Bill Gates: from hero to villain and back again

Bill Gates was a tech billionaire at 31. Then he was knocked down for ruthless business practices – and hailed again for his philanthropy. Who is the real Bill Gates?

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Co-Chairman Bill Gates Interview
(Image credit: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In 2018, Bill Gates gave a video interview to Wired in which he broke down six key moments in his life. They included his meeting as a teenager with Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen; the launch of Windows 95; his first trip to Africa with then future wife Melinda; and his friendship with Warren Buffett, which led to the ground-breaking Giving Pledge – encouraging other billionaires to donate their wealth to charitable causes. At the time, says The Economist, Gates was at the peak of his public popularity, having reconfigured himself from the rapacious tech monopolist of his Microsoft years into the world’s most prolific philanthropist. “So successful was this reinvention” that Gates was “the most admired man in the world from 2014 to 2019”, according to YouGov polls.

Bill Gates: billionaire, nerd, saviour, king

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.