Bill Gates on His Childhood, AGI, and Why He’s Still 95 Percent That Same Curious Teen

Bill Gates’ new memoir doesn’t devote a single line to the works of William Wordsworth, but one of the Romantic poet’s most iconic 1802 lines kept coming to mind as I read Source Code: My Beginnings: “The child is father of the man.”

Nearly the entire memoir centers on Gates’ formative early life, with the founding origin story of Microsoft only appearing in the book’s closing chapters. (A second volume will dive into his decades leading the company, and a third will focus on his philanthropic work with the Gates Foundation.)

Over 40 years of knowing and interacting with Gates, I’ve long found him resistant to deep self-reflection. Whenever I tried to pull him into a thoughtful, biographical conversation, he’d usually brush it off with offhand quips or dodge the question entirely. But his fifth book, released this past February, offers 300 pages of unflinchingly honest, first-person account of Gates’ personal journey.

As Gates tells it, his Seattle childhood checked every box of a wholesome 1950s sitcom: he had loving, dedicated parents and all the trappings of mid-century American success. But the family dynamic was tense, driven largely by Gates’ uncompromising personality quirks. His late father once told me that Gates’ mother found their son’s defiant behavior “traumatic”—he refused to do homework on her timeline, ignored simple requests, and would even shut down and refuse to speak to his parents at times. With family, teachers, and classmates alike, Gates rejected unspoken social norms. He cracked crude jokes, responded with cutting sarcasm, and leaned heavily on his go-to line: “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard!” That phrase would become just as familiar to his early Microsoft employees as it was to everyone in the hallways of Seattle’s private Lakeside School.

At Lakeside, Gates learned that putting actual effort into classwork paid off, and that auditioning for school plays was a clever way to connect with popular girls (though one still turned him down for a prom date). Most critically, he stumbled into a world that would shape his entire life: access to an early computer terminal, which opened up a whole new realm of possibility for him—one that he would eventually bring to hundreds of millions of people globally through his software.

Gates’ retelling of how he and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft covers a story already well-documented in tech history. It was the subject of my very first interview with Gates back in April 1983, and I shared the tale in my book Hackers (along with many other writers): how, at just 19 years old, the pair built the first version of the BASIC programming language that ran on a personal microcomputer. Still, reading Gates’ firsthand account of Microsoft’s early days brings new insight. He openly explains why, after originally taking a 60% stake in the company, he later pressured Allen to accept an uneven 64-36 split that left Allen with the smaller share. Gates writes that he now regrets how he handled the situation, but argues the split reflected the fact that he was putting in more hours and making more key decisions at the time. In his own autobiography Idea Man, Allen framed the incident differently, writing that it “exposed the differences between the son of a librarian and the son of a lawyer.”

Gates and I met at the Washington, D.C. office of Breakthrough Energy, the organization he founded in 2015 to fund early-stage climate technology. The former teen troublemaker—who once joked with a friend that it would be crazy to ever build a $15 million fortune— is now 69 years old: a world-famous centibillionaire, divorced grandfather, with his own complicated family dynamic. He is revered by the global public health community, and openly demonized by anti-vaxxers and far-right conspiracy theorists. After thousands of interviews, he sat stone-faced as his microphone was adjusted for our conversation. But as he drifted back into memories of his early life, he soon began rocking gently, and cracking his signature jokes.

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Interviewer: I know you’ve toyed with the idea of writing an autobiography for decades, but I never expected you’d lead with a full book focused on your childhood.

Bill Gates: It’s a project I’ve kicked around for years, but it wasn’t until about 18 months ago that I settled on framing the first book around this early phase of my life—the first 25 years, before Microsoft even got off the ground, where my parents, my upbringing, and all the lucky breaks I got were the whole story. Once I landed on that idea, I got really excited. It was fun to get to write about how amazing my father, mother, and sisters were, and to explain how I ended up more obsessed and immersed in programming than almost anyone else by the time I turned 20.

Interviewer: This is very explicitly a bildungsroman, your coming-of-age story. You hold yourself accountable, and there are parts that don’t paint you in the most flattering light.

Gates: It’s not some hagiography, or a story of perfect overnight success. I had plenty of missteps and rough patches. There was that time I brought friends into the Harvard computer lab and used the system for my own side projects, which confused the administration, and I got reprimanded for improper use of the lab’s resources. Microsoft’s first customer was MITS, and we ended up in a messy legal dispute with them. I hope it comes off as a very human story, warts and all.

Interviewer: It absolutely is a human story. I remember profiling you back in 1999, and your father told me your mother was genuinely traumatized by your behavior as a teen. You’d go days without talking. As you write in the book, your whole world revolved around reading, math, and your own inner thoughts. You openly write that you weren’t always kind to your parents, and you express regret for that now.

