Whither the Nerd-Bully? | Ben Tarnoff | The New York Review of Books
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Reviewed:
Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World
by Anupreeta Das
Avid Reader, 323 pp., $32.00; $20.00 (paper)
Source Code: My Beginnings
by Bill Gates
Knopf, 318 pp., $30.00; $20.00 (paper)
When I was thirteen, I snuck into a theater to see South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. The film is so vulgar that the Motion Picture Association of America insisted on giving it an R rating, which is why I had to sneak in. I’m glad I did. I have never laughed harder in my life.<br>What I remember most clearly is a scene that involves Bill Gates. It begins with a US Army general briefing a group of soldiers. In the middle of his presentation, his computer crashes. He demands to see Gates, who is promptly hauled out. “You told us that Windows 98 would be faster and more efficient, with better access to the Internet!” yells the general. “It is faster,” Gates insists—and the general shoots him in the face.<br>Everyone in the theater cheered when this happened. Loud, joyous cheering. How hated do you have to be, I remember thinking at the time, for your point-blank execution to elicit such unanimous delight?<br>This was the state of Gates’s reputation in 1999. As the journalist Anupreeta Das explains in her new book Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World, by century’s end the “king of software had been dethroned.” When Gates cofounded Microsoft in 1975, he was only twenty years old. Over the subsequent decades he led the personal computing revolution, alongside his frenemy Steve Jobs. After Microsoft went public in 1986, he became the country’s youngest billionaire (at thirty-one) and the first who hailed from tech.<br>In this respect, as in many others, Gates was an innovator. Other people had made money from computers, but he was the first to attain the kind of wealth and power that invited comparisons to John D. Rockefeller. In the 1990s it dawned on the American public that digitization could alter the deep structures of the economy and that high technology might prove to be the breeding ground for monopolies on the scale of the great trusts of the Gilded Age. In 1995 the most valuable publicly traded company in the United States was General Electric. Five years later it was Microsoft.<br>With a new kind of monopoly came a new kind of monopolist. As Das argues, Gates was an “early template” for a species of capitalist overlord that has since become excruciatingly familiar: the nerd-bully, whose oddness and rudeness are the necessary effluent of his genius. Computerization meant that the commanding heights of the economy would come to be occupied by men who had spent their formative years getting stuffed into lockers, and were now determined to exact their revenge.<br>At Microsoft, Gates was by many accounts a nightmare boss, “prone to expletive-laden fits of rage,” reports Das. A workaholic, he demanded long days from his workers and even, as he later confessed to a BBC interviewer, memorized the license plate numbers of their cars so that he could keep track of their hours. Microsoft could be especially inhospitable to women; the historian Margaret O’Mara tells Das that the firm was so “intensely masculine” that it resembled a “frat house.” Gates himself, Das reports, had a reputation as a womanizer. “A former senior Microsoft employee recalled being told by an office assistant to Gates that he was like ‘a kid in a candy store’ in the company of women, if not restrained,” writes Das. Her book includes multiple stories of Gates hitting on his subordinates; in 2000 he conducted an affair with an employee that led, after she reported it years later, to his departure from the Microsoft board in 2020.<br>By the 1990s the unpleasant parts of Gates’s personality were becoming more widely known. The press increasingly portrayed him as
arrogant, disdainful, indignant, angry, snide, condescending, petulant, contemptuous, truculent, evasive, hyperaggressive, despotic, bullying, an enfant terrible of the tech industry, and a robber baron.
This public relations crisis culminated with the Justice Department’s antitrust suit against Microsoft, which began in 1998 and continued for years. Gates’s videotaped deposition from the trial remains a masterclass in how not to behave in a deposition: slouched and pouty, he debated the definition of words like “we” and pretended not to understand simple questions. He was so obnoxious that when the Justice Department...