Bill Gates: Software hardman

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Sä voimme jo tehneet t materiaale mitä kaikalua. Laitta tehdä William Henry Garmin s sudah viedespäär Usea invisible milliантasin pitäisi sin göri - ja se on tullut kärkysä. Ja se on tullut kärkysä. At school bells first best friend was his guy got Kent Evans who got Bill to read fortune magazine and they would chat about would they grow up to be generals or ambassadors? I mean these kids were kind of being primed for greatness I think. And they met at the Lakeside Programmers Group. This is the computer club. And it was run by one guy called Paul Allen and he is absolutely pivotal in the story. But at the time, or they did was mainly mess around with any computer hands on. Crucially, it was Paul Allen according to Bill Gates who knew that computers would be the big thing. He says that Paul for saw that computers would change the world. Even in high school before any of us knew what a personal computer was, he was predicting computer chips would get super powerful and give rise to a whole industry. And so these three Bill Kent and Paul would work on these programming tasks together. They even wrote some software. This is going to be a key. Pohjoitetaan, että se on tullut. some software for private high schools at how to schedule people's timetables. And they also made a pretty tidy profit from it. They made 10 grand, which at the time of your high school students, it's quite a lot of money. $10,000 when you're at high school in the early 70s, that's a lot of money. I mean, it beats working at McDonald's. Yeah. But tragically Kent died in a mountain climax when he was 17. And in many ways you could argue, he's like the Stuart Sutcliffe of the Beatles here, someone who died of a brain hemorrhage really early on would have been in the Beatles, but wasn't really Beatles. Kent Evans could have been potentially as famous as Bill Gates. So that's a real sliding doors moment because they could have been three people behind Microsoft, but as we'll find out it becomes two and then finally it becomes one. It does become one. But the 16 year old Bill Gates got a job coding for the electrical grid at a power plant. And he said, when I was 16, I didn't look 16. When I was 16, I looked 12. So the power plant company apparently saw him walk through the door and said, God, we're really desperate. It's because we're hiring actual children. Yes. And Bill Gates himself, as it was a similar experience for him, because these guys have bought in their best programmers to program there. So he was learning his craft, if you like, as a young sort of apprentice and these smart people coming over looking at his code, saying, you've got this right, you've got that wrong. That really brought his programming up a notch. And he was still earning money from this, right? So he was earning 12 grand at this job in 1974. At the time, the average US salary was nearer to $8,000. So he's making 50% more than the average wage when he's 16. It's an early example of how coding expertise and computing expertise was beginning to emerge as something which is really worth a lot of money. Right. Because you know, now we're all used to the idea of coders being paid silly amounts of money. Yeah. But at the time, man, they weren't, for probably weren't that many coders in the America. Well, probably folks, folks, people didn't even know what they were. But anyway, so Gates is bright lad. It goes to Harvard where he does well. You get the sense that he's almost too smart for Harvard, the stuff the courses he's doing, which he sort of, you know, get through in record time, kind of boring him. So he takes a leave of absence because he's got his, he's got his sights set on work. Now, if you think about the early 70s, when Gates was at Harvard, you know, there were many computers and colleges, Atari, for instance, that just launched Pong, but home computing was kind of seen as this thing that just people with a hobby did, which I find personally quite crazy. Yeah. But in 1974, there was a bit of a breakthrough. There was a company called MITS or MIITS. They built a more affordable PC for the home market. And this is when poor Alan pops his head up again, right? In the story, he actually is the one to bring it to Gates his attention and say, this is happening without us. And Bill Gates credits that moment as the beginning of our new company, Microsoft. And in fact, Gates makes a deal with MITS, and it's to develop software for this new home computer. It's basic, but it's important that there's a difference between hardware and software. Hardware is the actual circuit board, the computer, the actual physical stuff, the software is the stuff that makes it work. And it is the following year in 1975, when Paul Alan and Bill Gates found the company we now know as Microsoft. And they work hard, right? They're working 24 hour sessions to complete a working product for MITS. They pay another fellow student, Monty David, off to write some code. They register the trademark Microsoft and set up their office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, using a garage as their first office space. So that's the romantic story about all these tech bros and billionaires. The idea that these world-beating world-conquering companies started in someone's garage is part of the kind of tech dream. It's kind of interesting, right? Because in Bill Gates' story, you see the kernel of all these things that eventually become part of the tech bro myth, right? The dropping out of Harvard, the setting up in a garage. Yeah, they were in Albuquerque. They chose that because that's where their only customer, MITS, was actually based. And what they do is they do something called licensing software. So they basically create a bit of software and then you basically pay for the license to use it. Right. So rather than just selling off what you've made to them wholesale, every time they use it, you get a cut, right? Yeah. So