Bill Gates Read online

  In this 2006 example, Gates does describe precisely a future he had written about a decade earlier in The Road Ahead as e-mail prescreening. Of course, Gates had already been using e-mail for at least 18 years at the time, based upon the 1988 Success Magazine interview.

  THE TRUSTWORTHY COMPUTING MEMO

  In January 2002, Chief Software Architect (no longer CEO) Gates sent the Trustworthy Computing Memo to all full-time workers at Microsoft. In the memo, he draws connections to systems we accept as reliable and secure in the United States, such as basic utilities. If Microsoft cannot achieve this goal, then people would be unwilling or unable to use Microsoft products. In order to achieve the level of trust Gates deemed necessary, the products should always be available with no system outages and automatic recovery, secure to protect user data, and permit users to control their own level of privacy and how their data may—or may not—be used. Gates saw implementing this framework as more important than adding new features to existing software, and that the need was exacerbated by “weekly” announcements of new security vulnerabilities on various computing platforms—not just Windows—and how the events of 2001 had reminded everyone of the immediate need to always protect the critical infrastructure.14

  Chapter 9

  FAMILY AND HOME OF BILL

  Mr. Gates marries and has children in the 1990s.

  Michael Eisner wrote in Working Together, Why Great Partnerships Succeed that Bill Gates always has at least one exceptionally capable partner. Starting at 1987, the current of these exceptional everyday partners for Bill Gates is Melinda Gates (née French), and this partnership has continued through their 1994 wedding, building of a home designed by Bill and refined by Melinda on Lake Washington, three children, and the current initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.1 Melinda—due to her influence as co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—was ranked by Forbes in 2013 as the third most powerful woman in the world. While there are references in this chapter to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Foundation itself is discussed in Chapter 12 of this book; Gates has declared that his full-time job for the rest of his life resides with the Foundation.

  MEETING MELINDA

  He met his wife in 1987 at a Microsoft press event in Manhattan. She was working for the company and later became one of the executives in charge of interactive content: “When we very first met, I had worked at the company for only a few weeks. My background was computer science and business school, so eventually I worked my way up where I was running product groups—development, testing, marketing, user education.”2

  Many records detail that Bill and Melinda were married in Lanai, Hawai’i, on January 1, 1994. However, Gates took exceptional steps to protect his privacy, and the privacy of his guests, which included many luminaries.

  Bill and Melinda were married on the golf course belonging to the Manele Bay Hotel in Lanai, Hawaii. To ensure privacy, Gates had taken all 250 rooms at the hotel—including his own $1,300-a-night suite. He also booked all helicopter services on Maui to prevent photographers from renting them. Willie Nelson provided the entertainment. Among the attendees were Warren Buffett, Paul Allen, and Gates’s best man, Steve Ballmer.3

  Bill’s mother Mary, who had consistently asked her son to become involved in charitable initiatives, was dying of cancer at the time of the wedding. She wrote a toast to the new couple, acknowledging the way Melinda and Mary had interacted, as well as the way Mary had interacted with Bill Sr. over the years. She referred to a part of the wedding vow:

  “In sickness and in health”

  As you know in the last few months, we have had a chance to reflect quite directly on promises to stand by one another in sickness and in health. This challenge has brought a new depth to our relationship.

  Of course, the waters have not always been smooth, but I can’t imagine not being married to Bill! I hope you will have this same feeling 42 years from now about your Bill Gates.”4

  Mary Gates passed away shortly thereafter on June 11, 1994.

  A week after their Hawai’i wedding, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates host a reception in Seattle. (AP Photo/Dave Weaver)

  After the wedding, Melinda continued to work at Microsoft and was one of the marketing managers when Microsoft Bob was released in January 1995. Microsoft Bob was the first time Bill Gates was on stage to launch a product, as Steve Jobs became known for doing later: “Microsoft Bob, an early “user interface,” a smiley face with glasses, was introduced in January 1995. One of its marketing managers was Melinda French Gates, Bill’s wife. Bob was the first consumer product Gates launched personally.”

  Microsoft Bob was not a successful product for the firm and was gone within two years. Gates had presided over the product launch but he later joked: “Unfortunately, the software demanded more performance than typical computer hardware could deliver at the time and there wasn’t an adequately large market,” he wrote. “Bob died.”5

  Working through ideas for their Foundation, he wrote that the couple forms a highly functioning team, where one tempers the enthusiasm of the other by making sure all relevant issues are being considered: “She and I enjoy sharing ideas and talking about what we are learning. When one of us is being very optimistic, the other takes on the role of making sure we’re thinking through all the tough issues.”6

  In 2013, Melinda was ranked by Forbes magazine as the third most powerful woman in the world and highest-ranking nonpolitician. With the Foundation funded by the couple’s amassed fortune, the profile notes the Gates Foundation has to take risks and accept that some of the projects that are funded will be failures: “We not only accept that, we expect it because we think an essential role of philanthropy is to make bets on promising solutions that governments and businesses can’t afford to make.”7

  CHILDREN OF BILL AND MELINDA

  The Gates family has three children, Jennifer Katharine was born in April 1996, Rory John was born in May 1999, and Phoebe Adele was born in September 2002. Much like Bill’s own childhood, the only male child is the middle sibling. While the children do frequently accompany the family on excursions related to the parents’ involvement with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, father and mother rarely refer to the children by name in the press, usually referring to their children by age in each conversation. And there’s an effort by the family to ensure that the children have opportunities, but they will have to work and won’t inherit the family fortune.

