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In Search of the Real Gates

    He's the most famous businessman in the world, dominating the computer revolution. Yet we know little about him as a person. Here's an intimate look at one of the most important figures of our era.

    When Bill Gates was 11, he was at war with his mother Mary. She would call him to dinner and he wouldn't respond. "What are you doing?" she once demanded over the intercom.

    "I'm thinking," he shouted back.

    "You're thinking?"
    "Yes, I'm thinking," he said fiercely. "Have you ever tried thinking?"
    His parents decided he needed counseling. After a year, the psychologist reached his conclusion. "You're going to lose," he told Mary. "You had better just adjust to it." Mary was out-going and strong-willed, her husband recalls, "but she came around to accepting that it was futile trying to compete with him."

    A lot of computer companies struggle to compete with William Henry Gates III. In the 22 years since he left Harvard to start what would later be known as Microsoft Corporation, Gates, 41, has amassed a fortune worth more than $20 billion. But the world's richest person is more than that. He is the Edison and Ford of our age.

    His success stems from his awesome, at times frightening, blend of brilliance, competitiveness and intensity. At his desk, he works on two computers, one with four frames that sequence data from the Internet, and the other handles hundreds of e-mail messages.

    "I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence," Gates says over dinner one night at an Indian restaurant. "The neurons in the brain that make up perception and emotions operate in a binary fashion," he explains. "We can someday replicate that on a machine."

    Asked if there isn't something special, perhaps even divine, about the human soul, his face becomes expressionless, his squeaky voice turns toneless. Folding his arms across his belly he vigorously rocks back and forth. Finally, as if from an automation, comes the answer: "I don't have any evidence on that." Rock, rock, rock. "I don't have any evidence on that."
    "As a baby, he used to rock in his cradle," recalls gates' father, Bill Sr. a man as bit and huggable as his son is small and tightly coiled. A retired lawyer, he still lives in the airy Seattle house where Bill III—the boy the calls "Trey"—grew up. ( The name comes from the card term for three.)

    gates' mother and grandmother loved cards. And they would organize bridge games, as well as Password and trivia contests, after big family dinners held every Sunday. On summer vacations at a rental cabin, there were nightly campfires and competitive games. "The play was quite serious," Bill Sr. recalls. "Winning mattered."

    When Trey was ready for secondary school, "we became concerned about him," his father says. "He was so small and shy, in need of protection, and his interests were so different from the typical sixth-grader's." They decided to send him to the small, private Lakeside School. There, the Mothers' Club had funded a clunky teletype computer terminal.

    Learning computer language from a manual with his pal Paul Allen, Trey produced two programs: one that converted a number in one mathematical base to a different base, and another that played tic-tac-toe. Later he devised a computer version of RISK, a board game in which the goal is world domination.

    Trey and Paul were soon spending evenings at a local company with a new computer. The boys' job was to find the bugs that would crash it. "Trey got so into it," his father recalls, " he'd sneak out after we went to bed and spend most of the night there."

    The combination of counseling and computers helped transform the boy. At 14, he didn't go to math class because he knew the work. He placed within the top 10 in the United States on an aptitude exam. "His confidence and sense of humor increased," his father says. "And he made peace with his mother." By 15 he was writing a program for class scheduling which had a secret function that placed him in classes with the right girls.

    Still, the boy didn't have a lot of confidence in social settings, says his father. "I remember him fretting for two weeks before asking a girl to the prom, then getting turned down."

    After Gates went off to Harvard, he met Steve Ballmer. "Bill would play poker until six in the morning," says Ballmer, "then at breakfast discuss applied mathematics." They took graduate-level courses together and Ballmer nurtured gates' social side, getting him to join a university eating club and later visiting the Studio 54 disco in New York City.

    FAST CARS TO BABY TALK. In 1980 Gates lured Ballmer, then attending business school at Stanford, to Microsoft. "I always knew I would have close business associates like Ballmer and several of the other top people at Microsoft, and that we would stick together and grow together no matter what happened," Gates says.

    During gates' bachelor years in the early '80s, he, Ballmer and other friends would dine out, go to movies and play advanced forms of trivia. When friends got married, there were bachelor parties involving strippers and skinny-dipping.

    In 1986, after Microsoft became successful, Gates built a four-house family vacation compound and there replicated his childhood summer activities for friends and co-workers. The Microgames were no ordinary picnics: in one digital version of charades, for example, teams competed to send numerical messages using smoke signals, and the winners devised their own four-bit binary code.

    He also loves fast cars. When Microsoft was based in New Mexico, he raced a Porsche 911 in the desert; Paul Allen bailed him out of jail one night. The weekend he moved Microsoft to Seattle, he got three speeding tickets—two from the same cop.
    Gates met Melinda French, the woman he married in 1994, at a Microsoft press event in Manhattan. A graduate of Duke University with computer science and business degrees, she was working for the company at the time. Now 32, she is no longer at Microsoft and is active in charity work. Like Gates, she is smart and independent. Like his mother, she is friendly and social.

