New book examines the story of Bill Gates and the evolution of his public image
[Editor’s Note: This week’s guest host, Ross Reynolds, is an interviewer and moderator who is well-known in the Seattle region from his 34 years at KUOW, the public radio station from which he retired in 2021.]
Who is the real Bill Gates? Anupreeta Das focuses on that question in her new book, “Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World.” Das is the South Asia correspondent for The New York Times.
Listen to the conversation below and continue reading for highlights, edited for clarity. Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Why did you decide to write this book?
Anupreeta Das: Back in 2021, when Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates got divorced, I got pulled into the reporting because I had written about Gates’ fortune going back to 2014. The question of what was going to happen to that money became pertinent because of the Gates Foundation.
Leading up to that divorce, there was this period where you had Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, and Gates’s connections. I was like, “Who is this person?” I at least had thought of him as the Microsoft co-founder and this global philanthropist. And beyond that wasn’t really paying that much attention.
So that, for me, was the “aha moment,” to try to explore who this persona was, and who the person was, and what does it say about how we engage with billionaires.
What are your thoughts on what you learned, and what still remains unknown, about Bill Gates’ Epstein connection?
Das: The question is why, if you’re one of the world’s most famous billionaires, would you need the assistance of someone like Epstein? So that remains a mystery. Gates has always talked about how it was a lapse in judgment.
The second piece of it that’s confusing to me is, there are a lot of people around Gates. Did they not advise him? Even a simple Google search would tell you that Epstein was a shady character. So that piece of it has never been entirely clear.
[Editor’s Note: GeekWire contacted Gates’ representatives for comment on the book. They responded with this statement: “Relying almost exclusively on second- and third-hand hearsay and anonymous sources, the book includes highly sensationalized allegations and outright falsehoods that ignore the actual documented facts Mr. Gates’ office provided to the author on numerous occasions.”]
In your book, you place Bill Gates in the context of billionaires, and the myths we have about billionaires. One is that they’re self-made. What does the myth of the self-made billionaire leave out?
Das: His mom was on the board of the University of Washington. His dad was one of the best-known lawyers, and they were both community leaders. So you had this level of access into what was the latest at that time. You have to be brilliant, but it allows you to start at a level well ahead of many other people.
The lack of downside risk is something that really struck me. … [Gates] would have had a great career if Microsoft had failed. So that kind of security perhaps allows you to take much bigger risks.
A lot has been written about how hard-driving Bill Gates was and how harsh he was. When he left Microsoft and became a full-time philanthropist, all of a sudden, that began to shift, and that was not by accident.
Das: Until the Epstein stuff, for years, he was seen as the most-admired man in the world. Such was his renown. And this is a man who still gets the same welcome as a head of state. He can easily go into any country and seek a meeting, and the prime minister or the president will take that meeting. … It’s very hard to criticize someone like Gates, because he is doing good. He is a celebrity. He is highly visible, and that helps him.
And yet, we do hear from some people who work for him at the foundation, who say a meeting with Bill Gates is terrifying, even after he supposedly transformed himself into this benevolent philanthropist.
Das: At Microsoft, in the tech world, they kind of understood that. But in the foundation, when you have a lot of people coming from the very genteel worlds of academia or policy, I think that was a rude awakening to be talked to that way, especially because you were hired to the foundation for your expertise. … Either you go along with it, or you quit, or you say, I have a cushy job and I believe in the foundation’s work, and I’m just going to stay quiet and continue.
How does the annual giving by the Gates Foundation and its influence in the charitable areas it chooses to inhabit, compare to other foundations, and to governments, to the United Nations?
Das: The Gates Foundation institutionalized a certain kind of philanthropy, what I call Big Philanthropy. It’s a very data-driven approach. You pick something of vertical, you identify which nonprofits you want to give that money to, and then you give the money, but you hold them to certain standards, and then there are metrics and there’s assessments.
So I do think that if you’re a nonprofit on the ground, you risk spending a lot of time kind of providing these metrics and data points to assess the program’s success, because it’s tied to the foundation’s money.
The level of engagement is unusual. You could look at Mike Bloomberg’s philanthropies. It’s similar in the sense that they give away a lot of money, but it doesn’t have such a tight grip on how the money is being put to use. So the Gates Foundation is quite unique in that sense.
You didn’t get to talk to Bill Gates, but if you had a chance to talk to him, what would your first question have been? What would you have wanted to know most from him?
Das: Does he agree with the way the world looks at him? Does he have humility about it? How self-aware is he of how he is looked at, and how does he use that? Does he put ego aside to do the best he can with the goodwill that he has?
I think he would know exactly what the book was going for. The Economist in its review wrote about the influence of billionaires, and how I’m trying to address this. Gates reads The Economist cover to cover. So he would have read, I assume, their review of my book. And so the question is, does he agree?
Anupreeta Das will be speaking in Seattle on Thursday, Sept. 19, at Third Place Books in the Ravenna neighborhood.
Audio editing by Curt Milton.