Bill Gates: How a Kid Who Hated Losing Built Microsoft and Remade Himself

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Bill Gates has been two very different public figures: the desk-pounding monopolist of the 1990s and the sweater-wearing philanthropist trying to eradicate disease. This episode argues that both run on the same engine. It begins in a Seattle household where card games and swims to the dock at Hood Canal were contests with penalties for losing, then moves to the Lakeside School, where a 1968 rummage sale by the Mothers' Club bought computer time and a teletype terminal for a 13-year-old who became instantly obsessed.

From there the story covers the bluff that launched Microsoft, when Gates and Paul Allen sold software for an Altair 8800 they had never seen, and the IBM deal that let Gates keep the copyright to MS-DOS. It also covers the damage: the friction with Allen during his cancer treatment, the evasive 1998 antitrust deposition, and the later revelations about workplace conduct and meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. The pivot to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is weighed against all of it.

• After being banned for exploiting bugs to get free computer time, Gates and his friends negotiated a deal to find vulnerabilities in exchange for free access.
• At Harvard, Gates devised an algorithm for the pancake sorting problem that held the speed record for over three decades.
• Gates and Allen wrote an emulator on Harvard's mainframe to simulate the Altair. Their BASIC code touched the real hardware for the first time during Allen's demo in New Mexico, and it worked.
• Microsoft bought 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, renamed it MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM for a flat fee while retaining the copyright.
• Gates gave a 2015 TED Talk warning about pandemic preparedness, then became the target of baseless microchip and depopulation conspiracy theories during COVID-19.