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The older he gets, the more Bill Gates is surprised by what the world dishes up. Take billionaires. There are many now from the tech industry, quite a few with politics that skew forcefully right. “I always thought of Silicon Valley as being left of center,” Mr. Gates said. “The fact that now there is a significant right-of-center group is a surprise to me.”
Or take the evolution of technology in the decades since he began Microsoft and made it one of the world’s most valuable companies. “Incredible things happened because of sharing information on the internet,” Mr. Gates said. That much he anticipated. But once social media companies like Facebook and Twitter came along, “you see ills that I have to say I did not predict.”
Political divisiveness accelerated by technology? “I didn’t predict that would happen,” he said. Technology being used as a weapon against the broader public interests? “I didn’t predict that,” he said.
Mr. Gates is a techno-optimist but he has limits, like cryptocurrency. Does it have any use? “None,” he said. “There are people with high I.Q.s who have fooled themselves on that one.”
Even artificial intelligence, which Mr. Gates has spoken of enthusiastically, and which Microsoft is heavily invested in, produces a few qualms. “Now we have to worry about bad people using A.I.,” he said.
Mr. Gates, who turns 70 this year, is looking back a lot these days. Next week he is publishing “Source Code: My Beginnings,” which examines his childhood. The first of three projected volumes of memoirs, the book has been in the works for at least a decade but arrives at an unusual moment, as the tech billionaires have been unleashed.
Thirty years ago, Mr. Gates created the model for the in-your-face tech billionaire. Microsoft in the 1990s supplied the operating system for the personal computers that were increasingly in every home and office, and the company had big plans for this new thing called the web. Mr. Gates and his company were perceived as powerful, ruthless and ubiquitous. Silicon Valley was terrified and even regulators were alarmed, suing Microsoft.
The anti-Microsoft sentiment in popular culture peaked with the 2001 movie “Antitrust,” about a tech chief executive who murders people in his quest for world domination. Reviewers underlined the allusions to Mr. Gates, although they largely panned the film.
The ire is long gone and Mr. Gates has no recollection of “Antitrust.” Among billionaires who generate strong emotions, he said with a hint of relief, “I’m not at the top of the list. The current tech titans would elicit a stronger negative reaction.”
He is a counterpoint to the moguls in the news. “We don’t have a club,” he said. “Nor do we have consensus. Reid Hoffman” — the co-founder of LinkedIn, a Microsoft board member and vocal supporter of former Vice President Kamala Harris — “is a billionaire. You can ask for his point of view. He’ll be glad to critique.”
Mr. Hoffman, who The Times reported in November was considering leaving the country after Ms. Harris’s election loss, did not respond to emails asking for his point of view. But plenty of others in Silicon Valley are watching the transformation of the billionaires into would-be overlords with a horrified fascination.
“It’s a steady subject of dismal conversation around here,” said Paul Saffo, a longtime tech forecaster. “The consensus is that Bill Gates looks sainted compared to the a…these manners,’ and ‘If you’re going to use the ketchup you have to put the ketchup in a bowl and have to put the bowl here.’ She thought of me as pretty sloppy. Because I was.”
It was not really about the ketchup, of course. “I didn’t have any negative feelings toward her but I could pretend to not care what she said in a way that definitely irritated her,” he said. “What was I trying to prove?”
Parents then could not keep tabs on their children if the children were determined. His sister Kristi, he remembers, “was wary of what might go wrong. Whereas I’m like, ‘Hey, what could go wrong?’” Bill spent much of his time programming, often sneaking away at night.
Then something did go wrong, at the end of his junior year in high school. His best friend, Kent, was mountain climbing, fell and died.
“It was Kent being an independent thinker, pushing his limits,” Mr. Gates said. “His parents worried about him and he was not naturally coordinated. And yet he seemed to be enjoying it and they didn’t stand in his way.”
What Mr. Gates learned from the tragedy was that life can be unfairly bad as well as unfairly good. He was very lucky; Kent was very unlucky.
Mr. Gates said that if his teenage self were diagnosed now, he would probably be told he was on the spectrum. Maybe his mother intuitively understood what he needed. “I wanted to exceed her expectations,” he said. “She was pretty good at always raising the bar.”
Raising the bar is what he consistently did when he and his friend Paul Allen started a company in Albuquerque in 1975 to produce software for the Altair 8800, a rudimentary personal computer. Mr. Gates was barely out of his teens. He soon moved the fledgling operation to the Seattle area, closer to his mother.
Stewart Alsop covered Mr. Gates when he was the editor of InfoWorld, an influential tech magazine of the era. “Bill gave the privilege of having dinner with him solo in Seattle every six months; the price was always coming up with something he hadn’t thought of,” Mr. Alsop said. “That was easy as “he had a hard time seeing the world outside of his life.”
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