There's always been something desperate about Bill Gates. Doug Wilson / Corbis via Getty


February 4, 2025   5 mins

At a moment when the world’s most revered humanitarian faces growing public scrutiny and a fading public profile, what does he do? Try to change the narrative. Over the past year, we’ve seen Bill Gates embark on a powerful PR tour. In addition to his podcast, his blog, and endless speeches and op-eds, he pushed out a five-part self-aggrandising Netflix series last year. And now he’s got a new memoir.

A single volume would not be sufficient for Gates, however, and he has announced that he needs three to tell his life story. The first, Source Code, focuses on his early life, and the initial years of Microsoft, the company that made him a billionaire. As one of the most interviewed and talked about people in history, much of Gates’s personal story has already been told. So what could he tell us at this point that we haven’t heard before?

Actually, he could tell us a lot. But only if he wanted to. His remarkable life has been full of intrigue, filled with war stories — including the cut-throat tactics he used to kill Microsoft’s competitors and create one of the most powerful and destructive monopolies in the history of commerce. His personal life has been no less interesting. While his PR handlers have pushed the picture of a bookish nerd, the real Bill Gates has always lived in the fast lane; speeding in his Porsche, throwing explosive temper tantrums, and, apparently, enjoying a robust and diverse romantic life — one that, according to numerous allegations, has crossed lines.

Accounts of his bad-boy behaviour are legion, and, in recent years, the media has been increasingly open to critical profiles of the billionaire. Over the past 18 months, three books (including my own, The Bill Gates Problem) have been published, all of which were at least cautiously critical. At the same time, many legacy news outlets, which have long praised Gates, have started interrogating his presumed moral authority — exploring, for example, his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

If Gates was willing to consider partnering with a monster like Epstein to advance his philanthropic goals — that’s Bill Gates’s explanation for their numerous meetings — what else might he be willing to do? What drives a man like Gates to such extreme behaviour?

You won’t find an answer in Source Code, an insipid, sanitised work of revisionist history, a PR exercise aimed at humanising and revitalising Gates in the public eye — reminding us that, in a world of oligarchs, there truly are some “good billionaires”.

With a heavy focus on his youth, his book tells of the accidental death of his childhood best friend, the difficulties he had seeing eye-to-eye with his parents, and his earliest entrepreneurial activities in high school. These anecdotes are supposed to make readers see him as thoughtful and reflective, but they ring hollow because he never actually reflects on his hubris, his most defining character trait. Gates is a man who has always insisted that he is the smartest guy in the room — and should be sitting at the head of every decision-making table. As he once reportedly quipped at a dinner party: “Of course, I have as much power as the President has.”

Yet Source Code gives us few hints about the genesis of his god complex. As a result, it doesn’t help us understand who Gates is today, the promiscuous pedant who uses his extravagant wealth to position himself as leader, expert and authority on a dizzying array of topics — public health, public education, climate change, artificial intelligence, vaccines, contraceptives, agricultural development and endless other issues.

If Gates had used his memoir to simply embrace his inner power broker and reveal his real self — a man obsessed with power and control, a man driven by ego and self-interest, a man unable to control his emotions, a man who, according to numerous accounts, has trouble respecting women — we might, then, have a reason to read it.

The timing of publication is interesting, coming at a moment when other tech billionaires are surging ahead of him. Gates seems anachronistic today. He exercises most of his money-in-politics influence through dark corridors and back rooms. Last year, it was revealed that he made a $50 million dark-money donation to Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Publicly, meanwhile, he goes to extraordinary lengths to hide his influence, presenting himself as a wholly non-political humanitarian, driven by a selfless desire to help others.

This elaborate branding stands in contrast to billionaires like Elon Musk, a brazenly self-interested billionaire who seems to wear the title of oligarch like a king’s crown. He certainly doesn’t try to fool the public into believing that he is a philanthropist. Likewise, Donald Trump, though a politician who is required to at least gesture to the public’s interest, usually can’t help but show how devoted he is to his own interests. The reason these men are surging into public life may be, in part, because of the vulgar honesty they bring to the table. They are not nice, kind, or generous people. And they don’t pretend to be.

There’s something grotesque in seeing the contours of our oligarchs so exposed. But this behaviour also seems like a natural evolution of oligarchy, at least in American politics. Republicans and Democrats have long normalised and legitimised billionaires like Gates — accepting his campaign contributions, giving him humanitarian awards, generously co-funding Gates Foundation projects, delivering to him massive tax benefits for his philanthropy, and financially partnering with the company that continues to make Gates rich, Microsoft. Elon Musk may present a new level of normalisation and legitimisation for oligarchy, but he’s standing on the shoulders of Bill Gates.

Gates, perhaps, also deserves comparison to another billionaire, Howard Hughes, a man who spent his final years in extreme isolation, losing touch with reality. He reportedly let his fingernails grow several inches in length, his toenails even longer. As his health declined, he pursued a regiment of self-medication and quackery, obsessively injecting himself in the groin with mysterious fluids.

Hughes’s self-destructive behaviour and agoraphobia was probably not helped by his great wealth, which allowed him to surround himself with people who depended on him for money. Financial dependence, invariably, makes people afraid to bite the hand that feeds them. Or maybe even help a man clearly in need of assistance. And this is also becoming Gates’s story.

Today, Gates surrounds himself with people who depend on his money, and cloisters himself away from his critics, even as they grow in volume and viability, on both the Left and Right. Some of the intended beneficiaries of the Gates Foundation —  farmer organisations across the African continent — are openly calling on the foundation to pay reparations for all the harm it is causing. A growing body of independent experts levy a similar critique: that the foundation is doing more harm than good. To this criticism, Bill Gates never offers a response.

“Elon Musk may present a new level of normalisation and legitimisation for oligarchy, but he’s standing on the shoulders of Bill Gates.”

Meanwhile, in his private life, Gates has found himself subject to headline after headline of alleged inappropriate behaviour toward women. (He denies any wrongdoing.) And in his business affairs, his zealous efforts to present himself as a leader on climate change have fallen flat because none of the game-changing innovations he has promised have materialised.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this growing criticism, Gates and his handlers are going out of their way to create a world in which no critics exist. For his forthcoming book tour, he has decided to charge, which will keep out critics and naysayers. Couldn’t the $166-billion man simply rent out the venue at his own expense?

On the flipside, his philanthropic foundation shamelessly gives out hundreds of millions of dollars to the news media — The Telegraph, The Guardian, BBC and dozens of other outlets around the world — which creates strong incentives to praise Gates. Though the news media occasionally does put a critical lens to Gates, most journalists, even those not directly funded by the foundation, tend to treat him differently — and better — than other billionaires. To be sure, most news outlets appear to love Gates’s new memoir. The New York Times‘s recent, glowing review of Gates’s memoir was headlined: “Bill Gates isn’t like those other tech billionaires.”

A similar story can be found in the billions of dollars the Gates Foundation donates to universities, which has led to what academic researchers call the “Bill chill” — the chilling effect that makes them reluctant to criticise the man who so many look to for funding.

There’s always been something desperate about Gates deploying his money in a manner that reliably builds allies and quiets critics. Why not enter the public debate standing on his own two feet, explaining who he is and what his ideas are? What is Gates so afraid of? That he’ll finally hear the chorus of voices calling him the emperor who has no clothes?


Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist based in Washington DC and author of The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire.

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