‘Nobody elected tech leaders’: Microsoft founder Bill Gates talks politics, Elon Musk and AI

5 days ago 63

SINGAPORE – As the 69-year-old Bill Gates talked, he rocked.

This physical quirk has been noted by many who have interacted with the famous co-founder of Microsoft. Now, witnessing it over a video call, this metronomic movement is so genial, it takes only some getting used to.

Rather than signalling impatience, it appears to both abet and smooth over the ticking of Mr Gates’ mind – which, at the moment, he is applying to diagnosing himself with Asperger’s.

He told a select group of Asia publications, including The Straits Times, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, Korea’s JoongAng Daily and China’s Caixin Global, on Jan 8: “My ability (as a kid) to write a 200-page report on Delaware, or to read more science fiction books than anyone I knew.

“My social skills being slower to develop and less natural than the average kid – (they were) strange enough to have a teacher say I should be pushed back in school, and another to say I should be pushed ahead.”

Mr Gates is launching Source Code: My Beginnings, his memoir spanning his childhood and the 1970s, when he made the defining decision to drop out of Harvard University and start Microsoft.

It is the first entry of an envisioned trilogy. The other two will cover his Microsoft and philanthropy days. 

In this first book of teenage shenanigans, he describes many occasions where he spent days hardly eating and coding non-stop – “The math department’s equivalent of those nude models (for art class) was this computer terminal”.

At a time when the computer laboratory had to be bitingly cold to keep the machine cool, he wore a winter jacket and slept curled up next to it for warmth.

“My parents ended up doing a lot of things right, even though there was no guideline,” Mr Gates says of his father Bill, a prominent lawyer in Seattle, and mother Mary, a pioneering businesswoman in a pantsuit who served on the boards of multiple financial and non-profit companies.

They sent him for counselling after one particularly egregious moment when he snapped at his mother: “I’m thinking! Don’t you ever think?”

They themselves enrolled in parent effectiveness training at church, eventually granting their oddball prodigy son a long leash while remaining supportive.

Mr Gates says: “There are therapies and medicine now directed to that. I don’t know whether that would have been better for me or not. For any parent who has a kid...

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