I started reading Bill Gates’s new memoir Source Code the day after David Lynch died. In between learning about his pioneering BASIC coding language, I struggled to grasp what Laura Dern was saying in Inland Empire. In many respects, the two couldn’t be more different, but in some ways they act as mirrors—two lives that could have reversed with just a few small tweaks. Both were strongly identified with the West Coast: Gates in Seattle, Lynch in foresty Washington and then Los Angeles. Both held singular visions in their respective fields. One man pursued his passion with antisocial intensity, the other became the subject of clip compilations like “David Lynch melting my heart for three minutes straight.” One has spread software we use day in and day out, the other masterminded some of the most beguiling cinema ever produced. And now, Gates, one of the world’s richest men, has delivered one of its most pointless memoirs.
Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, served as the company’s CEO and largest shareholder until 2014. He founded the philanthropic Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with his now ex-wife, and his net worth hovers in the hundreds of billions. Along the way, he’s been accused of bullying, anti-competitive business tactics, and even spending too much time with noted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. When the tech tycoon came out swinging for vaccine patents in 2021, The New Republic called him a “monster.” But as he continues to fight climate change and Covid misinformation, a memoir offers a perfect opportunity to try to boost his spiraling reputation by reflecting on his earlier, more innocent childhood idylls.
Unlike, say, Elon Musk, Bill Gates cares about seeming nice. The problem is the best he could give the public is Source Code, a bland attempt at damage control for his past sins. While he tries to save the world through tech, Gates can’t escape the fact that he is still one of the richest people on the planet. Liberal as he may be, his peers are men like Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg: rough company for someone who donates to the Democrats rather than the new far right. If he wants to compete in this next era, he’s going to have to do more than take a defensive posture. But he’s given no sign that he’s truly willing to fight for anything that would risk the insulated life he’s already won.
In some ways, Gates is a quintessential Lynchian character: quirky but all-American, both bizarre and exemplary. His favorite animal is a dog. His favorite food is a hamburger. His parents were both goody-goodys—his mother a pioneering woman in business, and his father a man in a hurry to “get his degree, start a career, and, well, go dancing.” Wholesome personified. He grew up going on hikes and learning how to craft software. His grandmother, known to him as “Gami,” was a Christian Scientist who taught him how to play cards and learn through experience rather than the Socratic method. His childhood best friend Kent died on a hiking expedition, leaving Gates unspeakably changed. Until college, he struggled to understand women. Math, on the other hand, “was easy, even fun.” It was his one true love, and he appreciated “its ironclad certainty.” Early on in Source Code, he jokes about “how the Hollywood version of [his] story would go.” Such a fairy tale would have been more interesting than the many disclaimers of personal privilege that Gates makes on his normal suburban upbringing vaguely colored by minor misfortune.
“Cocooned by wealth and privilege … death took place at a distance,” Gates writes. “It’s impossible to overstate the unearned privilege I enjoyed,” he continues in the epilogue. “[To be] born in the rich United States is a big part of a winning birth lottery ticket, as is being born white and male in a society that advantages white men.” No shit. What does such a disclaimer do other than perform moral piety without demonstrating concrete change?
“Anyone could see that America was bombing,” Gates says of his childhood. The country was in a state of decline and needed to be brought into the modern era—through computing, of course. This expansionist mindset certainly accounts for his own “techno-optimism.” It wasn’t all roses, though, Gates was a bit of a dick to his mom. His parents put him in therapy, and he quickly became a better son. (There’s no problem that American goodwill can’t solve.) Despite this, Gates is aware that others have described his persona in middle school as “a loner, a nerd, a bit obnoxious.” (He debated in favor of the Vietnam War—an unpopular opinion even at the time.) Once he discovered computers, though, everything changed. He fell in with a crowd of boys just like him. They worked on developing software games and even PAYROL, a processing system for the school’s salary automation. All day, all night, no food, no sleep. Again and again in a dark room until the school shut them down and they had to find computer time elsewhere.
