Bill Gates: from hero to villain and back again

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

A lot can change in five years. Indeed, as Anupreeta Das writes in a new biography, Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King, “a large tear in Gates’ public image has forced us to reassess the man we knew”. The “tear” in question, says the Financial Times, started with Gates’ association with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and continued with the 2021 break-up of his marriage and philanthropic partnership with Melinda, following a tawdry office affair. There are even reports that his famed friendship with Buffett is “fading” due to the latter’s “unease about Gates’ personal behaviour”. 

Meanwhile, the power of Gates’ foundation – which pours billions into global public-health initiatives, “outspending many governments” – has come under increasing scrutiny for its lack of accountability, says The Economist. Gates has long been a magnet for conspiracy theorists, but during the pandemic, they went into overdrive “with stories suggesting that he was profiting from vaccines and even injecting tiny microchips into people”. When it emerged that he had quietly become the biggest private landowner in America, critics suggested that Gates’ controlling nature had found a sinister new outlet. “The geeky hero had once again become a villain.” 

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Das’s criticism is overdone, says The Guardian. Her book only lights up when we get “a sense of the extraordinary life that is to unfold”. It’s 1975, and a pair of young men are “huddled in the blue light of their computer screens in the early hours, chugging sugary drinks and writing the first lines of code for the company that will become Microsoft”. Gates and Allen hit the jackpot in 1979 when Gates learned that the industry’s biggest player, IBM, needed an operating system for its new PC. In the “genius” deal he struck, says Entrepreneur, Microsoft retained the right to license the software to other computer makers. The market was soon packed with IBM clones, and Microsoft cleaned up. When the firm floated in 1986, Gates became America’s youngest billionaire at 31. The aggressive business tactics and ruthless determination shown by Gates, and his lieutenant Steve Ballmer, made him a hate figure for many technology evangelists. But a new generation was rising fast. Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg identifies Gates as his “childhood hero”.

The motive driving Gates’ philanthropic work remains hotly contested, says the FT. In The Bill Gates Problem, published last year, Tim Schwab concludes that the foundation is little more than “a political tool, tax break and PR machine for Bill Gates”, who chases highly visible, self-aggrandising goals merely to extend his own influence. Most wouldn’t go that far. But, at 68, there is no sign that this complex, nuanced character “is slowing down or retreating from his self-appointed role as global seer and benefactor”. What has Gates’ long-term impact on the world been? It’s too early to judge.

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