—BILL GATES, 1996
* * *
Much has been made in the press of a certain physical sloppiness on the part of Gates, with references to perpetually smudged eyeglasses, a lack of attention to his wardrobe, and (in tones of coy horror) a disinclination to bathe as often as he might. But although he is clearly far from a fashion plate, he seems to have paid more attention to his physical appearance in recent years, and when giving speeches or making television appearances he is decently enough turned out. The press has also been fixated on his habits of rocking back and forth from the waist up when thinking or incessantly tapping his feet. On television interviews, there is some evidence of restless legs but very little in the way of rocking; instead there tends to be an upper body stiffness that suggests he is consciously controlling that tendency. It has been noted that his father has a habit of rocking, too, but in a much less pronounced way.
Interestingly, despite the media’s emphasis on Gates’s “geekiness,” some reporters have also suggested that in the past he has been something of a ladies’ man. The contradiction in terms is amusing, and below the surface what the press really seems to have been talking about was Gates’s unwillingness to get deeply involved with one woman during the period he was building Microsoft into a software empire. Whether it was his unwillingness or the fact that a man given to putting in eighteen-hour workdays is something less than a romantic ideal remains an open question.
According to many reports, he was involved in the early 1980s with a Seattle computer equipment salesperson named Jill Bennett, who is quoted by James Wallace in Overdrive as saying, “Although he hides it well with his hard-core exterior, and certainly will not admit it, Bill’s feelings get hurt easily.” But Gates didn’t have much time for a serious relationship. He then took up with Ann Winblad, who built a software company from scratch in Minneapolis and then sold it for millions. They apparently had a great deal in common, although Winblad was five years older. Gates still wasn’t interested in marriage, and they broke up not long after he first met Melinda French in 1987. French had recently started working for Microsoft; she was nine years younger than Gates.
* * *
Why do I work hard rather than retire? The answer is simple: I do what I find interesting and challenging, and I think I have the best job in the world. Most people struggle on one level or another for economic security. What would they do once they had it? Would they play tennis all day? Would they read books? I like recreation and I love to read books, but the most enjoyable challenges come from work. I am nowhere near retiring.
—BILL GATES, 1995
* * *
The relationship with Melinda French developed gradually, with a few on-again off-again patches, into the early 1990s, when Gates, according to various friends, began to indicate that he was seriously in love with her. It is known that both his parents, and especially his mother, Mary, were pushing Gates to get married. Several male friends who were already married and had children have said that Gates talked with them about what it means to be married when one’s work plays such a central place in one’s life. Many people who know Gates well have said that Melinda French was an exceptionally good match for him. Not only did she know the computer business well enough to keep up with his intellectual and business interests but perhaps even more important, she was also a strong, independent woman with interests of her own, who was already serving on the board of a Seattle theater company. She was, in that regard, like Bill Gates’s mother, a woman perfectly capable of occupying her own time in fruitful, even important, ways.
Although Gates had broken off romantically with Ann Winblad years earlier, they had remained extremely close friends, and Bill Gates revealed to Time that he had consulted with Winblad before proposing to Melinda French. Winblad approved. And as if demonstrating her own strength and independence, Melinda French agreed that Gates could go on spending a week each year with Winblad at her cottage on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. This long-standing excursion is described by both Gates and Winblad as a chance to unwind and talk about the world. That this yearly rendezvous is so openly acknowledged lends credence to the idea that it is also completely above-board. What Melinda French Gates really thinks about it, however, is unknown; she does not give interviews, although she apparently has no problem with her husband’s discussing such subjects as the raising of their children when he is asked questions in interviews.
* * *
I can’t be neutral or dispassionate about Warren Buffett, because we’re close friends. We recently vacationed together in China with our wives. I think his jokes are all funny. I think his dietary practices—lots of burgers and Cokes—are excellent. In short, I’m a fan.
—BILL GATES, issuing a disclaimer at the start of a review of Roger
Lowenstein’s biography of Gates’s fellow billionaire, for Fortune,
1996
* * *
Both Gates and his good friend and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett have talked about how Gates proposed to French. Gates and French were returning from Palm Springs on a chartered jet, which Gates arranged to have land in Omaha, Nebraska. The reason was that Buffett owned a jewelry store there, and even though it was a Sunday night, he personally opened it up and helped the couple pick out an engagement ring. For a supposed “computer nerd,” this sounds more like a romantic plotline out of a Danielle Steel novel.