Gates: I give my parents so much credit for how they shaped me. My dad led by example, he was always so serious and dedicated to his work. With my mom, our relationship was far more intense. I often fell short of her expectations: “You didn’t get up here when I asked, your table manners aren’t what I want them to be.” She was always pushing me to do better. Eventually she was proud of what I accomplished, but it was always a complicated dynamic.

Interviewer: Your parents were so at their wits’ end with you that they took you to a therapist. At the end of the book, you write that if you were growing up today, you’d almost certainly be diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. What led you to that conclusion?

Gates: Back then, the idea that kids could have wildly different neurotypes and need targeted support just wasn’t commonplace. I was clearly pretty hyperactive, but I could also focus intensely on things that interested me. Dr. Cressey, my therapist, really got me thinking about the conflicts I was having with my parents: did I actually have a point I was trying to make, or was I just looking to stir up trouble? I think seeing that therapist was really good for me. Who knows what would have been different if I’d gotten a formal diagnosis? Today kids get so much more evaluation and support. Back then, I was able to just spend all my time at the computer center, go off on hikes alone, do my own thing.

Interviewer: I was shocked reading about how you and your preteen friends went on these long, dangerous multi-day hikes back then.

Gates: Today, any kid doing that would be outfitted with a GPS tracker.

Interviewer: Late in the book, you openly acknowledge how much privilege shaped your path. You write that you benefited from being a white man from a well-off family. Your life really was charmed: people looked out for you at every turn, your father stepped in multiple times to help with legal issues, teachers went out of their way to nurture you, people had your back again and again.

Gates: I was so incredibly lucky with all of that. I had at least five or six teachers who saw something special in me and went out of their way to engage with me. My parents were comfortable, but compared to the other kids at my private school, I’d say we were below average. They had bigger houses and more generational wealth. [This wasn’t how Allen saw it, by the way: he wrote in his memoir, “Bill came from a family that was prominent even by Lakeside standards … I remember the first time I went to Bill’s big house a block or so above Lake Washington, feeling a little awed.”] I actually had a bit of a chip on my shoulder: “You guys get cars from your parents, you don’t have to work summer jobs.” But you couldn’t ask for a better childhood, honestly—especially having a time-sharing computer terminal show up at my school when I was just 13 years old.

Interviewer: You write that you were the class clown, and you often interacted with people by being what you diplomatically call a “smart aleck.”

Gates: Look, there’s this lazy, clever-boy shortcut with sarcasm that lets you communicate really quickly. That whole back-and-forth sparring can be funny. At Harvard, that was my default approach, my whole way of interacting with people: I’d procrastinate, and I’d be super clever and sarcastic while tearing apart other people’s arguments. The underlying skill of being able to pick apart an argument is actually useful, but I grew out of leaning on it so much, I learned when not to use it. That kind of talk doesn’t work when you’re managing people.

Interviewer: Well, I’m thinking about that deposition you gave as a billionaire CEO during the antitrust trial—you behaved exactly like that same smart aleck kid back then!

Gates: You think I was the smart aleck? That lawyer questioning me was the real smart aleck!

Interviewer: Malcolm Gladwell argued in Outliers that we can explain why some people end up extraordinary: they put 10,000 hours of practice into their craft, and they happen to be alive at exactly the right time for their skills to matter. You definitely put in more than 10,000 hours of programming, and the timing was perfect. But that’s true for a lot of people, and there’s only one Bill Gates. I can’t figure out what makes someone extraordinary, have you thought about that?

Gates: Circumstance matters a huge amount, that’s true, but it’s not just that. Yeah, there are millions of kids who had access to similar opportunities that I did. But through my father, I got an innate understanding of basic business common sense. Early on, when I connected with Digital Equipment Corporation, which was this super respected company back then, people took me under their wing and gave me validation. And there’s just something about my own drive to succeed using the skills I had. My friend Kent Evans really helped cement that drive in me.

Interviewer: He was your best friend, he was even more ambitious than you were as a teen, reading business magazines nonstop. His accidental death at 17 hangs over this book, and over your life.

Gates: Kent helped shape me into a forward-thinking person. Then Paul Allen was always reading up on new chip technology, and he showed it to me. He was two years older than me, but he still sought me out to work on projects together.

Interviewer: Paul also introduced you to LSD. Steve Jobs once said LSD was a formative experience, it opened his mind and helped with his creativity and product design. It doesn’t sound like it was a life-changing experience for you.

Gates: I think the batch Steve got must have been really good for product design and marketing. My God, imagine if I’d gotten that same batch! Yeah, I did my share of wild things when I was young. Paul deserves credit for that part. By the time we got serious about building Microsoft, we’d put all that behind us.

Interviewer: You also briefly write about the famous time you got arrested for speeding. Were you scared spending a night in jail?

Gates: No, it was just kind of a funny thing. They thought it was weird that someone so young had a nice car—what was this kid up to? Was I a drug dealer or something?

Interviewer: You bought yourself a Porsche when you were in your early twenties.

Gates: I clearly didn’t fit their normal profile. We had enough cash on hand for Paul to come bail me out pretty quickly.

