Source Code — Bill Gates

I don’t know if Bill Gates’s latest book wants to be an autobiography. Honestly, I don’t think he’s sure either. It’s a book about his early years, that much is clear — about the keys he pressed in just the right order to make something like Microsoft happen. But as you read it, you get the feeling that more than trying to tell his life story, Gates is trying to make sense of it.

What struck me most wasn’t any technical anecdote or the founding myth of the empire. It was something simpler, rougher, and far more universal: the importance of knowing what you want.

Because sure, Gates had undeniable privilege — a wealthy family, the right connections, access to computers when the rest of the world didn’t even know what they were — but he also carried around a very specific kind of obsession. Clear-cut, almost mathematical: computers, logic, and solitude. Three things that didn’t just define him, but built him a kind of mental refuge where everything made sense. He wasn’t looking to escape that space. On the contrary, the deeper he went into that inner world, the more at home he seemed. He knew what he wanted. And he didn’t mind seeming strange, or annoying, or out of place to get it. In fact, in that discomfort —the one others felt around him— he seemed to find a kind of peace.

And his parents —and this really stuck with me— didn’t rush him. They didn’t push or straighten his path. While other kids were being loaded with soccer practice, piano lessons, and expectations, Gates was allowed to wander through his own labyrinth. To dig into weird corners, to sit in front of a terminal for hours without anyone checking in. And that —even if most of us weren’t born in Seattle with computers at school and Harvard down the road— is a kind of rare luxury: to be left alone to be who you are. No one correcting your path. Because when someone gives you that kind of freedom —the kind that seems small but isn’t— anything can happen. Sometimes, you invent Microsoft.

And it wasn’t just the parents. There was also the grandmother. And you know how that goes: some grandmothers leave a bigger mark than any diploma or job title. Because with parents you fight, rebel, argue. But with a grandmother, the bond is different. Softer. Quieter. A kind of silent alliance, where affection comes wrapped in tricks and disguised lessons.

They called her “Gami.” She had a mathematical mind and a calm that taught without raising her voice. She taught him how to play cards like they were equations. How to see patterns in a deck like others see constellations in the sky. And —though he may not have realized it at the time— she taught him that thinking differently could also be a way of caring.

She was the one who nicknamed him “Trey,” because he was the third Bill in the family. That nickname, half tender and half formal, stayed with him like a private password between them. It doesn’t show up in Microsoft’s founding documents, but it’s there, in the background of everything: a quiet signal that someone, early on, knew how to stand beside his strangeness without trying to fix it.

And maybe that combination —parents who didn’t limit him and a grandmother who shaped him with logical tenderness— gave him the foundation he needed to do everything that came after.

Gates acknowledges it, though without guilt or false modesty. He says he was lucky. But he also says —and this is worth pausing on— that many of the most defining decisions of his life were the ones that pushed him out of his comfort zone. He doesn’t say it that way, of course. He says it in his own language: that he became obsessed with the limits of code, that he skipped classes to keep programming, that he clashed with professors and partners. But the core is the same: he kept making himself uncomfortable. And that habit —when repeated often enough— starts to shape the world.

But if there’s one moment in the book where Gates slows down, drops the armor, and becomes deeply human —in a way that can’t be faked— it’s when he talks about Kent Evans.

Kent wasn’t just his best friend. He was his co-conspirator, his mirror, his nerd twin. They programmed together, dreamed together, exchanged letters full of code and wild projects. Everything that would later become Microsoft, in a way, was already present in those teenage conversations — the kind you only have if you’ve ever been obsessed with something and shared it with someone who vibrated on the same strange frequency.

Kent’s death in a mountaineering accident split Gates in two. He doesn’t say it outright. But it shows. It leaks through the sentences like an emotional glitch. And you can tell that in that moment, Gates understood —without needing to write it down— that some things can’t be solved with logic. That grief doesn’t come with an ‘undo’ key. And that time, when it hurts, doesn’t rewind like a bad program.

I kept thinking about that. Really. Like an idea that won’t go away. And I can’t help but believe that if someone had offered Gates the chance to bring Kent back in exchange for everything he built later —yes, even Microsoft— he would’ve said yes. Not because what he built wasn’t worthwhile. But because some losses rewire you. They change the way you move through the world. And once that happens, you’re never quite the same.

That pain —controlled, but visible— turns the story into something more than a tale of success. It becomes a quiet testimony about chance, fragility, and what’s left behind when someone who made the world make sense is suddenly gone.

There’s something deeply human —and contradictory— in the way Gates drops these confessions, almost offhand. Quotes that don’t beg for empathy, but get it anyway. That don’t ask for forgiveness, but fully understand context.

“If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum.”

He says it with such ease it disarms you. And suddenly you see the kid in the back seat, reading while the others played. The one who got lost in books —not out of love for knowledge, but because it was a quieter place to be.

“Reading in the back of the car —or anywhere else for that matter— was my default state. When I read, hours flew by. I tuned out the world… I was in my own head… where I could explore and soak up new facts, all on my own, without anyone else.”

And that’s when a pattern starts to take shape: the adolescent who isolated himself not out of shyness, but out of affinity with a more predictable, logical universe. A kid who found in computers not just a tool, but a fair judge:

“I loved how the computer forced me to think. It was completely unforgiving in the face of mental sloppiness.”

And at the same time, there’s a brutal awareness of his privilege. Gates doesn’t sugarcoat it. He spells it out, plainly:

“It’s impossible to overstate the unearned privilege I enjoyed. 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.”

That sentence should be printed in business school textbooks — right before the class on how to raise funding with a mediocre idea and a good contact list.

And somewhere in all that memory soup, we also find the teenager watching others from the sidelines, realizing late —or far too early— how the social game worked:

“The class clown held a niche position among other kids. Raising your hand to crack a joke won more popularity points than raising it for the right answer.”

And as if this whole journey needed an outside punchline, there’s Steve Jobs —in his famous Stanford speech— tying it all together with irony that still bites:

“Because I had dropped out and then took a calligraphy class, the Mac had multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

So there you have it: the man with “no taste,” according to Jobs, helped —even by copying— to make sure that millions of computers around the world had beautiful fonts. As if even theft, when done right, can spread a little beauty.

Because sometimes, the future isn’t designed — it’s compiled. Sometimes it’s not planned — it’s patched together. And most of the time, you only connect the dots when you look back and realize —like Gates— that the path wasn’t straight, but it made sense.

If only because someone, at some point, let you be.