Maxine Collins / BBC
It is towards the end of our interview that Bill Gates reveals new figures on the amount of his charitable foundation spent in his efforts to fight against avoidable diseases and reduce poverty.
“I gave more than 100 billion,” he said, “but I have even more to give.”
These are dollars, just to clarify, worth around 80 billion pounds sterling.
It is roughly equivalent to the size of the Bulgarian economy or at the cost of building the entire HS2 line.
But to put it in context, it is also almost the same as a year of Tesla sales. (The owner of Tesla, Elon Musk, is now the richest man on the planet, a position of doors held for many years.)
The co-founder of Microsoft and his colleague Philanthrope Warren Buffett combine their billions through the Gates Foundation which he initially created with his ex-wife now Melinda.
Gates says that philanthropy was instilled in him very early. His mother said regularly to him “with wealth came the responsibility to give it”.
The plan was to unveil the figure of $ 100 billion in May, for the 25th anniversary of the Foundation. But Gates revealed it exclusively at the BBC.
He said to me, for his part, he likes to give his money (and about 60 billion dollars in his fortune have been so far in the foundation).
Regarding his daily life style, he does not really notice the difference: “I have made no personal sacrifice. I did not order less hamburgers or fewer films.” He can also, of course, always allow himself his private jet and his different huge houses.
He plans to give “the vast majority” of his fortune, but tells me that he spoke “a lot” with his three children about what could be the right amount to leave them.
Will they be poor after his departure? I ask him. “They will not do it,” he replied with a quick smile, adding “in Absolute, they are well, as a percentage, it is not a gigantic number”.
Gates is a guy for mathematics and it shows. At Lakeside School in Seattle, in eighth year, he participated in a regional mathematics examination at four states and so well done that, at 13 years old, he was one of the best students in high school mathematics in the region.
Mathematical terminology comes to second nature. But to translate, if you are worth 160 billion dollars, which the Bloomberg billionaire index claims that it is even leaving your children a small percentage of your fortune always makes them very rich.
Maxine Collins / BBC
Bill Gates (photo with Katie Razzall) walks in her old school in Seattle, which he remembers as “wonderful”
I am with one of the 15 people on the planet who are centillionaries (worth more than $ 100 billion), according to Bloomberg. We are in his childhood house in Seattle, a modern house of four modern bedrooms in the middle of the century installed in a hill, and we meet because he wrote a memoir, source code: my beginnings, focusing on His first life.
I want to discover what has shaped a difficult and obsessive child who did not correspond to the norm in one of the pioneers of technology of our time.
He brought his sisters, Kristi and Libby, and all three visited the house where they grew up. They have not returned for a few years and the current owners have renovated (fortunately, the brothers and sisters of doors seem to approve the changes).
But that brings back memories, in particular, while they enter the kitchen, the intercom system now long between the parts appreciated by their mother. She used it to “sing for us in the morning,” said Gates to get them out of their rooms for breakfast.
Mary Gates also set their watches and clock eight minutes quickly so that the family works in her time. Her son has often rebelled by his efforts to improve it, but now tells me that “the crucible of my ambition has been warmed through this relationship”.
He puts his competitive spirit to his grandmother “Gami”, who was often with the family in this house and who taught him to thwart the competition very early with card games.
Maxine Collins / BBC
(LR) Bill Gates, Katie Razzall, with the sisters of Bill Libby and Kristi, who with their brother saw cards like a “competition sport” thanks to their grandmother
I follow him on the wooden stairs as he leaves to find his old childhood room in the basement. She is a neat guest room now, but the young Bill spent hours, even days, here “thinking”, as his sisters say.
At one point, her mother was so tired of the waste that she confiscated any article she found on the ground and loaded her stubborn son 25 cents to buy it. “I started wearing less clothes,” he said.
At that time, he was addicted to coding and, with some friends of the experienced school, had access to a unique computer of a local company in exchange for reporting any problem. Obsessed by learning to program in these emerging days of the technological revolution, he would sneak at night through the window of his room without his parents knowing how to have more computer times.
“Do you think you could do it now?” I ask.