The proposal, and the bestowal of an engagement ring with an enormous diamond, took place on the final weekend of March in 1993. The bride-to-be was not just an anonymous Microsoft employee. Since being recruited in 1987, she had risen steadily through the middle-management ranks and was now a unit manager for the desktop publishing software known as Microsoft Publisher, in charge of nearly fifty employees. With her stock options, she had become one of the twenty-five hundred Microsoft millionaires. During the engagement she went right on working, but it had been decided that she would not continue after the marriage. Although there was inevitably a great deal of press coverage when the engagement was announced two days after the special trip to Omaha—word had already spread through Microsoft in a deluge of e-mail—her friends and family followed her wishes and refused to give interviews. Even former neighbors in Seattle and in Dallas, where she had grown up, were asked to keep quiet, and with security considerations having been made explicit, almost all complied. The few people who were willing to talk to reporters were mostly friends of Bill Gates, and they universally touted the match as an excellent one.
* * *
A relationship with Bill early on is a test. Are you smart enough? Do you have enough common sense? Can you make the grade? Are you athletic enough? Melinda is Bill’s pick. He could have chosen any woman as a wife for life. He has chosen her, and that means she is an exceptional woman.
—ANN WINBLAD, quoted in Overdrive, 1997
* * *
The wedding took place nine months later on January 1, 1994, on the Hawaiian island of Lanai. Lanai is small, largely covered with former pineapple fields. It has only three thousand permanent residents, and its two plush, secluded resorts, built in 1990 and 1991, are favored by Hollywood stars who cherish their privacy. Gates rented all the rooms at both hotels, for security reasons, although many were not needed for the fewer than one hundred fifty guests. They included a number of Microsoft executives, headed by Steve Ballmer, who was best man, Paul Allen, close friends like Warren Buffett and former girlfriend Ann Winblad, and a single media luminary, Washington Post owner Katherine Graham, who was a longtime friend of the Gates family. Great effort had been taken to keep the wedding secret from the press, and although word leaked out in the last day or two before the wedding, the island was too cut off for the media to mount a paparazzi assault.
Most of the guests arrived several days before the Saturday of the ceremony. They were able to play golf on the island’s two courses, one designed by Jack Nicklaus, the other by Greg Norman. There were parties, gifts for the guests every day, a luau with firewo
rks. On New Year’s Eve, Bill Gates sprung a very special surprise on Melinda French as he casually introduced her favorite singer, Willie Nelson, who performed on the private beach of the Manele Bay Hotel where the Gates and French families were staying. According to James Wallace, the highlight of the evening came when Nelson sang, “I’ve got the money, honey, if you’ve got the time.”
* * *
Evolution is many orders of magnitude ahead of mankind today in creating a complex system. I don’t think it’s irreconcilable to say we will understand the human mind someday and explain it in software-like terms, and also to say it is a creation that shouldn’t be compared to software. 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.
—BILL GATES, to Time, 1997
* * *
Paul Allen had had his yacht sailed to Hawaii and hosted a champagne brunch aboard it on the wedding day. Guests were driven out to the twelfth tee of the Manele Bay Hotel in golf carts in the late afternoon. There, on a spectacular cliff-side site, the ceremony was performed by Father William Sullivan, the president of Seattle University. French is Catholic, and it has been reported that the couple’s children will be raised as Catholics unless Bill Gates should commit himself fully to some other religion. That seems doubtful since, as he explained to David Frost, he tends to look for scientific explanations for things, much as he says he respects the moral principles of the major religions.
It seems likely that the happiest person at the wedding, aside from the bride and groom, was Mary Gates. She was very seriously ill with cancer, and there had even been concern that she would not be well enough to attend her son’s wedding. Friends of the family have said that her fortitude in being there was a remarkable demonstration of human will and inner strength. Shortly after returning home, she became so ill that the remaining months of her life were spent largely in seclusion. She was only sixty-four when she died in her sleep in June 1994.
* * *
I am the son of Mary Gates, and she was a wonderful woman. Not many adult sons are as proud of their mother as I was.
—BILL GATES, at his mother’s funeral, 1994
* * *
Bill and Melinda Gates took up residence in the home he had bought a few months earlier less than a mile from the $40 million house he had begun building on a bluff over Lake Washington in 1993. This dream house has been much talked and written about, but it was to undergo further changes requested by Melinda Gates. From the start it had been designed with a future family in mind, having a children’s wing and live-in facilities for a nanny. The high-tech aspects of the house have received particular attention. It has been wired beyond most people’s imagination, with the capacity to give Gates and his family, or any guest, an enormous variety of music in the air or art on the walls according to the whim of the moment. There were those who speculated that Melinda French Gates was insisting upon cutting back on the technology, but more recent reports suggest that her main concern was what she saw as an excess of exposed concrete. Gates himself, it turns out, saw the importance of making sure that the house had warmth as well as futuristic technical wonders, and he was extremely conscious of the kind of detailing that would achieve that end. Despite its size, photographs of the unfinished structure have revealed an architectural conception, including recycled Douglas fir beams, that is not at all out of place on Lake Washington. In the spring of 1997, Bill and Melinda Gates hosted the first large-scale dinner at the still unfinished house as part of a Microsoft “C.E.O. Summit” attended by heavy hitters from twenty-five countries, not to mention Vice President Al Gore, Steve Forbes, and the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Reed E. Hundt. The New York Times noted that one guest, Paul Hazen of Wells Fargo & Company, passed the word that the house “is so full of beautiful wood and detail that those touches seemed to upstage high-tech features like the huge video screen that took up a full wall in the dining room.”
