Bill Gates has written his first autobiography, Source Code: My Beginnings. It’s about his early years, and he plans to write additional books too. He’s 70 years old now, and he’s been divorced from Melinda French Gates for more than three years. He still talks about and thinks about Melinda a lot – he’s given a few interviews to promote the book, and as he takes stock of his life, his divorce is the thing he regrets the most. I’d like to point out that the divorce wasn’t his call though – Melinda left him, Melinda was the one who had enough and dictated the terms of their separation and divorce. Bill talked about all of that and more with the Times of London – you can read the full piece here. Some highlights:
Divorce regrets: “I’m more cheerful now,” he says. As one of the few billionaires who managed to have anything resembling a normal family life, he almost appeared to have it all. “That was the mistake I most regret,” he admits of his unravelled marriage.
People didn’t understand neurodiversity in the 1970s. “If they ever invent a pill where they could say, ‘OK, your social skills will be normal, but your ability to concentrate would also be normal,’ I wouldn’t take the pill. Maybe I am forgetting how painful it was, but I needed my neurodiversity to write that software; I could do all that stuff in my head. That takes a lot of concentration. I wrote my first code as a young teenager on a hike in the snow when I was tired and wet, and I used it later for Microsoft.”
He wanted to replicate his parents’ happy marriage: “Absolutely. I encouraged Melinda to be a little calmer than my mother was, but we were both quite driven. I spent more time with the kids than my dad did, but the ratio was still 10:1, with Melinda doing most things for the kids. We had a great time….There is a certain wonderfulness to spending your entire adult life with one person because of the memories and depth of things you have done and having kids together. When Melinda and I met, I was fairly successful but not ridiculously successful — that came during the time that we were together. So, she saw me through a lot. When we got divorced it was tough and then she made the decision to leave the foundation — I was disappointed that she took the option to go off.”
Divorce is the biggest failure of his life: “You would have to put that at the top of the list. There are others but none that matter. The divorce thing was miserable for me and Melinda for at least two years.” Now he is with Paula Hurd, the widow of the former Oracle boss Mark Hurd. “Melinda and I still see each other — we have three kids and two grandchildren so there are family events. The kids are doing well. They have good values.”
His decades-long work on vaccines: “Robert Kennedy Jr called me a child killer trying to make billions of dollars. You have to have a sense of humour. The world is not logical now and you have to accept that you might be treated as the Antichrist for trying to help. But vaccines were the obvious solution. During the pandemic people came up and yelled at me that I was tracking them. I was like, ‘Wow, there really are people stupid enough to believe that.’ ”
While he backed Kamala Harris, he met with Trump: “Yeah, on December 27 I had a three-hour dinner with Trump… It was quite an engaging conversation where he listened to me talk about HIV and the need to stay generous and to innovate to get a cure. I talked a lot about polio and energy and nuclear, and he wasn’t dismissive…he is the most powerful person in the world and his decision over whether to consider changing HIV funding alone would make the trip worth it, or to encourage Pakistan and Afghanistan to take polio eradication seriously.”
Whether he thinks he should have gotten more politically involved, like Elon: “Not at all. I thought the rules of the game were you picked a finite number of things to spout about that you cared for, focused on a few critical things, rather than telling people who they should vote for… For me it’s only ever about aid. I did think Brexit was a mistake, but I wasn’t tweeting every day.”
More on Elon Musk: “I’m ultra-different. It’s really insane that he can destabilise the political situations in countries. I think in the US foreigners aren’t allowed to give money; other countries maybe should adopt safeguards to make sure super-rich foreigners aren’t distorting their elections. It’s difficult to understand why someone who has a car factory in both China and in Germany, whose rocket business is ultra-dependent on relationships with sovereign nations and who is busy cutting $2 trillion in US government expenses and running five companies, is obsessing about this grooming story in the UK. I’m like, what? You want to promote the right wing but say Nigel Farage is not right wing enough… I mean, this is insane sh-t. You are for the AfD [in Germany].” Is he embarrassed a billionaire techie has gone rogue? “We can all overreach… If someone is super-smart, and he is, they should think how they can help out. But this is populist stirring.”
The stuff about Melinda… again, she left him, she was tired of dealing with his (open) affairs and his association with Jeffrey Epstein. She clearly wanted to be done with the whole thing, but I find it interesting that he’s indicating that he didn’t force her out of the foundation – he makes it sound like he wanted Melinda to stay on the foundation, so they could continue to do that work together to some degree, but Melinda wanted to leave that as well. As for what he says about Kennedy and Musk… Gates is not a stupid man, but he seems to believe that most people operate logically, with a baseline understanding of how the world functions, how power works and more. Musk and Kennedy don’t operate that way. Neither does Donald Trump.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.