Interviewer: Speaking of money, on your recent Netflix series, you did an episode about economic inequality. You don’t call for getting rid of billionaires entirely, but you advocate for a more equal system. How would that work, in your view?

Gates: The global economy has created a small group of hyper-rich people—people like me, and maybe 50 or 60 others. Elon Musk tops that list right now, but you’ve got Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg—there are a lot of people with extraordinary levels of wealth. I think that’s okay. But I do support a far more progressive tax system, which would leave me with about a third of the wealth I have now. That would still leave me with an enormous fortune.

Interviewer: The New York Times recently reported that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is on track to avoid $8 billion in estate taxes. When you read that, did you think “I should hire his tax lawyer?” Or do you think that’s a problem that needs fixing?

Gates: I’m pretty sure I’ve paid more in taxes than any other person alive—over $12 billion total. There are strategies I could have used, like borrowing against my Microsoft shares instead of selling them to avoid taxes. But if people are legally paying less in taxes, blaming them individually is kind of off-base. We should be changing the tax system itself, not blaming people for following the existing rules.

Interviewer: But they are culpable, because they lobby politically to keep their loopholes open and cut funding for the IRS.

Gates: The political influence of these billionaires shouldn’t be shaping our tax code. That said, a lot of the 50 hyper-rich actually support more progressive taxation. I’ve been surprised that even the Democratic Party hasn’t moved farther to make the tax system more progressive. I’m a huge supporter of the estate tax, I think it’s a fantastic policy. I would make it even harder for rich people to avoid paying it.

Interviewer: Let’s talk about artificial intelligence. You’ve worked with AI research for decades, but you were slow to get on board with the recent transformational breakthrough of generative AI. It wasn’t until OpenAI demoed GPT-4 at your home, and it aced an AP Biology test, that you turned bullish on it. Why were you skeptical at first?

Gates: AI has been a throughline in my entire career with computers. Oddly enough, when I left Harvard to start Microsoft, one of the things I thought I might regret was that academic AI research would move fast while I was busy building BASIC interpreters. That turned out to be totally wrong. I always assumed that when we could encode knowledge in a rich enough way to let an AI read a biology textbook and pass the AP exam, we’d explicitly understand how we encoded that knowledge. Instead, we stumbled on this weird statistical algorithm that we still don’t fully understand. Why does GPT work? We don’t really have a clue. But when OpenAI showed me GPT-4, I was stunned that they’d crossed such an important threshold. We still have reliability problems to fix, but we now have a clear path to solving those, I think.

Interviewer: Sam Altman says we’ll get artificial general intelligence (AGI) in the next few years. Do you agree with that?

Gates: Absolutely.

Interviewer: What will that mean for humanity?

Gates: Anyone who compares this to electricity, tractors, or personal microcomputers is missing the point. This isn’t just a productivity tool for humans. This is something that will exceed human capability across almost every domain. It isn’t bounded in any way, and it’s advancing extremely, extremely quickly. Looking back at past tech revolutions and assuming “everything worked out then, so it will work out now” is not a reliable guide for what’s coming with AGI.

Interviewer: Do we need to regulate it?

Gates: Regulation will require assigning clear liability, and setting quality benchmarks. But the big question people really want to ask is: should we slow it down? It’s very hard to figure out how we would actually do that. Whenever someone in the U.S. says we should tighten regulation, people immediately ask “well, what about other countries like China?” The key reality is that we don’t have a global mechanism to slow down AGI development right now.

Interviewer: We’re also developing AI-powered weapons—there’s an out-and-out arms race for lethal autonomous weapons controlled by AI. Do you think that’s a good direction?

Gates: Take what Elon Musk has essentially said about the F-35 fighter jet: having a human pilot in the cockpit actually reduces its value. He’s right about that. If you follow the logic of building the best possible combat aircraft, AI is the cutting edge right now.

Interviewer: What’s your relationship with the new Trump administration? In an earlier interview, you told me Donald Trump urged you and Anthony Fauci to meet with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Gates: We did meet with him, we talked about vaccine safety. It was four of us: Robert Kennedy, [former NIH director] Francis Collins, Tony Fauci, and me, and we talked for two and a half hours.

Interviewer: Are you enthusiastic about his nomination to lead the Department of Health and Human Services?

Gates: It’s still unclear if he’ll actually take the job, right? There are people who are excited that he’s willing to shake up the status quo. If he shakes it up in the right way, maybe that could lead to better outcomes. But I think the National Institutes of Health works really well as it is right now. So my advice, if anyone’s asking, is to not make overly radical changes to the NIH. But ultimately they’re in charge. At the very least, it’s going to be an interesting period.

Interviewer: Aren’t you scared that an anti-vaxxer will be in charge of the nation’s vaccine program?

Gates: It’s hard to know what will actually happen. A lot of extreme things get said during campaigns and political transitions, and very few of them actually