It begins to unroll the capture and opens the window. “It’s not that difficult,” he said with a smile while he climbed and went out. “It is not at all difficult.”
There is a first early clip of doors in which a television presenter asks him if it is true that he can jump over a chair from a standing position. He does it right in the studio. I am in the childhood room of the doors for something that looks like “a moment”. The guy is almost 70 years old. But it is always a game.
Bill Gates, 69, happily recreated the time when he got out of the window of his room at night to access a computer – without being caught by his parents
It seems comfortable – and it is not only because we are in a familiar environment. In memories, he revealed publicly for the first time he thinks he was growing today, he would probably be diagnosed on the spectrum of autism.
The only time I met him before was in 2012. He barely looked at me in the eyes because we did a quick interview on his goal of protecting children from fatal diseases. There was certainly no small pre-interview conversation. I wondered after our interaction if it was on the spectrum.
The book presents it: his capacity to hyperfocus on the subjects which interested him; its obsessive nature; his lack of social conscience.
He said that in primary school, he turned in a 177 -page report on Delaware, after bringing brochures to the state, even by sending envelopes addressed to local businesses asking for their annual reports. He was 11 years old.
His sisters tell me that they knew he was different. Kristi, who is older, says that she felt protective of him. “He was not a normal child … He sat in his room and chewed the pencils in mind,” she said.
They are obviously close. Libby, a therapist, tells me that she was not surprised to learn that he believes he is on the spectrum. “The surprise was more of his desire to say” it could be the case “”, she says.
Gates family
LR: Kristi, who said that his brother “would sit in his room and chew the pencils in the head”, Bill and Libby in 1971
Gates says he had no formal diagnosis and does not provide. “The positive characteristics of my career have been more beneficial than deficits were a problem for me,” he said.
He thinks that neurodiversity is “certainly” overrepresented in Silicon Valley because “learning something in great depth at a young age – which helps you in certain complex subjects”.
Elon Musk also said he was on the spectrum, referring to Asperger’s syndrome. Billionaire Tesla, X and SpaceX courts Donald Trump, as are the other technologies of modern technology, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Jeff Bezos from Amazon among the other participants of Silicon Valley during the inauguration of Trump.
Gates tells me that although “you can be cynical” about their motivations, he also contacted the president. They had a three -hour dinner on December 27 “because he makes decisions about global health and how we help poor countries, which is one of my big goals now”.
I ask Gates, himself a target of fairly wild conspiracy theories, which he thinks of the decision taken by Zuckerberg after Trump’s elections to pour facts in the United States on his sites. Gates tells me that he is not “impressed” by the way governments or private companies sail within the limits between freedom of expression and truth.
“I do not know personally how you draw this line, but I fear not to manage this as well as we should,” he said.
He also thinks that children should be protected from social media, telling me that there is “good luck” that the ban on under 16s, as Australia does, is “an intelligent thing”.
Gates tells me that “social networks, even more than video games, can absorb your time and make you worry about others that approve you”, so we must be “very cautious how it is used”.
The story of Bill Gates origin is not rags with wealth. His father was a lawyer, the money was not tight, although the decision to send their son to private school to try to motivate him was “a section, even on my father’s salary”.
If they hadn’t done it, we might never have heard of Bill Gates.
He first had access to a mainframe computer at the start via a teletype machine at school, after the mothers held a salesman to collect funds. Teachers could not understand, but four students were there day and night. “We were able to use computers when almost no one else did,” he said.
School by the lake
Bill, seen in 1973, said he “tried to appear cool” in the “teletype room” of Lakeside School, where he would spend an “extreme time”
Much later, he created Microsoft with one of those friends of the school, Paul Allen. Another, Kent Evans, Gates’ best friend, died tragically 17 years in an climbing accident. As we walk in the Lakeside school, we pass the chapel where they held its funeral and where Gates remembers crumbling on the steps.
Together, they had had major projects. When they were not on computers, they read biographies to determine the factors that made people succeed.
Now Gates wrote his. His philosophy? “A large part of who you have been there from the start.”
The manufacture of Bill Gates is on BBC two at 7:00 p.m. on Monday, February 3 and on Iplayer
Source code: my beginnings are published on Tuesday, February 4
