Bill Gates Traumatized His Parents—and Other Stories of a Wild, Wonky Youth

Terrorizing classmates, spending a night in jail, tripping on LSD: This isn’t the Bill Gates you know.

Steven Levy. Jan 31, 2025. Part 1 of 2.

In his new memoir, Bill Gates doesn’t mention any study of William Wordsworth’s writings. But when I read Source Code: My Beginnings, I thought of the English poet’s famous line from 1802: “The child is father of the man.” Nearly the entire volume is devoted to Gates’ early years, with Microsoft’s origin story entering the narrative in the final chapters. (A second volume will discuss his company, and a third will focus on his work with the Gates Foundation.)

In more than 40 years of interactions with Gates, I have found him resistant to self-reflection. He’d often mock my attempts to engage him in a deep biographical mode by making flip comments or dodging the question. But in this book—his fifth—released this February, there are about 300 pages of Bill Gates’ personal journey, told in a somewhat unsparing first person.

As he paints it, Gates’ Seattle childhood hit all the notes of a ’50s sitcom, with loving, devoted parents and the trappings of the American Dream. But the family dynamic was fraught, often because of Gates’ personality quirks. His own father once told me that Gates’ mom found their son’s behavior “traumatic”—he refused to submit to his parents’ wishes that he do his homework, listen to simple requests, or even speak to them. With his family, his teachers, and his fellow students, Gates rejected the social contract. He cracked jokes or responded with sarcasm and his favorite phrase, “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard!” (Those words would later be as familiar to his employees at Microsoft as they were in the hallways of Seattle’s Lakeside School.)

At Lakeside, Gates learned that actually studying for class could pay dividends, and that acting in a school play was a great way to get to know popular girls (though one turned him down for a prom date). Most importantly, he discovered that a computer terminal could open up a world to him—and ultimately, with his software, to hundreds of millions of others.

Gates’ description of how he and his friend Paul Allen cofounded Microsoft is a more familiar tale. It was the subject of my very first interview with Gates in April 1983, and in my book Hackers I told the story (as did others) of how, when Gates was 19, the pair created the first version of the BASIC computer language that ran on a microcomputer. But reading Gates’ side of the early Microsoft saga is illuminating. He explains why after commandeering a 60 percent stake in the company, he later browbeat Allen into accepting the butt end of a 64-36 split. Gates says he now feels badly about how he handled it, but that the arrangement reflected who was working harder and making more decisions. (In his own autobiography, Idea Man, Allen would write that the incident “exposed the differences between the son of a librarian and the son of a lawyer.”)

Gates and I met at the Washington, DC, office of Breakthrough Energy, an organization he founded in 2015 to help fund climate tech. The former teenage hellion—who once joked with a friend how crazy it would be to accumulate a $15 million fortune—is now a 69-year-old world-famous centibillionaire and a divorced granddad with his own complex family dynamic. He is respected by the global health establishment and literally demonized by anti-vaxxers and tinfoil paranoids. He has been interviewed thousands of times and sits stone-faced as he mics up for our session. But as he reimmerses himself in the past, he soon is rocking gently—and cracking jokes.

I know you’ve been thinking of an autobiography for decades. But I didn’t expect you to write a book about your childhood.

It’s a project I’ve been working on for some time. But it was only about 18 months ago that I decided to do a book on this first phase of my life—the 25 years up to the start of Microsoft

Episode 4026 - Feb 5 - Tiếng Anh - Phần 1 của 2 - Bill Gates đã gây tổn thương cho cha mẹ - Vina Technology at AI time

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Episode 4026 - Feb 5 - Tiếng Anh - Phần 1 của 2 - Bill Gates đã gây tổn thương cho cha mẹ - Vina Technology at AI time