I believe that Mark Zuckerberg‘s enthusiasm for MMA is genuine, that his new style is entirely artificial, and that he’s more religious than he puts out in public. However, I’m basing this on my interpretation of a PR-consultant-crafted image. You can’t know billionaires. We can judge their companies, influence, money, and the myths that orbit them, but we can’t know what they’re like as people. If the stock market and White House wanted an empathetic liberal, Zuckerberg would trade his T-shirt for a Zegna crewneck and start harping on about corporate responsibility. I can confidently say that because that’s what he did five years ago.
You might hope that billionaires’ memoirs would do something to break through the persona, but oh no. At best, they rewrite history for their benefit — to downplay the bad, hype up the good, change popular stories, and snipe at their rivals. However, more frequently, their prose is strip-mined of all personality. No amount of caffeine could carry me through Jeff Bezos‘s essay collection, Invent and Wander.
Which brings us to Bill Gates‘s new memoir, Source Code. The first of a planned trilogy, if you’re looking for hot corporate goss’ on the heydays of a rising Microsoft, you’ll have to wait for Volume 2. It may be, though, the odd exception to the ordinary rules about what billionaires do with the books they write (or “write”). It doesn’t settle scores, re-mark records, or do anything to inflate Microsoft’s share price. Instead, it is spent almost entirely on Gates’s childhood. The final chapters tease toward the more drama-filled, interesting parts of his story — there’s even a brief first appearance of a young Steve Jobs — but the vast majority of its 14 chapters are spent on the rowdy young boy in Seattle and the parents who raised him and school that educated him. Source Code does include him dropping out of Harvard and starting the computer company “Micro-soft,” but that’s how the book closes out, rather than opens, and he only applies to Harvard in Chapter 9.
Commercially, this makes Source Code a somewhat odd book. It’s not as though millions of readers are desperate to know what Bill Gates was like at 9 years old. However, it also makes for far more interesting reading. Gates is free from the usual constraints, open, and self-aware as he reverse-engineers how he became himself. And he presents his origin story quite differently from the Randian self-made man narrative that has become popular in Silicon Valley.
Gates retells his story with an implicit theme of Rawlsian moral luck: he was fortunate enough to be born at the right time and place for his skills to be of great use and in a household and social setting that could let him thrive, right when computing was starting to become accessible. He lived in an affluent household, was raised by kind, thoughtful parents, and went to a good school. The only trauma he faced was the death of a friend in a rock-climbing accident. Rather than cliched childhood hardships, he recounts a pleasant upbringing. If anything, he was the cause of the hardships for his unprepared but patient parents.
He writes that they “had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects, missed social cues, and could be rude or inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others,” but they “afforded me the precise blend of support and pressure I needed: they gave me room to grow emotionally, and they created opportunities for me to develop my social skills.” This isn’t a policy manifesto in the way Gates’s previous books have been. However, if there are broad takeaways from Source Code, it’s that helicopter parenting smothers talent, and children need to be given the resources to explore their passions.
Gates is also very open about how unpleasant he could be. He was far from being the perfect youth. The one time his father cracks is when Bill is fighting with his mother at the dinner table, and, at wit’s end, he dumps a glass of water on his son’s head — to which the self-described young “smart alec” snaps back, “Thanks for the shower!” Gates writes that he “had never seen my gentle father lose his temper.” Having read Gates’s description of his young self, you feel like he had it coming.
As he grows older, the story gets a little closer to the classic founder story — dropping out of college, nightlong coding sessions, and so on — but even here, he’s less egoistic than you might expect. In his own words, he didn’t exceed here because he was a harder worker than his peers or smarter than them but because programming and computers uniquely suited his neurodivergent thought processes, and his hard work came from a primed obsession. Asides into the way he thinks are often the most insightful parts of the book, such as when he writes, “I loved how the computer forced me to think. It was completely unforgiving in the face of mental sloppiness. It demanded that I be logically consistent and pay attention to details. One misplaced comma or semicolon and the thing wouldn’t work.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINE
Another strength is that, though the story is clearly from his perspective, it wasn’t written alone. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Rob Guth, who now works for Gates, was tasked with digging into old records to correct false memories and add extra context. For example, though he didn’t read it at the time, had he “been paying attention to the final issue of the Lakeside newspaper that spring, I would have noticed a two-paragraph story at the bottom of the second page. It said that starting in the fall, the math department was going to get connected to a computer. ‘Hopefully, some students will use it to work on extensive projects,’ the story mused.”
Though Source Code is about the period of Gates’s life that ought to be the least interesting, it feels light and only digressive in the right way, as well as refreshingly open and candid. However, he also considers himself a child for most of it. In Volume 2, he’ll be running Microsoft at its peak as a ruthless asshole; and in the third, he will have his encounters with Jeffrey Epstein and ultimately divorce his wife. Writing honestly and self-critically for those sections is the bigger test.
Ross Anderson is the life editor at the Spectator World and a tech and culture contributor for the New York Sun.