they took an initial fee of around $3,000 plus royalties of 30 or $35 per copy the program sold. It actually reminds me a lot of the royalties clause that Michael Jordan's mother struck with Nike. Yeah. And also the beauty of licensing is that you can license it to company A, you can license it to company B, company C, company D. If you look at Microsoft Windows, for example, you license it just about every company in the world. And in Microsoft's first year, if 1975 sales were over $30,000 all for their software for the MITS computer. Yeah. And we got an interesting glimpse early on in 1976 because he writes an open letter to computer hobbyist condemning file sharing. Basically, he's fiercely proprietary about his own intellectual property, which is ironic as we'll see. And it's actually quite interesting because for instance, I came with agent the file sharing boom, where everyone was just trading things illegally online. Napster, for example. Yeah. Napster, lime wire, etc. So seeing Bill Gates is one of the early figures of modern computing come out so strongly against it. It kind of makes you think, this whole industry was kind of built on people fiercely defending their IP. But we have failed decades off that for now because in the 70s, Microsoft is growing pretty steadily, making products for different machines. They're hiring their first secretary who still has to do the accounting by hand because they don't even own a word processor. Let alone Excel by this stage. And in 1978, they have their first international sales office in Japan. That's quite a bold move. 13 employees, their sales there are exceed a million dollars in 1978. But during this time Gates is still a young guy, right? He's in his 20s. And it's then that he's arrested for running a stop sign and not having his driver's license. And you can actually still look up the mug shot. Yeah. And on that, he looks a little bit self-confident. So there's a slight insuisance about him. I think he was driving a Porsche. So he's still that kind of rather privileged arrogant, petalant rich kid. I actually think he bought that Porsche when he was 19 years old, which tells you something about the kind of person he was. And he's wearing these like tinted aviator sunglasses with the kind of Beatles mark and he's kind of grinning. It's actually the most rock star that Bill Gates has ever looked. There we go. So growth continues. And this is an interesting point. New staff at Microsoft are offered stock options in lieu of big pay. A stock option just basically says, I'm going to give you the right to buy shares in this company at X price in the future. And those options can last for many, many years. And the idea is that if the share price goes up a lot, your right to buy at a much cheaper level will be very, very valuable and companies like them because you're not giving away any cash. It doesn't actually cost you anything. It'll cost you a slice of the company, a share of the company in years to come. But right here right now, doesn't cost me any cash. And you now have an incentive to work very hard to make the company's success because then you can hit the big time. Right. So if I'm an employee of Microsoft and I say, I really think you should be paying me more. And you say, well, what about stock options? Do I kind of shake hands of you and say, okay, my stock option costs 50 cents. Thinking that if Microsoft becomes very valuable, my stock options could suddenly. Yeah. I mean, basically if Microsoft becomes a very successful company, your right to buy shares at 50 cents a piece. If the shares one day hit $100, every single one of those is now worth $99.50. And if they give you 10,000 of them, that's a million dollars that I've given you. And it's cost me nothing upfront. Well, that makes me ready to work 24 hours a day. Yeah. Well, it became also the do-regure way that technology companies would incentivise and pay their staff. It offered, you know, untold riches if the company really became world-beating because them nothing in cash when they were just setting up and they were just to start up. So Microsoft already kind of pioneering the way that tech firms operate in the future. This is kind of rare at the time, right? Yeah. It's impossible, I think, also to talk about Microsoft without talking about the other big tech company around at that time, which is Apple. And whilst they are working on their software to run ultimately everyone's machine, Apple were doing hardware as well. You know, they were actually building the hardware the computer itself and they were installing their own software and how to run it. And in 1980, the Apple 2 computer is launched. But Microsoft at this point has no software to work on an Apple machine. So this is kind of an interesting thing. The Apple is the thing that Microsoft hasn't cracked. So Microsoft, you know, has to kind of figure out a way to deal with this competitor, right? And Paul Allen comes up with this solution, which is a circuit board that plugs directly into the Apple 2 and allows users to run Microsoft applications, originally designed for a different operating system. A huge deal for Microsoft and again, one that Paul Allen is responsible for. And now they obviously got more customers just than they albacook he based one MITS. So they actually moved back to his hometown, Seattle. And this is where family connections come in. So his mum, Marie Gates, aka Giggles, befriends a guy called John Ople who is conveniently the chairman of IBM. At that time, IBM is looking for a partner for the first time in their 70 year history, IBM needs friends, right? They're the biggest name and competing, but it chooses to partner with Microsoft, which is still quite small. And Ople remembers the company because it's run by Bill Gates, Marie Gates's son. Isn't that great? My mum's friends with chairman of IBM. And it's worth saying at the moment that IBM is a big deal. They used to make these enormous computers that cost millions