Bill Gates’s Source Code Is a Thank You Letter to Lax Parenting
In a memoir of his childhood, the Microsoft founder attributes his success to a mix of freedom and luck.
Illustration: David Plunkert for Bloomberg
There is utility to be had in Bill Gates’s memoir of childhood, Source Code: My Beginnings (Knopf, Feb. 4), but there is also joy: the joy at marveling at genius coming into focus — confident, watchful, disciplined, exuberant, boyish and prickly — and the joy at watching a door left ajar kicked open wide. Yet the book is more than just that. Subtly, searchingly, always trusting the reader, Gates explores the mysteries of why he of all people became the Bill Gates: not only the first of the world-conquering tech titans of our era but also, in his second act, likely the best of them.
Figures like Gates tend to write (or commission) My Whole Life Considered, telling their best stories, settling scores. Indeed, Source Code is the first volume of a planned trilogy and only takes us from Gates’ early childhood through 1978, when the 23-year-old entrepreneur led a dozen Microsoft employees from Albuquerque to his hometown of Seattle.