The golden boy still found time to try “experimenting with different identities.” The opacity of such a statement is astounding. What, did he try kissing a boy? No, or at least, highly unlikely. Gates worked as a page in the House of Representatives, played the leading man in a play, asked a girl out to prom, started downing the occasional drink, and dared to try LSD with his friend-turned-business-partner Paul Allen. “You are one weird dude,” everyone tells him. His relationships lag during this time. He argues a lot with Paul and the other boys when they start working on business contracts to develop complex software. For a time, he falls out with Paul. No matter. Gates believes “that advances in the world sprang from individuals.” He would wield this individualism like a weapon his entire life. In the 2019 documentary Inside Bill’s Brain, he tries to take on the clean-water problem as a knight in shining armor, a technophile who believes his one true love can solve anything. “That’s my hammer,” he quips.
The gangly group of boys develops a BASIC interpreter that gets licensed and taken up as a gateway project, launching them into the big-boy tech world. This “was the dawn of the personal computer revolution. We all were just faking our way along.” Between trips to Albuquerque and overly optimistic business partnerships, Gates commandeers abandoned bulldozers and learns how to operate the behemoths in order to move mountains stone by stone.
The final act of the book only hints at what’s next. (There are two volumes forthcoming that will follow Gates’s journey to the present moment.) After dropping out of college, Gates feels the tech world heating up. The three main computer competitors, the “1977 Trinity,” all use a version of BASIC by Microsoft. Gates relocates to Seattle for the battle. He waxes on about his nostalgia for youth, trying to sound sonorous and eloquent, “These days I’d like to be thirteen again, making that bargain with the world that if you just go forward, learn more, understand better, you can make something truly useful and new.” This modesty isn’t a fresh sentiment for him. In 2006, he told a group of Seattleites he wished he wasn’t the world’s richest man. Too much attention. But his continued wealth and media visibility begs the question: Could he ever really let go?
It’s hard to be a relevant milquetoast liberal these days. Even as Musk and Zuckerberg cozy up to Donald Trump, Gates still prefers the quiet life—he wouldn’t endorse Kamala Harris this past fall, but did privately donate $50 million to her campaign. While all three share some surface-level technocratic similarities, Gates is the odd man out. He’s stepped down to let the younger men rule the world through street fashion and fascist hand gestures. In a 2014 Rolling Stone interview after Gates left Microsoft’s day-to-day operations, he seemed hopeful about the future, believing the world could combat polio, poverty, even climate change. Now, it seems the best he can offer us is a dull memoir littered with relatively inane observations and stories. There are no deep feelings or intimate reveals here. He is a man unbothered by the storms of life—because he can afford to be.
If David Lynch was enigmatic as a point of artistic pride, Bill Gates is merely evasive. In Source Code, he offers us his own sanded-down self-mythology. “I believe … that mankind felt the need for creation myths,” he told Rolling Stone. His own genesis invokes fast cars, acid hangovers, the Vietnam War, Jimi Hendrix, and the inheritance of his father’s name—Bill Gates even. But the allure of his story isn’t the promise of a brave new world. Gates is able to write three memoirs for an interested public only because his middle-class background turned into accumulated wealth beyond any of our wildest dreams. He was never a benevolent billionaire focused on public good, because there can be no ethical billionaire.
Early on in Source Code, Gates’s family survives a tornado relatively unscathed. The elder Bill wants to celebrate with a cookout and invite all the neighbors, but his wife tells him this is a bad idea. Gates recounts this tidbit in order to tell us something about his father’s joie de vivre, but perhaps it better describes the son. There’s nothing to celebrate about one individual narrowly avoiding personal damage from a massive ecological disaster—even if Gates would like to see us all dancing to his tune of social and technological progress. At 69 years old and obscenely rich, he is not a savior from the calamities his generation and his industry continue to provoke. He is merely the best-positioned among us to escape the consequences. Like a barbecue after a twister, any celebration of a living technocrat is premature.