  Bill Gates was the subject of a parody website www.billg.com, which was online for a number of years with weekly updates. Gates was consistently described as socially inept and geeky, and his actual attorneys even wrote to the anonymous editor of the website—through the ISP (Internet Service Provider) hosting the website—threatening invasion of privacy and false statements. Gates did not like the parody, but his spokesperson stated that the intervention of the lawyers was not about the boss being the subject of the parody. “Bill recognizes he’s a public figure. He’s fair game. The issue was about his wife and his family.”8

  In talking about the children, Bill and Melinda reveal much about social interactions and belief systems. In 1998, Barbara Walters interviewed Gates about his first child, who was then less than two. Gates not only talked about the singing lessons he took with Melinda but also broke into song about the lullabies he sang to his eldest daughter: “I said, ‘What do you sing the baby?’ Walters said, referring to his 21-month-old daughter, Jennifer Katharine, and Gates broke into a rendition of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.’”9

  In a 2010 interview, Melinda spoke about efforts ranging from her childhood to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to her family and children. In her religious high school, the school’s motto is “Serviam,” that is, “I will serve,” which has guided her efforts with the Foundation. She continues to be Catholic despite disagreeing with the Church on the issue of reproductive health and birth control.

  Promoting women’s issues through the Foundation, like t
he Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health, was seen as important because of past neglect of women’s issues. As she stated, “80 percent of small-subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are women, and yet all the programs in the past were predominantly focused on men.” When questioned why the Foundation doesn’t do more in the United States, she noted the three major programs and that approximately one-fifth of all funds were for U.S. programs.

  When talking about her family, she provides a lot more personalization. Of being a warmer person than Bill, she relayed that her husband was improving, recently uttering the line: “I’m starting to realize that talking to people about tuberculosis at a cocktail party doesn’t go so well.” And just like Bill’s parents when he was younger, Bill and Melinda speak about topics at the table that would rarely—if ever—be mentioned within most families: “We say at our dinner table, ‘Diarrhea is a discussion we can have,’’ and the kids will go, ‘Ugh!’ Diarrhea kills a million and a half kids a year. Sometimes we overdo it, I think, at the dinner table.”

  The children in the Gates family are not permitted to own Apple products, and Phoebe Adele was noted as teasing him when he fell from the top ranking in the list of the world’s billionaires.10

  Bill maintains that he is not religious but had been given the choice of religions for the children if the family would attend church. When pondering his first child in communication with an author, he wrote: “Religion has come around to the view that even things that can be explained scientifically can have an underlying purpose that goes beyond the science. Even though I am not religious, the amazement and wonder I have about the human mind is closer to religious awe than dispassionate analysis.”11

  Melinda’s stories about the children parallel what Bill relates about the children at the same time. In 2010, Travie McCoy and Bruno Mars released the popular music hit Billionaire, which is sung often in the Gates household:

  “The Billionaire song is what my kids tease me with,” he says. “They sing it to me. It’s funny.”

  They have apparently also introduced him to the “joys” of Lady Gaga, “but the 12-year-old is always worried about the nine-year-old listening to songs with bad words. So he’s like, ‘No! Skip that one!’ So I only know some Lady Gaga songs.”12

  Gates also reiterated that his kids would not become rich via an inheritance, with their educational and health needs covered but each of his children “will have to pick a job they like and go to work. They are normal kids now. They do chores, they get pocket money.”

  Despite enormous wealth, the default vehicle of the Gates family is a minivan driven by Bill, as the events of the Gates children occupy a lot of his schedule since his retirement from Microsoft full time: “We have a minivan and that’s what we use when it’s the five of us. My eldest daughter rides horses, so we go to a lot of three-day shows. The kids are a big part of my schedule.”13

  Gates has the resources to make his schedule—and his children’s schedules—much less difficult to manage. One of the events where his eldest daughter rides horses is in Wellington, Florida. In 2013, he purchased an existing estate in Florida—one his family had once rented during a competition—to accommodate his daughter’s hobby at a cost of $8.7 million, drawing some criticism in the media at the time.14

  Being a child of Bill Gates does have other benefits. As Bill and Melinda—along with U2’s Bono—had been selected to represent Time’s Person of the Year in 2005, he was asked if Bono had invited the Gates family backstage after a 2011 concert in Seattle. His response to the interviewer’s question? “Umm, no—actually, he (Bono) stayed at our house.”15

