The genius boy

Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, philanthropist, and one of the world’s richest people, has released an autobiography. It’s another step in his long-running campaign to distance himself from the image of the ruthless businessman of the 1990s, the one who was seen as a symbol of capitalism and, therefore, deserving of pies in the face.

Source code: My beginnings is the first of a trilogy that Gates promises to release in the coming years. It covers his childhood in Seattle, through his school and university period, to the early years of Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico, before Windows, when the company made its living selling versions of a Basic language interpreter for the handful of computer architectures that were popping up at the time.

Bill Gates’ story, at least as he tells it in this book, would make for a pleasant TV series, a coming of age set in a typical middle-class American suburb in the 1980s. Like a Stranger Things, but without the supernatural part…? Or, in a less popular but more accurate comparison (even in name), a Freaks and Geeks with more emphasis on the “geeks.”

Don’t be mistaken, this is a compliment to the narrative. It’s a really nice book!

Gates presents his teenage self as rebellious, competitive (his grandmother’s influence), and driven by curiosity. There are some somewhat exaggerated parts in building the aura of rebellion. Nothing too serious, forgivable in an autobiography.

That feeling of a 1980s series (although the story starts much earlier; Gates was born in 1955) is reinforced by the bonds of friendship, including well-known characters like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, others less known but notable, like Kent Evans, and many activities that today seem very distant, almost nostalgic in this insensitive world mediated by screens that we inhabit. (And which, ironically, Gates helped build.) Almost like teasers for the upcoming books, there are mentions here and there of two Steves, Wozniak and Jobs, the latter being Gates’ future great antagonist.

It’s somewhat evident that he’s an atypical human being. Almost at the end of the book, he writes that “if I were growing up today, I would probably be diagnosed as someone on the autism spectrum.” His facility with mathematics, in processing the world around him through numerical lenses, in code, were providential for his brilliance in the nascent software industry.

What caught me by surprise, although it’s something more evident, was the explicit recognition of the privileges and luck he enjoyed, which were also decisive for his exceptional professional trajectory.

Often, success stories reduce their protagonists to stereotypical characters: the precocious boy, the brilliant engineer, the iconoclastic designer, the paradoxical magnate. In my case, what strikes me is the set of unique circumstances—largely beyond my control—that shaped both my character and my trajectory. It’s impossible to exaggerate the undeserved privilege I enjoyed: being born in a prosperous country like the United States is an important part of a winning lottery ticket, as is being born white and male in a society that privileges white men.

Add to that the temporal coincidences that favored me. I was a rebellious boy at Acorn Academy when engineers found a way to implant tiny electrical circuits on a silicon tablet, giving rise to the semiconductor chip. I was shelving books in Mrs. Caffiere’s library when another engineer predicted that these circuits would get smaller and smaller, at an exponential rate over years to come.

[…]

Of course, curiosity cannot be satisfied in a vacuum. It requires care, resources, guidance, support. When Dr. Cressey said I was a lucky boy, I have no doubt he was thinking mainly of the good fortune I had in being the son of Bill and Mary Gates—parents who struggled with their complicated son but who in the end seemed to know intuitively how to guide him.¹

Random curiosity unrelated to the book: Gates could jump over an office chair. I always laugh at that video.

Transparency In Brazil, Source Code was published by Companhia das Letras, which kindly sent me the copy I read.

Top photo: GatesNotes/Reproduction.