Inside the mind of Bill Gates
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He is the most famous businessman in the world, dominating the computer revolution. Yet we know little about him as a person. Here’s an intimate look at one of the giants of our age.
WHEN bill Gates was 11, he was at war with his mother Mary. She would call him to dinner and he would not respond. What are you doing?’’ she once demanded.
’’I’m thinking,’’ he shouted back.
’’You’re thinking?’’
’’Yes, thinking,’’ he said fiercely.
’’Have you ever tried thinking?’’
His parents decided he needed counseling. After a year, the psychologist reached his conclusion.
’’You’re going to lose,’’ he told Mary. ’’You had better just adjust to it.’’
Mary was outgoing and strong-willed, her husband recalls, ’’but she came around to accepting that it was futile trying to compete with Bill.’’
A lot of computer companies struggle to compete with William Henry Gates III. In the 23 years since he left Harvard University to start what would later be known as Microsoft Corporation, Gates 42, has amassed a fortune worth more than $20bn. But the world´s richest person is more than that. He is the Thomas Edison and Henry Ford of our age.
His success stems from his awesome, at times frightening, blend of brilliance, competitiveness and intensity.
At his desk, he works on two computers, one with four frames that sequence data from the Internet, the other handling hundreds of e-mail messages.
’’I don’t think theirs is anything unique about human intelligence,’’ Gate said over dinner one night at an Indian restaurant. ’’The neurons in the brains that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion,’’ he explains. ’’We can some day replicate that on a machine.’’
Asked if there isn’t something special, perhaps even divine, about the human soul, his face becomes expressionless, his squeaky voice turns toneless. Folding his arms, he vigorously rocks back and forth. Finally, as if from an automaton, comes the answer: ’’I don’t have any evidence on that.’’ Rock, rock, rock. ’’I don’t have any evidence on that.’’ ’’As a baby, he used to rock in his cradle,’’ recalls Gates’ father Bill senior, a man as big and huggable as his son is small and tightly coiled. A retired lawyer, he still lives in the Seattle house where Bill III the boy he calls ’’Trey’’ --- lived.
The name comes from the card tern for three. Gates’ mother and grandmother loved cards, and they would organize bridge games and trivia contests after the big family dinner held every Sunday. During summer holidays at a cabin, there were nightly campfires and competitive games. ’’The play was quite serious,’’ill senior recalls. ’’Winning mattered.
When Trey was preparing for senior school,’’ we became concerned about him,’’ his father says. ’’He was so small and shy, in need of protection, his interests were so different from the typical 11-year-olds.’’
They decided to send him to the small private Lakeside School. There, with funds from a jumble sale, the Mothers’ Club had bought a clunky teletype computer terminal.
Learning computer language from a manual with his friend Paul Allen, Trey produced two programmes: One that converted a number in one mathematical base to a different base, and another that played noughts and crosses. Later he devised a computer version of RISK, a board game in which the goal is world domination.
Trey and Paul were soon spending evenings at a local company with a new computer. The boy’s job was to find viruses that would crash it. They got so into it,’’ his father recalls, ’’that he would sneak out after we went to bed and spend most of the night there.’’
The combination of counseling and computers helped transform the boy. At 14, he didn’t go to Maths lessons because he knew the work and had read ahead. He came in the top ten in a national aptitude exam.
’’His confidence and sense of humour increased,’’ his father says. ’’And he made peace with his mother.’’ By the age of 15 he was writing a programme for timetabling school lessons. It had a secret function to place him in classes with the right girls.
Still, the boy didn’t have a lot of confidence is social settings, says his father. ’’I remember him fretting for two weeks before asking a girl out, then getting turned down.’’
At Harvard, Gates met Steve Ballmer. ’’Bill would play poker until six in the morning,’’ Ballmer recalls, ’’then at breakfast discuss applied Mathematics.’’ They studied the same course and Ballmer nurtured Gates’ social side, getting him to join one of the college clubs and later visiting Studio 53 in New York.
In 1980 Gates lured Ballmer, then attending business school at Stanford University, to Microsoft. ’’I always knew I would have close business associates like Ballmer and several of the other top people at Microsoft, and that we’d stick together and grow together no matter what happened,’’ Gates says.
During the early 1980s, Gates led a bachelor lifestyle. He, Ballmer and other friends would eat at fashionable restaurants and go to films. When friends got married there were stag nights involving strippers and skinny-dipping.
Later, after Microsoft became successful, gates built a four-house family compound and there replicated his childhood summer activities for friends and colleagues.
The3 ’Macrogames’ were no ordinary picnics: In one digital version of charades, for example, teams competed to send numerical messages using smoke signals, and the winners devised their own four-bit binary code.