of dollars and a computer would be the size of a large room But they're working on something called the PC the personal computer and this was considered a massive gamble by IBM at the time They were taking a big flyer on this as well But to have this personal computer you had to have something that made it work Right, you needed what is called an operating system right because your average Joe or Jane who lives at home Doesn't know how to code they're not going to type in all the commands so they need an operating system that let's them figure out what they can do with this home computer It's the conduit between instructions that you can put into the computer in a language that the computer itself can understand to perform these various functions So IBM blue chip huge organization Partners this whale partners with this little tidally company called Microsoft right IBM 341,000 employees making over 26 billion dollars in revenue Microsoft 40 employees 8 million dollars in sales This is a great deal for Microsoft. I mean, it's been called the greatest deal in the history of computing this deal is so transformative Such an epic moment that a kind of folklore grows up around it because it's that pivotal and Unsurprisingly for something so important There's also a big controversy around it right because when IBM partner with Microsoft Microsoft hasn't actually Built an operating system. Yeah, they've got a deal with IBM, but they haven't got a product So they actually end up buying an operating system called QDOS and you know QDOS stands for quick and dirty operating system According to one programmer. It's just a copy of his other operating system But the designer of QDOS says making the recipe in the book doesn't violate the copyright on the recipe We can see that copyright and intellectual property becomes very very contentious issue throughout this story And QDOS was bought very cheaply again a deal negotiated by poor Alan and actually Microsoft's initial fee from IBM ends up covering it Tenfold and so they go to hell of a deal they take QDOS and basically tweaked it and developed it and turned it into something called MSDOS Microsoft And it's installed on all new IBM personal computers, but crucially the deal is also non-exclusive right so it becomes the go to operating system for almost Every personal computer on the market that is so important because basically IBM sort of led the charge of mass-produced personal computers once they've established some sort of standard Then MSDOS become standard for all other types of machines like this So they've managed to get their foot in every door So the IBM personal computer with Microsoft's operating system MSDOS installed it launches in 1981 Costs $1,500 about 1200 pounds and they sold 200,000 computers in its first full year in the market And they sold double that the following year This is the beginning of their trajectory to being a massive company So Microsoft reorganized itself into a privately held corporation built Bill Gates's president and chairman of the board and Paul Alan as executive vice president And a guy could Steve Bulmer is Microsoft's 30th employee, 30 employees And he is the first business manager that Gates hires and he's actually you know key to Microsoft success You know he teaches Bill Gates to delegate to limit the promises he's making so he can hire good people Create organizations and teams and gates kind of transitions to being a bit more of a leader right he finds out his new hires were actually Better than he was when it comes to coding. Yes, so Gates then becomes a leader a business person and Clearly company is doing well. How well do we think it's doing this time? Well, I think it's safe to say that Bill Gates has made a million after his deal with IBM Okay, so thank courtesy of IBM Bill Gates in 1981 is a millionaire So Where does he go from there? How does he get from a million to a billion and beyond? Well, Microsoft is growing both in profits and headcount Their operating system is becoming the industry standard and then in 1983 they launched something which is still with us today Microsoft word still a staple of the catalog something you probably use I know I use every day It's hard to believe Microsoft word is 40 years old today. Yeah, but this is the point where Microsoft becomes a bit more professional What they're now in the business of is selling a consumer product right and that requires Branding and that's where they start hiring people with experience and communications and comms You know Bill Gates has a VP of comms who actually comes from the cosmetics industry so this communications person told the Washington post That before Bill Gates hired him he pulled out two jars from a drawn his desk He said this moisturiser sells for $40 an ounce this one for one dollar an ounce There is no technical difference between them the only difference that exists is within the woman's mind And he said I want to try and create a certain image and perception of Microsoft And this VP has this idea of giving away a demo copy of word with PC world magazine Which means that customers can try out this new program before they commit to buying the full version I remember that really well the computer magazines routinely came with a disc Tapes to the front of them and that was exciting because if you had one of these computers You were quite keen to try out new things on it. What can it do and also for those of you who are too young to remember Uh back in the day you couldn't download computer programs from the internet You had to install them off a CD not a CD before that even There was a floppy disk you shoved it into this little slot And then you clicked and then pulled down a little latch and it made this kind of weird whirring sound God back when software was sort of like hardware Yeah in a way I suppose that's right So word is launched but at this point there is a big change at Microsoft because Paul Allen K found of the company steps down from