Bill Gates Interview: The Restless Boy Who Built A Tech Giant I Microsoft I EXCLUSIVE

My family was well off, not super well off, but reasonably well off. We never worried about things. I was read to a lot, particularly by that grandmother we called Gammy. They were a little confounded by my high energy, but found it kind of fascinating, thought of me as a very happy kid. You know, as a kid who probably would have been labeled either on the spectrum or also, you know, with ADHD, because I had a lot of energy and ability to focus in, and if something wasn't engaging, I wanted to go off and think about other things. Everything, the time I was born, the kind of, you know, mental approach I have where I can dive into things, even though, you know, that is sometimes confusing, you know, to people, and I wasn't a natural at certain social things. It was kind of obvious to me that we could do a software company, not just a company with a software product, like most of our competitors, but a company that would do every kind of software. There was a year there where I actually tried to get Microsoft going while I was still taking classes, but that, you know, I had Rick Weiland out there trying to run things, and I just wasn't satisfied with that. Seven of the most valuable companies in the world, if you ignore Aramco, are these tech companies, you know, people that I know and grew up with, and each in their own way, you know, is pushing the boundaries of what technology is, Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and now, you know, Nvidia's somewhat in that group, but it's, you know, it's kind of amazing. Microsoft's turning 50. The Gates Foundation is turning 25. You know, my dad would have been 100 this year. So, you know, kind of a number of milestones that make me reflective, and although, you know, my bias is always looking forward in terms of great new innovations, whether it's AI or energy or global health, you know, it seemed like a time to look back, and we've been gathering, you know, reference material and interviewing people, and it was about 18 months ago, this idea of doing a volume that went through my first 25 years came up, and, you know, that kind of came together well because, you know, it's during that period that my parents and, you know, two very key friendships, one with Kent Evans, who tragically dies, when I'm about 16, and then with Paul Allen. So, you know, at the end of this book, I'm moving back to Seattle, and Microsoft has got about 20 employees. I'm 90% still looking ahead, you know, helping Microsoft with AI and, you know, driving climate energy innovation and the work of the foundation. You know, I want to make sure that all the money, which, you know, I'll be giving away, you know, that it has the best impact possible, and I get to work with such incredible people. But, you know, sharing how it all came together, you know, thoughts about how I was parented or, you know, things that worked or didn't work for me. You know, it's kind of, you know, helping other people do their work. You know, it's part of a, I guess, you know, being a little bit more reflective, but still mostly driving new work. You know, everything was, other than the tragedy of my friend Kent dying, you know, which was very shocking. You know, I, you know, my family was well off, not super well off, but reasonably well off. We never worried about things, whether it's, you know, my parents paid the private school tuition, and later for the years I went to Harvard, they paid that tuition. My dad, my relationship with my two parents, you know, is pretty different because my dad's working very hard, and a lot, you know, he's just showing by example that he's got values, he's always on top of things, you know, always really calm and, you know, figuring things out in a very savvy, almost judicial type way. My mom was a little more frantic and, you know, high energy in it. My time, you know, was overwhelmingly with her, and she, you know, had high expectations. You know, she had us meet with adults at household events, which, you know, helped me when I, my social skills were sort of developed, my ability to talk to adults was actually even better than people my own age, which came in handy to learn a lot from adults. You know, my dad, when he came home, would share the complex lawsuits that he was part of and how he thought about those. I was read to a lot, particularly by that grandmother we called Gammy, but, you know, then I was, you know, we had a World Book Encyclopedia, and they let me buy lots of books. They were a little confounded by my high energy, but, you know, found it kind of fascinating, you know, thought of me as a very happy kid. I was a little rebellious, you know, from like nine to 12, and, you know, my school teachers, you know, saw that I was capable, but kind of not very directed, and that eventually got my parents to think that maybe this private school would be beneficial, and so I start at seventh grade, age 12, I start at Lakeside School and, you know, of course go there for all six years of high school before I head off to Harvard. Even when this book ends and Microsoft, you know, is moving to Seattle with 18 people, we think we're on to something that nobody else sees, which is that with the exponential improvement of the microprocessor, computing will be essentially free, and that the ways that you'll use computing will be, you know, extremely broad, and so we set a computer in every home and a computer on every desk, and people thought that was a bit crazy. You know, I chose that we would not do hardware, that we would just do the software piece, because I saw that as the most interesting piece and where we were unique and, you