He also loved fast cars. When Microsoft was based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he raced a Porsche 911 in the desert; one night Paul Allen had to bail him out of jail. The weekend he moved Microsoft to Seattle, he got three speeding tickets two from the same policeman.
Gates met Melinda French, the woman he married in 1994, at a Microsoft press even in Manhattan. A computer science and business graduate, she was working for the company at the time. Now 33, --- at the time of writing in February 1998 -- she is no longer at Microsoft and is active in charity work. Like Gates, she is clever and independent. Like his mother, she is friendly and sociable. Their daughter Jennifer was born in 1996. Gates pulls a snapshot out of his desk showing him proudly cradling her. ’’I used to think I wouldn’t be all that interested in the baby until she could talk,’’ he says. ’’But I’m totally into it now. She’s just started to have a personality.’’
Gates’s intellectual sidekick is Nathan Myhrvold, 38. Pacing round a room, they talk for hours about future technologies such as voice recognition, then topic ranging from quantum physics to genetic engineering. ’’Bill is not threatened by smart people,’’ he says, ’’only stupid ones.’’
Microsoft had long recruited an IQ and ’intellectual bandwidth’ they’re called ’Bill clones’ than some one with experience. The interview process tests not what applicants know but how well they process tricky questions; to work out how may times on average you would have to flip the pages of the Manhattan phone book to find a specific name, how would you approach the problem?
About other people, Gates shows little curiosity. Warren Buffett, the investor whom Gates demoted to the second richest American, seems an unlikely person to be among his closest friends. A jovial, outgoing 67-year-old grandfather, Buffet only recently learned how to use a computer. But as multibillionaires go, both are unpretentious and they enjoy taking holidays together.
Gates is ambivalent about his celebrity status. His office is modest, sparsely decorated and filled with standard furniture. The phone almost never rings. Nor do phones ring much elsewhere on the Microsoft campus, a cluster of 35 low-rise buildings, lawns and courtyards that resemble a college environment.
Gate mainly uses three methods to run his company. Day and night, he bats out e-mail messages, often chuckling as he dispatches them. Every month or so, he meets up with top management group.
And most important 70 per cent of his schedule, by his calculations he holds two or three small meetings a day with teams working on company products. Young team members in the standard winter uniform of khaki trousers and flannel shirt lead the discussion, as Gates flips ahead through a sheaf of paper and within minutes has the gist of the material.
He stars rocking, peppering them with questions about the politics of their potential partners, details of the technology, their competition and strategy.
Answers are crisp; no one seems to be showing off, but neither do any hesitate to speak up. To a man, they mimic his mannerism and rock when they think. Gates listens intently. And he does not hide his cut-throat instincts.
While his mother may have come to terms with his competitive intensity, much of the computer world has not. There are websites dedicated to reviling him, lawyers focused on foiling him and former associates who sputter at the mention of his name.
Company such as Netscape, Oracle and Sun Microsystems publicly make thwarting his ’’plan for world domination’’ into a holy crusade.
The criticism is that he had tried to use, unfairly and perhaps illegally, Microsoft’s near monopoly in desktop operating systems. (An interim court ruling last December ordered Microsoft to stop requiring purchasers of its software, such as Window 95, to install its Internet browser at the same time.)
’’Who grew this market?’’ Gates says. ’’We did. Who survived companies like IBM, ten times our size?’’ His rival, he says, are ’’every bit as competitive as I’ am.’’
Nevertheless, Gates is enjoying the challenge. Games are fun. Working with smart people is super fun. Others may see him as ruthless, cold or brutal; but for him the competition is sport, a blood sport perhaps, but one played with relish.
A former Microsoft executive admires Gates’ vision but describes him as Darwinian. ’’He does not look for win-win situations, but for ways to make others lose. Success is defined as flattening the competition, not creating excellence. In Bill’s eyes,’’ he says, ’’He’s is still a kid who’s afraid he´ll go out of business if he lets anyone compete.’’
Indeed gates’ language is boyish rather than belligerent. The right stuff is ’really net’ and ’super cool.’ Bad strategies are ’crummy,’ ’really dumb’ and ’random to the max.’
Gates hopes to run Microsoft for another ten years, then promises to focus as intensely on giving his money away. He says he plans to distribute 95 per cent of his wealth. ’’He will spend time thinking about the impact of his philanthropy can have,’’ Buffet says. ’’He is too imaginative to do conventional gifts.’’
Gates likes repeating the line used by Intel chief executive Andrew Grove as a book title: ’’Only the paranoid survive.’’
As Ballmer says, ’’He still feels he must run scared.’’ Gates puts another spin on it, ’’I still feel this is super fun.’’
About Walter Isaacson
The article was first published on TIME magazine under the name "In Search of the Real Bill Gates"
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