his job at Microsoft he stays on the board He's suffering from a form of cancer And when Paul leaves bill becomes synonymous with Microsoft he appears on the front cover of time magazine in 1984 for the first time And time says that gates is worth over a hundred million dollars. Yeah, he is literally the face of computing He's the geek in chief. He's the poster child for a new revolution in technology And the very next year MS-DOS is upgraded with the launch of windows. It's most important product ever And like I say you walk into any office anywhere in the world and you switch on the computer What will you see? You'll probably see a window sign still iconic all these years later and Microsoft Is growing and growing getting bigger and then it hits another milestone Yeah, when it actually sells shares in itself we talked about this before It's called an initial public offering an IPO. It's where a private company sells shares in itself to the general public From what we know we think Bill Gates would have preferred to keep the company private But he's given so many of his employees stock options and once you hit a certain number of people who actually own shares in the company You have to go public so they had 500 private stockholders They would have been staff members that triggers the need to register with the Securities in Exchange Commission They're basically the police of the financial sector So Microsoft essentially has to become publicly listed at that point So there they are. They're now a public company the shares gone sell for $21 But at the end of the first day of trading the shares go up to $28 So that's 33% gain in one day and the IPO ends with Microsoft gaining a market capitalization of $77 million but I kind of need some context for this. This is good. What does it mean? Well, that's I mean that means because so it's basically worth three quarters of a billion dollars That's a lot of money back in 1986 It doesn't make it a giant company by any means But Bill Gates earns nearly 45% of the company so we know Exactly how much money he's got at this moment 45% of 777 million so Forbes say his fortune at this point is $315 million and he lands on their list of the riches Americans for the first time and the young chief executive celebrates by making a very sensible decision He pays off his 150,000 dollar mortgage. So no rockets into space for him just paying off the right I got the mortgage So he's got hundreds of millions But excitement about the software industries potential and the fast growth sees Microsoft shares massively increasing value In the first year in trading at one point shares were selling at six times their initial price So in 1987 the value of his shares in Microsoft are well over a billion dollars Bill Gates is a billionaire Forbes estimates that his net worth is now 1.25 billion and he is just 31 years old So he is the youngest billionaire ever at the time quite a thing the youngest self-made billionaire ever at the time He's been supplanted since then by Mark Zuckerberg who will probably do on this show later. Yeah at this point I would probably bow out As does everyone have a number in their head when they were basically just go fishing 10 I mean five I mean one no one's not enough these days is it? I don't know I'm not yeah, but the point is is that one of the themes of our billionaires in this series is that you know 10 millions not enough 50 millions not enough Do you know mean that they're driven by something more than that and he says he's got no desire to retire He says at the time I'm tied to the wheel It's 2003 in Birmingham doors have been slammed in your face. You're not welcome here They were capable of murder and had murder drive by killings gang wars a vigilante group that fought against Jamaica's notorious yardies the home boys thought Tämä on se, että se on tullut mukaan. Tämä on tullut mukaan. Su конasta electriquetus Thank you Ja joutui tu лучa tilistua. Joten kaikki tiede jäin, että hurulok小心si Moreover saaisin kempossa, että oli tuohon nopea rampaa työsin maenteena. Jos mietit confidentcalmä teitoa Reallylee去 on hisken - telsi saattaa evidenti pykee mua 1 voikoopi ja Paope decorations. 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Mikä kylmääntä on kylmääntä. Tämä on kylmääntä. Mikä kylmääntä on yksi 1.000 kylmääntä on yksi 1.000 kylmääntä. taas tailor MARKKipperkkasaa, joka käyneet venitiivä Follow nein aina sausagesяa, kun takaisin aikablaista katsotaan, kuy spritellekitettiin se kuin überhaupt Oy ôran pyritään myös audinaä keận! Ja on yelloysä tuohon ja sinä sopкеin aut osa?! Ja jsem甚ä turvita näistä siellä on lauultakin meille! Vaikka ratkaa,appa sagin joka puoltaut mitaa ja vaiken cordsaan ja missä luon enem äänetenskasturitauksessa sen, että turvita, che ja vuotta�ittoriaan kanssa Nelé Seinkinhän puoltafa stapleits on tul 31 Peri - mutta denn controllaan PVC eri tässä includedan, - Apple Ronin vä Warriorsan. - Anothe Saintsailn這樣的 아이�oika, miten me ne bijattiin a ski? Annen TANYTA! gapsakou 150 m. Ja connio器 Pirasi inspired, jotka fond� gelm Rica- Christinaодia. Mikrosoften on tullut suurittu, että tämä on järjestelmää. Tämä on valmiut, koska tämä on tosi, että se on johteen. Mikrosoften on tullut, että se on johteen vahvasti. Pohjan pitää suurittuja, että se ei ole tullut. Tämä on todella suurittuja. Mikrosoften on johteen vahvasti. Apple järjestelmää on järjestelmää, että Mikrosoften on kotiin. Mikrosoften on järjestelmää, että se on johteen vahvasti. Tämä on järjestelmää, koska tämä on järjestelmää. Apple järjestelmää on järjestelmää, että se on johteen vahvasti. Ja, se on johteen vahvasti. Se on johteen vahvasti. Ja, mutta se on johteen vahvasti. ja ajat application programming interfaces with third party. companies, but his image has kind of been tarnished. Yeah. So basically, he's brought in front of the regulators. And there's a video of his deposition where Bill Gates is giving evidence. He's described as consistently truckulent, evasive, and