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Bill Gates, a man who revolutionised world technology, turns 70 in October 2025. In Source Code: My Beginnings – the first instalment in a planned memoir trilogy – he looks back on his early years, from his birth in Seattle to the foundation of Microsoft in the 1970s.
Gates offers insight into his family, painting an affectionate, admiring portrait of his father – despite the fact that the 6ft 7in lawyer occasionally “spanked” him and once emptied a glass of water in his face. His mother, meanwhile, is depicted as virtuous, albeit peculiar. She kept notes every Christmas so that she could make a plan on how to “improve upon it” the following year. Both parents were concerned by their extremely bright, reclusive young son.
Gates details his love of reading from an early age, recalling his lack of interest in most social interactions. Reading this, my immediate thought is that he may be neurodivergent, something he suspects himself in the epilogue: “If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum.”
He was small for his age, “shy” and obviously not one of the “cool kids”. He was also self-conscious about his “Barbie-blond hair” and “unusually high-pitched squeaky voice”, referring to the latter no fewer than three times while offering the maudlin revelation that the female speech expert hired to train him in a “big daddy-bear voice” referred to him as “retarded”. But Gates skirts over his being bullied – and notably also over his childhood growing up in a segregated Seattle.
There are other candid moments in the book, however, including when Gates recalls his youthful experiments with LSD – including being high on acid and watching Kung Fu. On another occasion, he naively took the hallucinogenic the night before an orthodontist appointment, resulting in a dental procedure from hell. “I sat gaping at my doctor’s face, his drill grinding away, unsure if what I was seeing and feeling was really happening,” Gates writes in one wince-inducing passage. Elsewhere, he admits that he lived as a “complete slob”. There are touching memories woven in about his card-playing grandmother and his teenage friend Kent Evans, who died tragically early.
For all his attributes – Gates is an innovative thinker, driven and intense – he admits to being considered somewhat unlikeable, and reflects on this perception of himself as “a loner, a nerd, a bit obnoxious”. In hindsight, he puts his flaws down to a search to “find an identity”, stating that he is now much more in tune with other people’s emotional states.
We live in an age where tech tycoons are constantly in the news. From the outside, at least, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems to have the emotions of a cyborg and X owner Elon Musk appears to be missing something at the core of his moral hard drive, but there is, judging by this memoir, a much more human side to Gates – one that backs up his claims that he is, in fact, in tune with others.
Source Code may well be designed to frame Gates in a positive light (there is an oblique credit in the acknowledgements to writer Rob Guth for “giving form to my memories”) but his humanity is most plain to see in the book’s little details as opposed to any overarching narrative. The fact he was dubbed “Happy Boy” for his wide grin as a child; his lifelong love of rollercoasters; that he loved playing the “class clown” to get laughs; and that his pet name assigned by a fellow drama club student was “sweetie poo”. Perhaps most poignantly of all, it’s there in the way he recalls the impact that Robert Redford’s 1980 family drama Ordinary People had on him. “I’ve seen it many times since, and nearly every time I get choked up,” Gates writes. “It’s a great movie, nearly perfect… there are elements I recognise in my own upbringing when I was young and confused.”
Aside from these revelations about his character, the book also offers a painstaking account of his time at the exclusive Lakeside private school and then at Harvard. This book will also delight anyone who enjoys acronyms. If you are interested in how Gates became such a historic, influential businessman, then Source Code, an inside view from a hyper-focused young man with a brilliant mind, provides solid insights and fascinating tidbits – such as confirmation that it was indeed co-founder Paul Allen who came up with the name for their company when he suggested a portmanteau of the words microcomputers and software: “Micro-Soft.”
Gates, always so logical and methodical, insists that mysteries can be figured out and “the world can be understood”. Personally, I am more in tune with the recently departed David Lynch who once said: “I don’t think people accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable” but I finished Source Code with a respect for Gates’s intellect – and an appreciation of why he is such a unique achiever. Perhaps his driven mind is best summed up in one of the book’s small asides. “I loved how the computer forced me to think. It was completely unforgiving in the face of mental sloppiness,” he writes. “It demanded that I be logically consistent and pay attention to details.”
‘Source Code: My Beginnings’ by Bill Gates is published by Allen Lane today
