a man who declares himself “not prone to nostalgia”). Readers hungry to hear more about Microsoft or his later philanthropic work will have to wait—this 312-page book is the first of three planned volumes chronicling his life.
Gates was, in his own words, a bright, awkward and precocious child. He’d read almost every volume of the family’s World Book Encyclopedia collection by the time he was nine, and when other kids proffered musical instruments or souvenirs during class show-and-tell, Gates—newly fascinated by physiology—proudly presented a cow’s lung fresh from a local slaughterhouse. He’d later write his first software program aged just 13 after falling in love with the hulking computer a group of forward-thinking mothers installed at his Seattle private school.
Naturally, being a child prodigy had its downsides. “Bigger kids picked on me. Looking back, I can’t say I felt lonely or even hurt,” he recalls. “More than anything I was just kind of baffled: Why didn’t kids see things my way?” This yawning gulf between how Gates experienced the world compared to the people around him stretches into his time at Harvard, where he struggled to stand out in a crowd of similarly gifted students. The University’s associate director of computing called him “a wise ass”; another professor described him as insubordinate. Programming turned out to be his salvation, and paved the way for him to build the world’s third-most valuable company.
Gates is self-aware enough to admit that his colossal success has hinged on more than just his own natural brilliance—from his good fortune to be “born white and male in a society that advantages white men,” to the unwavering support of his comfortable, loving family. Unfortunately, while there’s no doubting his achievements, it neither makes for the most enthralling story, nor him the most compelling storyteller.
The young Gates loved maths because it’s built on indisputable facts. His memoir deals in the same kinds of methodical, predictable patterns at the expense of drama or intrigue. This steadfast commitment to telling us what happened, rather than how he felt about what happened, means that Source Code offers little in the way of juicy revelations for seasoned Gates watchers, although casual readers might enjoy his recollections of the handful of times he’s taken LSD, his love of the card game bridge or obsession with rollercoasters. These brief humanising moments are the closest we get to learning more about the man behind the businessman. But it’s never long before the book snaps right back to business as usual.
Source Code’s most interesting disclosure comes in its closing pages, in the form of Gates’ guess that if he were growing up today he probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum—something he’s never publicly addressed before. “Even with [my parents’] influence, my social side would be slow to develop, as would my awareness of the impact I can have on other people,” he ponders. “I wish it had come sooner, even if I wouldn’t trade the brain I was given for anything.”
It’s both a touching thought and a missed opportunity. In a different kind of memoir, this suspected diagnosis would have made an engrossing prism through which to reexamine his youth. It’s a real shame – but there’s always book two (and three).
Published by Allen Lane on 6th February, £20
Rhiannon Williams is a reporter at MIT Technology Review magazine and the i’ paper’s former technology correspondent