non-responsive. And this is the moment when the Bill Gates halo, if you like, begins to slip a little bit. Once they were exciting, thrusting, whatever, now they're monopolistic. They're squashing competition, they're a juggernaut. It's a different kind of vibe coming off them there then. And you can actually still watch the deposition on YouTube. And it's kind of excruciating. I actually went and looked it up. He comes off as so snobbish. Like, these real, you can kind of see the echo of that 12-year-old kid arguing with his mother. Yeah. And so, like I say, rather than the revenge of the nerds, this geeky, wonderkin, he's now a noxious mogul. Right. I also feel like at this point, we should kind of explain to people who don't quite get it. But why are monopolies considered bad? Why does a DOJ have to go after people who are trying to impose a monopoly on their industry? Well, the idea is, is that if one company becomes too dominant, it means that you will stifle innovation. It means that other companies won't try and come up with new ideas, because they get squashed by the incumbent player. And it's also kind of an interesting thing about the US state of mind, actually. The United States has always had this phobia of monopolies. In a way, it's an encapsulation of this kind of land of the free kind of idea that concentrated power blocks are bad for that idea and need to be broken up whenever they begin to coalesce. So it's almost like they view them as cartels that need to be broken up? Correct. And technology has been a very fertile ground for monopolistic practice to take hold, because once you've got someone within your kind of walled garden, it's quite hard for other people to break in. For example, how many times do you go to the third page of a Google search? Never. Google's got so much monopolistic power in search that other people struggle to break in because of the way that a Google algorithm works. So they're kind of like the gatekeeper in many ways. Right. So it's almost like in the same way Google is a walled garden. An operating system can be a walled garden. If it stops you from downloading other applications or programs, they've got a monopoly on you as a consumer. And it's things like that the regulators look out for. And that Bill Gates in his deposition. There's a kind of outrage that he has. You can't see the logic of trying to stop him dominating the world. It's like, well, we've got this product as the best to get out of our way. Right. So that whole attitude of, I'm the best and I can't see from a human point of view why this lack of competition is bad. Yeah. And it comes into play. Yeah. So they have a scrape with the regulators, but it's not doing anything to dent his wealth. Right. Because in 1999 Gates' net worth actually tops $100 billion. Hang on a second. I thought that when we did the Jeff Bezos episode that he was the first centipillionaire, the first hundred billionaire. Well, Gates was very briefly won in 1999. So I don't know, you know, brief centipillionaire, permanent centipillionaire. I think we have to give it to Jeff. Okay. But he was briefly won in 1999. But by 2000, we have the sort of beginnings of the dot-com bust after the boom. His wealth shrinks from nearly 100 billion to 63 billion. First significant decline in his wealth, as I say, because the tech bubble is popping. And also the loss of that antitrust trial meant that there are potentially regulatory limits to Microsoft's power. It's also at this point that Gates starts stepping back, right? He relinquishes the role of chief exec to Steve Bormer, who is still at the company after becoming its 30th employee all those decades ago. And he's very different character. As seen as a hard-nosed business people, some people say that the time that Steve Bormer was in charge was the period of least innovation. And two years prior for the first time in 13 years, he is also not the world's richest person. He's surpassed by, you know, investment, guru, war and buffer, a Mexican telecom tycoon. So, you know, Gates is no longer the richest person in the world. No, it's interesting. I also wonder whether they ever care about this. And I know for a fact that they do, because I saw an interview with Bill Gates once where he talks about, because he's very good friends with war and buffet. There was a moment previously when war and buffet had fallen at one point to eight richest person in the world. And Bill Gates said he sent him a pool eight ball. He sent him one through the post. So they know where they sit on the Forbes list. They're not unaware of it. It's interesting, right? Because at this point, Bill Gates could have gone, I'm going to work even harder. I'm going to work 36 hours in a day. But he actually announces he's going to stop working full-time at Microsoft to dedicate more of his time to philanthropy. Rolling back a few years, when he got married to Melinda, Bill founded the William H. Gates Charitable Foundation. Got his father to direct it with the plan of using his money to improve things like reproductive and child health in the developing world. And in 2000, Foundation changes its name and becomes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. A real powerhouse for philanthropy. And if you go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it's the Atl. It's this whopping great building. As they say, it looks like the United Nations of philanthropy. It's a very serious project. And in 2010, he gets even more serious about philanthropy. He co-creates what's called the Giving Pledge, which asks extremely wealthy people to sign up to commit to giving almost all of their wealth away. And he leads, by example, he's given more than $59 billion to the Foundation. And he's actually planning to give away virtually all of his wealth to the Charitable Foundation in his lifetime. I remember him talking about his kids and they said, "How much money will he give your children?" And he said, "I will give them enough money to do