know, predicted eventually that's where most of the value would be even though at that time, you know, hardware was everything and IBM just gave away the software. You know, everything, the time I was born, the kind of, you know, mental approach I have where I can dive into things, even though, you know, that is sometimes confusing, you know, to people and, you know, I wasn't a natural at certain social things, you know, through my friendship with Kent and Paul and all this computer work, it was kind of obvious to me that, you know, we could do a software company, not just a company with a software product like most of our competitors, but a company that would do every kind of software, and that we would hire better and have better tools and just move faster than anybody else for this magic ingredient. Well, there's no doubt that the childhood prediction that, you know, Paul and I made in starting Microsoft that digital stuff and software would be a primary change agent in terms of how life changed and driving lots and lots of innovation, you know, that that's been borne out. And so you can view what's going on today with AI as simply a continuation of what starts with the microprocessor, the PC, the mobile phone, the internet, and how all that, you know, now, you know, has it sort of central to all of our activities that, you know, kind of like electricity, we often take it for granted. AI does take it to a new level. You know, instead of thinking that it's computing is free, as we improve these systems and make them far more reliable, you'll actually be able to think of intelligence as being free. And, you know, that's even more radical in terms of how it changes things. This idea of if you have lots of computing, how intelligent could you be? Here with AI, we have, you know, millions of people working on it, hundreds of billions of capital, you know, every magazine, every company going, okay, how do we get into this? So, you know, the digital centrality of digital activity, you know, there's a lot of ways to measure it, but, you know, how much time do you spend online versus just passive TV watching? You know, now it's shifted over where you're online interacting even more than anything else, even in your leisure time, not to mention a high percentage of your work hours. You know, seven of the most valuable companies in the world, if you ignore Aramco, are these tech companies, you know, people that I know and grew up with and each in their own way, you know, is pushing the boundaries of what technology is, Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and now, you know, NVIDIA is somewhat in that group, but it's, you know, it's kind of amazing. You know, as a kid who probably would have been labeled either on the spectrum or also, you know, with ADHD, because I had a lot of energy and ability to focus in and if something wasn't engaging, you know, I wanted to go off and think about other things. You know, I had teachers who said I should be moved ahead one or two grades. I had teachers who said I should be held back. You know, they sort of had a hard time characterizing me. The one thing that I always was very good at was math. And, you know, of course, that gives you kind of a logical understanding of the world that as you go into computers is very helpful. Well, yeah, when I was at Harvard, before the Altair, that first personal computer came out, I, you know, I didn't, you know, I didn't, I had some spare time. And so there was a period where there was a group that played poker and, you know, so I'd waste a lot of time staying up at night playing poker. Eventually I gave it up because they raised the stakes and the average players got really good. And then, you know, as soon as that Altair came out, then I had no spare time at all. You know, so as an adult, I don't really gamble. I don't find it that interesting. Poker has an element of skill in it. And back then poker didn't just mean hold them. It included hold them, but it was, you know, five card high, five card high low, seven card high low, lots of different variations that, you know, made you think about, okay, what's a good hand? If there's five people playing in this game versus, you know, eight people playing in this game. Anyway, it has kind of a statistical thing to it. And as I share in the book, my early exposure to cards with my grandmother made me think through, okay, what is a good strategy? Even to this day, one of the leisure time things I do is play bridge. There was like a year there where I smoked pot some, but it really didn't help much with social stuff. Also, because I like my mind, you know, kind of figuring things out a lot, eventually, you know, the idea of taking drugs was not attractive because either during or after, you know, you kind of are not thinking that well. And, you know, are you limiting, are you in some ways reducing your longterm mental capacity? I, you know, I don't know, but, so that was kind of an early youthful experimentation thing that I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't recommend that to others. Well, I felt that Paul and I had this unique insight about software and the importance of software. And of course, once you ship a software product, like take a word processor, you know, people get used to it and they tell you how to improve it. And so you can increase your R&D. So being first, you know, being early with software is very helpful. Even with our basic, you know, people would write lots of programs. And so the fact that it was our basic on all these computers, the Apple to Apple soft, the common or path, the TRC, you know, meant that you could have a lot of basic applications and our basic was preferred over what anyone