“BILL is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything,” spat the now late Apple inventor, Steve Jobs, regarding Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, to biographer, Walter Isaacson – further divulging regarding a fellow college dropout and peer he shared a birth year (1955) with: “He just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas.”
Conversely, Gates admired and envied Jobs’ performative theatre so much so he enquired of a colleague: “How does he do that?” Although, beginning in the late 1970s, the duo shaped the first thirty years of the personal computer age and were early collaborators on software – they were fierce rivals disdainful of each other!
Jobs’ barney has cogency considering dismissals of Gates’ programming credentials and accusations of plagiarism and theft which eddied around him! For Gates, if it meant taking an existing program or application, tweaking it and selling it as part of Microsoft’s flagship Windows software – so be it!
Windows 95 was the latest version of a software product which Microsoft built by borrowing the idea of a graphical user interface from Apple, its closest competitor! What Microsoft couldn’t build, it tried to buy – having already made a habit of acquiring top companies in fields it wanted to enter.
Between 1994 and 1999, the entity’s prolific deal-making resulted in its owning all or part of 130 companies.
As Microsoft legend goes, the future techno behemoth established in 1975, had its genesis after Gates and Paul Allen, a high school friend, provided the makers of a microcomputer called the MITSAltair with a software program (an adapted existing version) to run on its hardware. Thereafter, it struck a deal with IBM to build an operating system (it bought a disk operating system from Seattle Computer Products for around $50 000 and licensed it to IBM as MS-DOS – and also got IBM to agree to allow it to license MS-DOS to other hardware makers, paving the way for it to sell software to as many computer manufacturers as there were in the market) for the hardware giant’s personal computer, which had come to market in 1981.
Gates saw a market for software where none existed and built one of the world’s biggest companies based on that vision. The licensing model was Gates’ real innovation – bringing Microsoft hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue over the decades. A year after Microsoft went public in 1986, Gates became America’s youngest billionaire, at 31, and the first to make his fortune from technology.
Microsoft would become part of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ entities which include Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia and Tesla because of their dominance of the digital economy – with Gates counted among eight of the 10 top billionaires (who include Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Ballmer – each of whom who boast an estimated net worth of more than $100 billion) in the Forbes 2023 list of the world’s 400 richest people!
He’d grown up in Seattle in an upper-middle-class family as the middle child between two sisters –one of whom, Kristianne, once observing that Bill “didn’t see that he was not normal” – the son of a lawyer father, William Gates Sr. and mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, whose mention of his then fledgling start-up to an IBM chairman lead to Microsoft being invited to build its computer’s software program. He attended one of the city’s most prestigious private schools where he was introduced to computers at an early age. Microsoft’s relocation to the city in 1979 would create hundreds of millionaires (the so-called Microsofties) there!
Some of Gates’ feats were as commendable as some of his modus operandi (which earned him comparison to John D. Rockefeller Sr., monopolistic Standard Oil’s robber baron and America’s very first billionaire in the 19th century) were condemnable – as attested by the slapping of an anti-trust case on Microsoft by the United States government in 1998 prompted by complaints regarding its rapacious business conduct. The Justice Department’s trial would leave both Gates’ and his entity’s images tarnished – resulting in Microsoft having to settle in 2002.
Having been befriended by Warren Buffett in 1991, Gates was expressly picked by the Berkshire Hathaway chairman – in his quest to repurpose his business strategy to his philanthropy – to disburse his fortune (estimated at $44 billion) through the Gates Foundation. Between 2006 and 2023, Buffett gave more than $39 billion of his endowment to the foundation. (From its own largesse, between 1994 and 2022, the Gates Foundation disbursed $39 billion, including a $22 billion kick start in 2000.)
In 2010, the ‘besties’ initiate the Giving Pledge (unto which South Africa’s tycoon Patrice Motsepe has also committed) campaign geared to encourage other billionaires to contribute to philanthropy.
25 years the junior of the ‘Sage of Omaha’, Gates had initially been reluctant to meet “a stockbroker” – referring to Buffett – when his mother sought to introduce him to the older billionaire during a Fourth of July rendezvous. Despite Gates’ prior misgiving, the two men would hit it off immediately en-route to what he’d later describe as an “unbelievable friendship” – with Buffett quipping: “The moral of that is, listen to your mother.”
On January 1, 2020 when Melinda French Gates posted on Instagram: “happy anniversary to the man who keeps me dancing through life” – the cordiality belied the reality that she had already been consulting with divorce lawyers with the intention of splitting with the man she had married in 1994.
A valedictorian of an all-girls Catholic school who graduated from Duke University with a computer science degree, she had joined Microsoft in 1987, rose through the ranks and after marrying Gates, went on to parent three children, Jennifer, Rory and Phoebe – with him.
On May 3, 2021 she and Gates announced their divorce, citing “irreconcilable differences.” At the time, allegations had abounded of Gates unfaithfulness to her over the years.
Enter Jeffrey Epstein, the man whose association with Gates, Gates French said contributed to their divorce. A man she met once in 2013 when Gates’ staff was campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize for the foundation’s work on polio eradication – French Gates has spoken publicly about her disgust for the convicted sex offender who in August 2019, apparently committed suicide in a Manhattan jail.
In June 2010 after Buffett and the Gateses had announced the Giving Pledge, Epstein saw a way of making money – leading to him meeting with Gates, from January 2011, and presenting the billionaire with the idea of his facilitating the pooling of the philanthropic dollars into a charitable fund created for the Gates Foundation. In the end, the man described as a social parasite couldn’t convince a deal out of the magnate since, “there were no pots of money looking for a place to go.”
Ironically, if Epstein had hoped to use Gates as his cash cow, the billionaire himself has maintained that he met with Epstein because he was told that the financier could connect him with a lot of rich donors who could help raise more money for philanthropic causes. Epstein (to whom billionaire private equity investor Leon Black allegedly paid $158 million in fees for tax advice) would later, according to The Wall Street Journal, try to blackmail Gates about a 2010 affair with Mila Antonova, a bridge player who occasionally stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion.
For Gates’ part, every time he was asked about his association with Epstein, he offered nothing but regrets and apologies –calling it a mistake and blaming it on poor judgement.
Billionaire Nerd Saviour King is the unfettered probe of: a man reserved the king’s welcome all over the world; an emperor unto whom courtesies are lost (I once witnessed him declining a request for a photo opportunity by South African entrepreneur, Sbu Leope, at a media conference after he’d delivered the 14th Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture at the University of Pretoria’s Mamelodi Campus in 2016); the target of conspiracy theorists who claimed that he engineered the coronavirus and was leveraging it for profit – based on a 2015 pre-pandemic TED talk he gave entitled, “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready.”
The New York Times’ finance editor, Anupreeta Das’ account unmasks the façade of a colossus for a reassessment of how he’s perceived!
A trade paperback, BILLIONAIRE NERD SAVIOUR KING is published by Simon & Schuster UK and distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Available at leading bookstores countrywide, it retails for R460.
