In Search Of The Real Bill Gates

By Walter Isaacson

Page 2

His best friend was Kent Evans, son of a Unitarian minister. "We read FORTUNE together; we were going to conquer the world," says Gates. "I still remember his phone number." Together with Paul Allen, they formed the official-sounding Lakeside Programmers Group and got a job writing a payroll system for a local firm. A furious argument, the first of many, ensued when Allen tried to take over the work himself. But he soon realized he needed the tireless Gates back to do the coding. "O.K., but I'm in charge," Gates told him, "and I'll get used to being in charge, and it'll be hard to deal with me from now on unless I'm in charge." He was right.

To relieve the pressures of programming, Evans took up mountain climbing. One day Gates got a call from the headmaster: Evans had been killed in a fall. "I had never thought of people dying," Gates says. There is a flicker of emotion. "At the service, I was supposed to speak, but I couldn't get up. For two weeks I couldn't do anything at all."

After that he became even closer to Paul Allen. They learned an artificial-intelligence language together and found odd jobs as programmers. "We were true partners," Gates says. "We'd talk for hours every day." After Gates went off to Harvard, Allen drove his rattletrap Chrysler cross-country to continue their collaboration. He eventually persuaded Gates to become that university's most famous modern dropout in order to start a software company, which they initially dubbed Micro-Soft (after considering the name Allen & Gates Inc.), to write versions of BASIC for the first personal computers. It was an intense relationship: Gates the workaholic code writer and competitor, Allen the dreamy visionary.

Over the years they would have ferocious fights, and Allen would, after a Hodgkin's disease scare, quit the company and become estranged. But Gates worked hard to repair the relationship and eventually lured Allen, who is now one of the country's biggest high-tech venture-capital investors (and owner of the Portland Trail Blazers), back onto the Microsoft board. "We like to talk about how the fantasies we had as kids actually came true," Gates says. Now, facing their old classroom building at Lakeside is the modern brick Allen/Gates Science Center. (Gates lost the coin toss.)

Steve Ballmer, big and balding, is bouncing around a Microsoft conference room with the spirit of the Harvard football-team manager he once was. "Bill lived down the hall from me at Harvard sophomore year," he says. "He'd play poker until 6 in the morning, then I'd run into him at breakfast and discuss applied mathematics." They took graduate-level math and economics courses together, but Gates had an odd approach toward his classes: he would skip the lectures of those he was taking and audit the lectures of those he wasn't, then spend the period before each exam cramming. "He's the smartest guy I've ever met," says Ballmer, 40, continuing the unbroken sequence of people who make that point early in an interview.

Ballmer nurtured the social side of Gates, getting him to join one of the college's eating clubs (at his initiation Gates gave a drunken disquisition on an artificial-intelligence machine), playing the video game Pong at hamburger joints and later wandering with him to places like the old Studio 54 during visits to New York City. "He was eccentric but charismatic," says Ballmer.

When Microsoft began to grow in 1980, Gates needed a smart nontechie to help run things, and he lured Ballmer, who had worked for Procter & Gamble, to Seattle as an equity partner. Though he can be coldly impersonal in making business decisions, Gates has an emotional loyalty to a few old friends. "I always knew I would have close business associates like Ballmer and several of the other top people at Microsoft, and that we would stick together and grow together no matter what happened," he says. "I didn't know that because of some analysis. I just decided early on that was part of who I was."

As with Allen, the relationship was sometimes stormy. "Our first major row came when I insisted it was time to hire 17 more people," Ballmer recalls. "He claimed I was trying to bankrupt him." Gates has a rule that Microsoft, rather than incurring debt, must always have enough money in the bank to run for a year even with no revenues. (It currently has $8 billion in cash and no long-term debt.) "I was living with him at the time, and I got so pissed off I moved out." The elder Gates smoothed things over, and soon the new employees were hired.

"Bill brings to the company the idea that conflict can be a good thing," says Ballmer. "The difference from P&G is striking. Politeness was at a premium there. Bill knows it's important to avoid that gentle civility that keeps you from getting to the heart of an issue quickly. He likes it when anyone, even a junior employee, challenges him, and you know he respects you when he starts shouting back." Around Microsoft, it's known as the "math camp" mentality: a lot of cocky geeks willing to wave their fingers and yell with the cute conviction that all problems have a right answer. Among Gates' favorite phrases is "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," and victims wear it as a badge of honor, bragging about it the way they do about getting a late-night E-mail from him.

The contentious atmosphere can promote flexibility. The Microsoft Network began as a proprietary online system like CompuServe or America Online. When the open standards of the Internet changed the game, Microsoft was initially caught flat-footed. Arguments ensued. Soon it became clear it was time to try a new strategy and raise the stakes. Gates turned his company around in just one year to disprove the maxim that a leader of one revolution will be left behind by the next.