anything, but not enough to do nothing." Which is kind of an interesting one. I thought it was quite a nice way of phrasing it. But also, but on this philanthropy point, he approaches it almost like he's solving a problem. Yeah. He wants his money to be used as impactfully as possible. And it's like he's debugging a program. That's the way he's thinking about it, rather than saying, "Oh, look at the poor little children." Yeah, it's almost like he's looked at something like "Charred poverty" and gone, "That's a glitch in the system. If I threw enough money at it, I could work the bug out." But he's also quite. He wants. He measures the impact of how wealth is actually used. I mean, it's quite an analytical thing. It's not just, you know, they just need some more money. He's quite analytical about how the money is deployed, whether you get a return on that money, he wants to bring his nows to bear in a different sphere. Right. And that's classic billionaire, to think that you know better than everyone else. Yeah. But, you know, we undoubtedly has saved millions of. millions of millions of lives. And he's done that, but not without attracting some shady criticism, I would say. I mean, there's a famous quote, "attributed to Steve Jobs," where he said, "Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he's more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people' ideas. He'd be a broader guy if he'd just dropped acid once or gone off to an ash ram when he was younger." Burn. That's quite bad, isn't it? It's really bitchy, actually. Yes. It's like, yeah, but basically unimaginative. That is Karsh. He's not a university popular person. Probably one of the reasons with his vast wealth and his role in vaccines, which is why he became this target for conspiracy theorists. Yeah, exactly. And I think a lot of the conspiracy theories, which are completely baseless and actually quite deranged if you look into them. You know, they have all these theories about Microsoft using the COVID vaccine to insert microchips into you. You know, a lot of these conspiracy theories in a way are slightly complementary of Microsoft and Bill Gates because they assume that he's got so much more power and influence than anybody he probably has. Yeah, conspiracy theories are odd, aren't they? I mean, I generally think most of them are not true, simply because people aren't organized enough to actually pull them off. Oh, no. And if you look at almost all the billionaires we talk about, so many of the things that ended up making them are just complete accidents and chances, chance encounters like his mom with IBM. And the Bill Gates story is the story of the emergence of the computer. So his success is basically a mirror of the success of computing. But let's bring the story up to date. 2014 is when Bill Gates steps down as chairman of Microsoft and in 2020, he just steps down from the board entirely. Remember, he owned 45% of the company at one stage? He now owns about 1.3% of the company. Having said that, 1.3% of the company worth two and a half trillion dollars is still $26 billion. So he's still got plenty of stock in the company. And he's also got, you know, other things going on. He's got an investment firm called Cascade Investment. He's got other assets, like $143 million estate in Washington, which he's called Zanadoo. He's one of the largest owners of US Farmerland, random. Yeah, what's he doing with that? Cascade is his sort of investment company. And that owns a bunch of things like it owns a controlling stake in four seasons hotel. And 14% of a car dealership called Auto Nation. It shares in waste management. The tractor maker, Deer Enco, Canadian National Railway and much more. These are kind of like, if you like his family office. So he's still one of the 10 richest people in the world. And he is also not just a brief centipillionaire. He is a confirmed centipillionaire right now. He's also been tainted by his association with Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex trafficker. Jeffrey Epstein's not someone you want to be seen in a picture with that often. No, and the Wall Street Journal actually reported that Epstein threatened to expose an affair that Bill Gates had had. Yeah, in 2021, in fact, he got divorced from Melinda after 27 years of marriage. And he admitted that he had an affair. But Melinda Gates did say that his links to Epstein were a factor in their divorce in interview with USDB. But having said that because they never had a prenup. And by all kind of non-pre-nup divorce standards, they actually quite amicably split their possessions. Yeah, according to him, the version was like, "I'll keep this amount of billion to give away. You can have a few billion to give away. I don't think they cared that much about it." Yeah, it was just pretty rare when you get right down to it. So that's brought us right up to date. We now need to judge Mr William Henry Gates, the third Bill Gates. Wow. Let's start with wealth. I mean, he was the world's richest man for over a decade and the youngest billionaire. So for my generation, he was the rich man. To my generation, he was the Rockefeller of the past, the Musk of the present. So he's still riding high in the top 10, which I think for me, makes him at least a nine. Yeah, for sure. He's not the richest man in the world anymore, but he was for a very long time. Nine, nine's all round. What about rags to riches? Definitely not rags. No, no. Dad was a tech lawyer, went to private school. It sounds like they were basically very well to do upper middle class Americans. Right. And hot housed in the way that there was people. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, basically pushed hard to achieve not only that, but also the thing that made him rich would come through his mother's connections to the chairman of IBM. He's wealthy and lucky. Yeah, which is a killer combo if you want to get rich, right? So I think rags to riches, he scores quite a lot. Yeah, I think maybe even a one. I would say a one out of 10, because I mean, if it wasn't for old Giggles, his mum, who knows that IBM deal might not have never materialised. So nine to wealth, ones for rags to riches, villainy. This is an interesting one. Yeah, I mean, we talked about Paul Allen. And Paul Allen is kind of the Waluigi to his Luigi, isn't Paul? Because Paul has actually gone on record as saying that Bill Gates is a kind of schema who conspired to rip him off following his treatment for cancer. And says that Gates was actually constantly demeaning his employees and famous for saying this is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Yeah, and apparently early in his career, Bill Gates memorised the license plate of every employee to keep tells them see how hard they are working. I mean, yeah, he doesn't come off as a very socially adept guy. It's probably the nicest way of putting it. It's one of those things though, isn't it? These people are very driven. Yeah, he was working 12 hours a day. Even when he toned it down, he said he was working. He doesn't work any more than 12 hours a day, only eight hours a day at the weekends. I think when you're like that, you don't understand why other people aren't seeing things the way you're seeing them while they're not working as hard as you do. We know that he's not an empathetic person. He probably came across as pretty brutal, pretty ruthless. Yeah, I think it's interesting because you can't go around expecting every single successful person in the world to be the most empathetic, nurturing figure ever, right? Sometimes their wealth and success comes from the fact they're quite hard on themselves and therefore hard on other people by extension. And you've got to be pretty driven in a pretty weird sort of way, not to sort of basically after your first 10 million or 20 million, whatever your number is, to say, I'm just going to go on a holiday for the rest of my life. If you keep going through the 10 million, to 100 million, to half a billion, to a billion, to 100 billion, takes a very unusual kind of mindset and probably one that is quite hard to be around. Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of on the fence with this one when it comes to villainy, right? Steve Jobs, arguably, was very mean about Bill Gates' actual ability to innovate, but for actual sheer villainy, when you compare him to the other billionaires that we've talked about before, literal arms dealers, I just kind of come down right in the middle. I'm like, I'm wondering if I'm given the five out of 10. I'm going a bit a bit harder than that. I think the reason is because of the way they set out to absolutely crush any competition. There's not the only tech company to try and be monopolistic. You know, Google's had plenty of scrapes with regulators themselves. And it's not unusual if you've got a dominant position to try and protect that position, but I think that a lot of people, in those early 2000s, when they're people going to work for other companies, it's because they thought that Microsoft had basically become this monolithic enemy of innovation, rather than an engine for innovation. So I'm going to give him a seven for villainy. Interesting. Okay, a five for me, a seven for you. The next category I think will be quite straightforward is just philanthropy. Well, I mean, I don't know if it's the most money ever given, but I think that Bill Gates, Bill and Melinda Gates have given more money to fight disease and poverty than the World Health Organization has. Having said that, people do criticise the Gates Foundation's approach, right? Because they've been said to come off as almost colonial in their approach. They kind of decide from their privileged position where to direct this money, what needs money. It's a kind of top down approach that you see more in a corporation than really an organization that wants to benefit the entire world. Yeah, in fact, there's a book coming out called the Bill Gates Problem, which looks at exactly that, which is that do you use that vast wealth to have political influence in other countries about how people are fed, educated, medicated, vaccinated, some people find that quite a troubling model. And it's actually something that we've raised before on this podcast, right? It's a Chuck Fini question. He also gave away the vast majority of his wealth to his own kind of causes. A lot of pet projects is the way to look at it. So, you know, should we let people with their own biases have such an extreme amount of power in something like public health? Well, yeah, I mean, although he's given away $71 billion and it's estimated that he saved the lives of 122 million children since 1990, there is such a thing as doing the right thing for the wrong reason. And in situations like who cares? It's very true. I'm sure the 122 million kids they save don't actually quit more about this. Yeah, I mean, he's got to go down as one of the biggest figures in philanthropy of all time. And also inventing the giving pledge, right? And basically, bullying other rich people into giving away their money. Yeah, I think he's got a claim to be one of the most remarkable people of the second, of the latter half of the 20th beginning of the 21st century. Would you give him a 10 out of 10 for philanthropy? I think you have to. $71 billion? Yeah. Come on, man. That's a lot of money. Money talks in business and money talks in philanthropy. I've got to get it. It's a 10. So, as we say, and strictly, it's a 10's across the board from both of us. 10's across the board. Well done. William Henry Gates, the third. What about power? How does he rank when it comes to power? I think weirdly, I mean, there's no doubt that Microsoft has had and still has enormous power in the commercial world. I mean, they've got a stranglehold over personal computing, enterprise computing in the world at the moment. So that is a very powerful position. He revolutionized the way that we interact with computers