  His children do attend private schools—as Gates himself had done. However, this has led to criticism in the media, as Gates has described smaller class sizes as a waste of public funding and encouraged larger classes for the most effective teachers in public education.16

  Despite his technological prowess, Bill mentions still liking to open books despite believing that digital reading will one day be the only option. However, he bristled a bit when asked about the legacy that he was creating:

  Legacy is a stupid thing! I don’t want a legacy. If people look and see that childhood deaths dropped from nine million a year to four million because of our investment, then wow! I liken what I’m doing now to my old job. I worked with a lot of smart people; some things went well, some didn’t go so well. But when you see how what we did ended up empowering people, it’s a very cool thing.17

  Q&A FOR BILL GATES

  In 2012, Gates was asked on his personal website about how the family teaches the children about the initiatives most important to the parents in their new full-time positions with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he started by describing how his children react to travelling with the family to areas like Africa and witnessing those environments, asking questions, and making connections. Gates was certain that his children would rapidly learn about the concepts and science behind the work done by their parents:

  They’re different ages, but over time they’ll learn about the bigger issues, and the science involved. They’re interested in seeing things they’re studying in school. My daughter is taking a course on African history, so she asks a lot about that. My son is very interested in politics, democracy and the unrest in some countries. He’s curious about why some countries have done better than others, like why Turkey is richer than Egypt.18

  THE WASHINGTON ESTATE OF THE GATES FAMILY

  Bill Gates and his family live in a waterfront home in Medina, Washington, just outside Seattle, Washington. The estate sits on Lake Washington, and the combination of buildings has 7 bedrooms and 18.75 bathrooms. According to the most recent property tax records, the estate is assessed for 2014 at $120,558,000, with the property assessed at $21,740,000 and the house/other structures at $98,818,000.19

  The Gates Estate had to be planned very carefully to fit in the 5-acre site; some of the structures are almost entirely underground to fit into the landscape. Architecture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson (BCJ) still includes the work done on the Bill Gates house on its website as an example of its work, labelled solely as “Pacific Rim Estate.” BCJ partnered with Cutler Anderson Architects in the design of the project. Awards for the estate include the 1997 National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects and 1997 Honor Award for Design Excellence from AIA Pennsylvania.

  Past the garage, a massive, curved wood retaining wall and canopy define the stone entry court that leads to reception spaces in the main house. At the lowest level, an indoor swimming pool overlooks a wetland and the lake. A stone and wood anteroom, with shower and sauna, precedes the light-filled pool space. Covered with grass, the pool’s roof is supported by timber framing; canted columns are positioned at its northeast corner to support the heaviest load of soil and logs.20

  The main house was described in other sources, such as the book Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, as having the size of some rooms constrained because of the space needed to hide all of the technology Gates used in the home. In his discussions of the house, Gates does not discuss that allegation.

  The guest house, 1,700 square feet itself, won the award from the AIA for being “modest” and “not extravagant.” However, the guest house was exceptionally high-tech for the 1990s, and was where many sources reported at the time that he wrote his book The Road Ahead. The guest house was also built first to allow for some experimentation in terms of technology:

  The guest house does offer sensors that recognize guests and adjust lighting, heating and music to individual preferences; wiring that allows all of the home’s various systems to be controlled via laptop; and a comprehensive video and audio library. High-tech panels that will allow visitors to change the room’s wall design or “artwork” at will haven’t arrived yet.21

  THE HOUSE IN HIS OWN WORDS

  For a person who values privacy when possible, one of the contradictions of Bill Gates is that he provides the most detailed description o
f his family’s Lake Washington home’s technology and design in his book The Road Ahead, including an example computer rendering of how the structure fits into a hillside. In Chapter 10 “Plugged in at Home,” he describes the possibilities of advanced connectedness from the information highway allowing individuals to stay home more often but remain as social as normal. Like the other version of The Road Ahead—there are differences in Chapter 10 before the first and revised edition.

  He describes basics of the construction and technology, and also relays that the design of the house had started back in the 1980s, with plans that adapted once he became married, began to think of family, and his wife required a workspace. The use of reclaimed lumber in his home appears to be a source of pride, coming from an old lumber mill that was being demolished. He describes intentionally building the home into a hill and being able to look “west over Lake Washington to Seattle to take advantage of the sunset and Olympic Mountain views.”

  In describing his house—then still under construction—he clearly understood that he was implementing many technological features that would not be available in other houses for many years, and stated that would be much like a world where there’s only one telephone. Vast numbers of technologically advanced homes would have many more capabilities once the Internet was better used and more robust.

  He notes, “The cutting-edge technology in the house I’m building won’t just be for previewing entertainment applications. It will also help meet the usual domestic needs: for heat, light, comfort, convenience, pleasure, and security.” He also admits that technology may fail at times and there are reliable alternatives, so the exceptionally high-tech home would still have physical switches to turn lights on/off as needed. He expresses pragmatism in examples other than the light switches, noting that there were items changed after experimentation in the guest house yet still not knowing precisely how the final product would turn out.22