During the bachelor years in the early '80s, the math-camp mentality was accompanied by a frat-boy recreational style. Gates, Ballmer and friends would eat out at Denny's, go to movies and gather for intellectual games like advanced forms of trivia and Boggle. As friends started getting married, there were bachelor parties involving local strippers and skinny-dipping in Gates' pool. But eventually, after Gates wed, he took up more mature pursuits such as golf. "Bill got into golf in the same addictive way he gets into anything else," says Ballmer. "It gets his competitive juice flowing."

It's a rainy night, and Gates is bombing around in his dark blue Lexus. He loves fast cars. When Microsoft was based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in its early years, he bought a Porsche 911 and used to race it in the desert; Paul Allen had to bail him out of jail after one midnight escapade. He got three speeding tickets--two from the same cop who was trailing him--just on the drive from Albuquerque the weekend he moved Microsoft to Seattle. Later he bought a Porsche 930 Turbo he called the "rocket," then a Mercedes, a Jaguar XJ6, a $60,000 Carrera Cabriolet 964, a $380,000 Porsche 959 that ended up impounded in a customs shed because it couldn't meet import emission standards, and a Ferrari 348 that became known as the "dune buggy" after he spun it into the sand.

Despite this record, Gates is not wearing a seat belt. (A dilemma: Is it too uncool to use mine?) He rarely looks at you when he talks, which is disconcerting, but he does so when he's driving, which is doubly disconcerting. (I buckle up. As his mother and others have learned, it's not always prudent to compete.) He turns into a dark drive with a chain-link fence that slides open as the Lexus approaches. It's nearing midnight, and the security guard looks a bit startled.

Gates' home of the future has been under construction for more than four years, and is not expected to be completed until this summer. Built into a bluff fronting Lake Washington, it has 40,000 sq. ft. of space and will cost about $40 million. Looming against the night sky are three connected pavilions of glass and recycled Douglas fir beams, looking a bit like a corporate conference center masquerading as a resort.

Gates swings into a vaulted 30-car garage carved into the hillside. In the corner, like a museum piece, sits his parents' red Mustang convertible that he drove as a kid. "The first pavilion is mainly for public entertaining," he says as he picks his way past construction debris down four levels of stairs. Despite the hour, three technicians are working in the ground-floor reception hall, with its view of the Olympic Mountains across Lake Washington, adjusting two dozen 40-in. monitors that will form a flat-screen display covering an entire wall. "When you visit, you'll get an electronic pin encoded with your preferences," he explains. "As you wander toward any room, your favorite pictures will appear along with the 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." Like Gates himself, it's all very fascinating, fun and a little intimidating.

Moving into the center pavilion, Gates shows off what will be the library. A mammoth carved wooden dome hangs just above the floor, waiting to be raised into the cupola. (I wonder: Does this grand chamber dispel my fear that he will relegate print to museum status? Or inadvertently confirm it?) He has hired a New York rare-books dealer to stock the library for him. His current reading is eclectic. "On a recent trip to Italy," he says, "I took the new Stalin biography, a book about Hewlett-Packard, Seven Summits [a mountaineering book by Dick Bass and the late Disney president Frank Wells] and a Wallace Stegner novel." He's also a fan of Philip Roth's, John Irving's, Ernest J. Gaines' and David Halberstam's, but his all-time favorite novels are the schoolboy standards The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby and A Separate Peace. A nearby room will be filled by an enormous trampoline; at the office he sometimes surprises colleagues by joyfully leaping to touch the ceiling, and he finds bouncing on a trampoline as conducive to concentration as rocking.

The only completed part of the house is the indoor pool under the family quarters. A sleek lap pool reflecting images from a wall snakes through glass into an outdoor Japanese bath area. The security guard reappears and warns, "Be careful of what you do in there, since the boats on the lake can see inside." As the door to the pool room closes, Gates doubles over in laughter. Does he come in here often at night? "Sometimes with Melinda," he says.

We wander out to the deck, and the wind slams the door shut. It's locked. Gates tries to call the guard, but he's disappeared to a distant part of the estate. So he leads the way past bulldozers into trenches that will someday become an estuary and stocked trout stream. At the moment, however, it's a quagmire that proves impassable. Remarkably, Gates is able to avoid looking sheepish. After a few more minutes of shouting, he attracts the guard's attention.

Gates chose the austere and natural architectural style before he got married, but Melinda is now putting her own imprint on it. "The exposed concrete is going to have to go," he says, expressing some concern about how the architect might take this.

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