    Their daughter Jennifer was born in April 1996. He pulls a snapshot out of his desk showing him proudly cradling her. "I used to think I wouldn't be all that interested in the baby until she could talk," says Gates. "But I'm totally into it now. She's just started to say 'ba-ba' and have a personality."

    gates' intellectual sidekick is Nathan Myhrvold, 37. Pacing around a room, they talk for hours about future technologies such as voice recognition, then topics ranging from quantum physics to genetic engineering. "Bill is not threatened by smart people," he says, "only stupid ones."

    Microsoft has long hired based on I.Q. and "intellectual bandwidth." Gates believes it's better to get a brilliant but untrained young brain—they're called "Bill clones"—than someone with experience. The interview process tests not what applicants know but how well they process tricky questions: To figure out how many times on average you would have to flip the pages of the Manhattan phone book to find a specific name, how could you approach the problem?

    About other people, Gates shows little curiosity. Wareren Buffertt, the Omaha investor whom Gates demoted to the second richest American, seems an unlikely person to be among his closest pals. A jovial, outgoing 66-year-old grandfather, Buffett only recently learned to use a computer. But as multibillionaires go, both are unpretentious, and they enjoy taking vacations together.
　

    When relaxed, Buffett says, Gates has a fun sense of humor. On a trip together to China, they saw huge ancient scrolls that were silently unrolled by women trained for the task. "There's a $2 fine," Gates whispered, "if you return a scroll not rewound."
　

    Gates is ambivalent about his celebrity. His office is modest, sparsely decorated and filled with standard-issue furniture. The phone almost never rings. Nor do phones seem to ring much anywhere on the Microsoft "campus," a cluster of 35 low-rise buildings, lawns and courtyards that resembles a polytechnic college.

    CUTTHROAT INSTINCTS. Gates runs his company mainly through three methods. Day and night, he bats out e-mail messages, often chuckling as he dispatches them. Every month or so, he meets with a top management group. Most important—70 percent of his schedule, by his calculation—he holds two or three small meetings a day with teams working on company products.

    Young team members in the standard winter uniform of khakis and flannel shirts lead the discussion, as Gates flips ahead through a deck of papers and within minutes has the gist of the material. He starts rocking, peppering them with questions about the politics of their potential partners, details of the technology, their competition and strategy. Answers are crisp; no one seems to be showing off, but neither do any hesitate to speak up. To a man, they mimic his mannerism and rock when they think.
　

    Gates listens intently. And he doesn't hide his cutthroat instincts.

    While his mother may have come to terms with his competitive intensity, much of the computer world has not. There are Web sites dedicated to reviling him, lawyers focused on foiling him and former associates who sputter at the mention of his name. Companies such as Netscape, Oracle and Sun Microsystems publicly make thwarting his "plan for world domination" into a holy crusade.

    The criticism is that he has tried to leverage, unfairly and perhaps illegally, Microsoft's near monopoly in desktop operating systems in order to dominate everything. "Those are clear lies," Gates says. "Who grew this market? We did. Who survived companies like IBM, ten times our size?" "His rivals," he says, are "every bit as competitive as I am."

    Nevertheless, Gates is enjoying the challenge. Games are fun. Working with smart people is superfun. Others may see him as ruthless, cold or brutal; but for him the competition is sport, a blood sport perhaps, but one played with relish.

     A former Microsoft executive admires gates' vision but described him as Darwinian. "He doesn't look for win-win situations, but for ways to make others lose. Success is defined as flattening the competition, not creating excellence. In Bill's eyes," he says, "he's still a kid who's afraid he'll go out of business if he lets anyone compete."

    Indeed, gates' language is boyish rather than belligerent. The right stuff is "really near" and "supercool." Bad strategies are "crummy," "really dumb" and "random to the max."

    KEEPING SCORE. He hopes to run Microsoft for another ten years, he says then promises to focus as intensely on giving his money away. He says he plans to distribute 95 percent of his wealth. "He will spend time thinking about the impact his philanthropy can have," Buffett says. "He is too imaginative to do conventional gifts."

    Already he's given $34 million to the University of Washington, partly to create a molecular biotechnology department, and an endowed chair held by Human Genome Project researcher Leroy Hood; $15 million for a new computer center at Harvard; and $6 million to Stanford. He's donated $3 million in book royalties to the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education to fund innovative technology programs in public school. An additional $200 million is in a foundation run by his father.

    Since Jennifer's birth, friends say, Gates has begun to reflect more on his life and what he might end up contributing. He speaks of the promise of computing not just in business terms but in social ones.

    He has become less enamored with pure intelligence. "I don't think that I.Q. is as fungible as I used to," he says. "To succeed, you also have to know how to make choices and how to think more broadly."

    So has family life dulled gates' intensity? "Well, predictably, he's pumped and focused on Jennifer," says Ballmer. "He showed a picture of her at our last sales conference and joked that there was something other than Netscape keeping him awake at night. He may be a bit less exhausting and a bit more civil. But he still pushes hard, still keeps score."

    Gates likes repeating the line used by Intel CEO Andrew Grove as a book title," Only the paranoid survive." As Ballmer says, "Gates puts another spin on it, "I still feel this is superfun."

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