else was doing. And so I felt there was an urgency that if I didn't drop out and really put time into Microsoft, you know, we would fall behind and maybe somebody else, somewhere else understood what we did. Now, it turned out there really weren't other people who thought of software as deeply or as broadly as we do. There were some good, you know, single product companies like WordPerfect or, you know, Lotus was one, two, three, but not until Google comes along, which is much later. There isn't a company that's trying to hire as many smart people as possible and, you know, putting tons of money into incremental compilation and high-speed optimization, the world's best compilers, all that stuff. We are, you know, kind of unique, but there was a year there where I actually tried to get Microsoft going while I was still taking classes. But that, you know, I had Rick Weiland out there trying to run things and I just wasn't satisfied with that. And so even though I loved Harvard, you know, they teach you interesting things. There's a bunch of people around, even late at night you can sit and talk about whatever nonsensical topic is interesting, you know. So I, and, you know, so I was in no hurry to leave except that, you know, this great insight I wanted to make sure that other people didn't get ahead. Now it turned out, you know, maybe it wasn't that urgent, but hey, you know, the sooner you get going, the better. And so we were, you know, right there at the very beginning of the industry. I totally think that philanthropy should be bigger and people should give more money, you know, particularly now with these very large fortunes because I think, you know, there are problems that only philanthropy can solve, you know, helping with malaria or malnutrition, you know, there aren't really markets that go after that. And even though governments could, they often don't know how to organize the science behind that. And, you know, so philanthropy can accelerate the work in those areas. I mean, even take like, you know, trying out AI in education. Yeah, government should do some of that, but philanthropy should really be, you know, at the cutting edge of, you know, how you at least run the pilots. And then if it really, really works well, which, you know, we're still too early to know exactly what that looks like, then the government, you know, comes in and scales that up. And so there's a lot of ways that the boundary between philanthropy and government, philanthropy and the private sector are important. There are a lot of great philanthropists in the tech sector, you know, whether it's in India or the US, you know, I worked with, you know, Premji Nandini Lankani, Rohini, you know, there's a, there are, I would say the tech sector, although it's not, that's not only where you find the philanthropy, you know, India has, you know, Tata, Pyramal. I feel bad because I won't mention some super generous people, you know, over time I expect Mukesh will be a strong philanthropist. So, but we can do more, you know, people can give more, they can give in a smarter way. And that's partly why we get people together under this thing called the Giving Pledge to learn from each other and encouraging each other. Well, certainly, you know, I'm going to talk a lot about mistakes we made, you know, how our management was perceived or how, you know, I didn't see the antitrust lawsuit coming. You know, we had cases where competitors did new things like Google comes in and does search, you know, and totally dominates that. You know, we have Apple that innovates across the hardware software boundary in a brilliant way. You know, we have Amazon who not only does retailing, which we weren't jealous of, but surprisingly, you know, the company that beats us to the punch in cloud computing is not IBM, Oracle, you know, Intel, you know, not a computer company. It's this, you know, basically retail e-commerce company, you know, to their credit, you know, they, and they're not computer science people, although they hire, you know, great people. So, you know, today in the word of cloud computing, Amazon is still number one. Microsoft is a very close number two, you know, partly that was Satya's work before he became CEO was taking Azure and really building it into the incredible asset that it's become. So yeah, I mean, I do think one of the luxuries of being, you know, kind of insanely successful is you want to be able to admit, you know, where you made mistakes and where you missed things coming. And, you know, it's all pretty much public record, you know, a lot of the key people are alive. And, you know, if I exaggerate, I'm sure they'll, you know, call me for it. And, you know, people are probably more interested in understanding the human truth than just the, you know, hate geography of, oh my God, we sure did a good job on this, you know. So the, you know, the mistakes we made in building the company internationally, the, you know, how we got ourselves into antitrust, you know, could we have focused on, you know, usability and some things better. We had a very engineering centric culture, was a very intense culture, you know, did that include all the people that could have, you know, I had to evolve as a manager and, you know, now today in AI, you know, it's a huge challenge because everybody knows how important it is. Everybody's trying to be in front, you know, we've got internal capacity, we've got this great partnership with OpenAI. So, you know, it continues to be an industry where you have to steer the ship, you know, very carefully. And, you know, up from the founding of the company in 1975, until 2000, you know, that was me in charge and through luck and skill, we did pretty well.