and through his philanthropy, he's an incredibly important person in a lot of poor countries. I mean, you know, when the Gates Foundation comes town, it can be transformative. So I think power is pretty high up. I mean, I've got the feeling that if he wants to talk to the President of the United States, he can, whenever he likes. Yeah, that is really the gauge of power, right? Well, with the President pick up the call, will you get through all the layers of telephones and secretaries? Yeah. I wonder whether other billionaires go, oh my god, no Bill Gates is coming round. He's going to ask me to give all my money away. When you have other money in here. When you have other billion scared of the Gates Foundation. No, please go, no, I don't want to be on Bill Gates' list. Go away. I'm going to hide. Tell Bill Gates, I'm not hitting that. I'm not home. I think he's, you know, I think he's got enormous power both in the business world and in philanthropy. And actually that translates in sub-Saharan Africa into a political power problem. So I would give him a nine in power. Yeah, I'd agree. You know, just from Microsoft alone, he's probably one of the more powerful people we've spoken about on this show. But what he's turned that power into philanthropic influence, I think that's remarkable. Yeah. I'd give him a nine for power, if not even a 10 actually. Yeah, maybe. I'm going to, I've, I've, I've gone out. You're going to hold off a 10. I'm going to hold off on the moment and want me 10. I'm too generous. OK, well, let's look at legacy then. How will we remember Bill Gates? Will remember Bill Gates as the person who reinvented what the nerd was, you know, basically he was the person who turned being a computer geek from being someone sort of unpopular into the master of the universe. There would have been a time when every person leaving kind of some kind of prestigious university would have gone to work for Goldman Sachs. Now they go and work for technology companies. I think Bill Gates changed that. Right. The whole narrative of the tech genius, you know, the tech visionary, you know, so many of those beats that we now kind of associate implicitly with someone in that world dropping out of school, learning how to code from a young age, you know, the kind of socially awkward, you know, that is something that Bill Gates kind of set the narrative for. Yeah, no one wanted to be a computer geek in 1975. Do people want to be a computer whiz now? Definitely. Oh, yeah. That's not anywhere rich is lie, but also social prestige of being a tech leader. Yeah, and cultural capital as well, right? Yeah, for sure. So I mean, that, I mean, everything we've just said would mean I think we score, he scores pretty highly. I mean, Bill Gates will go down as one of those people like a Rockefeller, like Andrew Carnegie, who combined great wealth with philanthropy. So I think legacy, I'm going to give him a nine. Yeah, I'm going to give him a nine because I feel now bad that I've been too generous to my tens. OK. I give him a nine for this, but a part of me wants to say ten. Okay. definitely less a very lasting impression on the world for sure. So William Henry Gates III, private school kid running a red light and driving without a license to one of the towering figures of the 20th and 21st century. Definitely. So is he good, bad or just a billionaire? He's not just a billionaire. Yeah. He's not just one of those rich people. He's too powerful for that. Oh, this is hard. It's really hard. I mean, how can you say someone who's given 71 billion dollars to charity is bad? Yeah. But I want to. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because I think that is the tension at the heart of the Bill Gates story. Because we know that listen, he can be quite nasty. He's a smart-ass. He's not very social. He's intolerant. He treated regulators with disdain with a basic contempt almost. He tried to squash competition wherever he found it. And yet the world would be a very different place without him. I'm going to say, and it's difficult for me because I might have to try and get an interview with him. I've said this before. I've spoken to him a few times. Will he ever speak to me again if I say that I think that he just nudges into, oh god, man. No, okay. I've had a road to domestic conversion. He gave 71 billion dollars to fight poverty and disease. He's good. I think the 71 billion dollars edges him into good. I think for me, he was kind of tiptoeing the line of bad in the way that he kind of handled Microsoft and the things he did along the way to make it such a dominant force. But then the fact he kind of does his huge turn almost, right? When Microsoft starts slightly floundering, he doesn't double down on the nastiness and the anti-competition. He then chooses to become a philanthropist. And that decision for me to start redirecting his energy and his time into giving money away, that for me edges him into good. Yeah, it's problematic, but he's good. So next week's billionaire, Al Confess, I'd never heard of. He's got an interesting story that takes him all the way through a part-eyed era South Africa to the billion dollar halls of American biotech industry. Yeah, with a lot of famous friends along the way, it is Patrick Sonshong, surgeon, businessman, biotech billionaire. Also sued by Shere. Thank you for listening to Good Bad Billionaire. This podcast is produced by Hannah Huffard and Mark Ward, James Cook, is our editor and it's a BBC audio production. I'm Mark Chapman and this is Everton. Nothing will be the same. This is the story of what happened over one of the most difficult and controversial seasons in the club's history. We go down, I don't think we're leaving existence five years later. We've been inside the club talking to players, coaches and managers. I had nine and a half years of my previous club. I probably got one book in me. Informancy, I probably got three. Everton, nothing will be the same. Listen now on BBC Sounds. [Music]