* * *
When you visit, you’ll get an electronic pin encoded with your preferences. As you wander toward any room, your favorite pictures will appear, along with music you like or a TV show or movie you’re watching. The system will learn from your choices, and it will remember the music or pictures from your previous visits so you can choose to have them again or have similar but new ones. We’ll have to have hierarchy guidelines, for when more than one person goes to a room.
—BILL GATES, to Time, 1997
* * *
Several of Gates’s main rivals in the computer software business expressed hope at the time of his marriage that it would change his workaholic habits and slow him down a bit. But in fact he had already slowed down some, without in any way becoming less aggressive as a businessman. There had been a time, as he told David Frost, when he had gone for nearly three days without sleep when working on an urgent problem, but he hadn’t done that in some time. As he got older, he found that he needed a good seven hours’ sleep in order to be as sharp as he needed to be. In a number of interviews, he made it clear that the advent of e-mail made his life easier to manage—it was now possible, for example, to work intermittently at home over the weekends, dispatching necessary instructions, notes, or ideas electronically. He still puts in what many would consider prodigious working hours, often twelve a day at the office or on his many business trips, and six to eight hours at home on weekends. A telling comment on the subject of religion was his assertion to Time that “just in terms of allocation of resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”
But it is clear that even though he is still driven by ambition and a vision of the future that he is determined to make real, he is more capable of taking a break than many would have thought possible a few years ago. His visit to China in September of 1995 is a case in point. In March of 1994, Gates had gone to China on business, a difficult and confrontational visit in which he had been given a rough time by the Chinese Ministry of Electronics Industry, whose officials had been upset that the Chinese version of Windows 3.1 had been developed on Taiwan instead of in cooperation with the mainland China computer industry. The software also did not use the simplified Chinese pictographs introduced by the Communist government in the 1950s to combat widespread illiteracy; rather they featured the traditional characters still in use on Taiwan and in Hong Kong. China’s president Jiang Zemin, according to James Wallace, bluntly told Gates he had much to learn abut the “five thousand years of Chinese history.” In the next several months, Gates had to restructure his entire approach to China in order to win government endorsement of Windows 95. His return to China in September of 1995 was not a business trip but a vacation, with the added benefit of a chance to learn more about the country. Gates boasted to David Frost that he had not even taken his computer with him or contacted Microsoft during the two-week vacation. He and his wife, along with the Buffetts and several other couples, instead went sightseeing—and played a lot of bridge. With Windows 95 successfully launched the previous month and antitrust actions by the U.S. government beaten back for the time being, he could afford to take some time off. According to many reports, he needed to do so, with several commentators suggesting that he was as close to exhaustion as he had ever come.
* * *
I’d like to understand how the human brain works. If there was an ultimate answer machine, that’s the question I’d ask. I’m in awe of the brain and its ability to learn. I’m fascinated by such things as how a child picks up languages, by mental disorders such as autism, and by the role of the limbic brain in letting aromas trigger mood changes. I really enjoy reading about the brain, the secrets of which are among the great mysteries of science.
—BILL GATES, 1997
* * *
Melinda Gates was already pregnant during th
e trip to China, and on April 26, 1996, she gave birth to their daughter, Jennifer Katherine Gates. Many Gates watchers, and even his friends, wondered what kind of father he would make. That question was answered sooner than expected. He told several interviewers that he hadn’t expected to have that much interest in a child until he or she learned to talk, but that Jennifer had proved “much more of a thrill than I expected,” as he told the New York Times. To Time in January 1997 he admitted, “…I’m totally into it now. She’s just started to say ‘ba-ba’ and have a personality.”
* * *
My kids will have computers, of course. But they’ll have books first.
—BILL GATES, 1996
* * *
Even before Jennifer was born, Bill Gates made it clear that he had thought a lot about how to bring up children. Because of who he is, he recognized that there would be problems about his children being approached differently than other kids, and security problems would always have to be taken into consideration. The security issue was not a new one, however. There had been an attempt to kidnap his mother as far back as 1984, according to James Wallace. But in talking to David Frost, Gates emphasized what he had learned from his own parents about raising kids, praising them for their willingness to listen to their children and to take their opinions seriously from a fairly young age. He noted that his parents had encouraged “sharing problems in a way that made them interesting to think about them, not to worry about them, but to consider all the possibilities.” He also made a point, as he often does, about his parents setting an example by reading a great deal.
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