On February 21, 2008, Gates stood in the main auditorium of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, about to deliver a speech to more than 700 students. Two years earlier, he had announced his intention to transition from his day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft, of which he was chairman, and turn full-time to philanthropy. Now, he was months away from doing just that. After the thundering applause and the flash of cellphone cameras faded, Gates began. He spoke at length about software, innovation, entrepreneurship, and philanthropy, topics that were dear to him, and his vision for all the ways in which technology would continue to transform lives and society. He dwelled on the potential of 3D technology. He talked about how far speech recognition software had to go.
And then, with a simple but attention-grabbing statistic, he explained why his latest pursuit, philanthropy, was necessary: Because malaria research gets only 10 percent of the funding that goes to research on cures for baldness. “The market directs itself to solve problems based on economic signals,” Gates said to his rapt audience, moving about the stage, gesticulating, as he explained why. Because of their profit-seeking nature, he said, companies put money into pursuing products and solutions that have the most demand. Since there are about two billion people at the top of the economic ladder who don’t like being bald and are willing to spend to find a cure, companies will channel resources to finding ways to reverse baldness. At the same time, the bottom two billion of the world’s population suffers because it doesn’t have the means to direct funds into malaria research. Large numbers of their children therefore die from an easily preventable disease caused by mosquito bites.1
This was an avatar of Gates that the world had increasingly become acquainted with: the billionaire philanthropist who explained why the same market that failed people could also be alchemized, by charitable dollars, to serve people. With facts, figures, and flashes of the geeky showmanship that had begun to define his philanthropic talks, Gates dazzled his young audience of mainly computer science and engineering students. One of the world’s foremost research institutions, Carnegie Mellon was founded in 1900 as the Carnegie Technical Schools with a $1 million gift from Andrew Carnegie, the steel mogul and philanthropist of the Gilded Age. In 1967, the training institute merged with a scientific research center endowed by Pittsburgh’s other wealthy family, the Mellons, to form Carnegie Mellon. But that day, Gates’s audience was so taken by his speech that most of their questions at the end were about careers in philanthropy rather than technology.
It was a stark change from Gates’s visit to the campus four years earlier, when he had stopped by to talk to students about computer science. By 2004, Gates had already begun to focus on philanthropy in a very public way. That year, the Gates Foundation donated $20 million for a new science center at Carnegie Mellon. Called the Gates Center, the futuristic looking building, with a zinc exterior, took five years to build and houses the school’s undergraduate computer science programs. But Gates didn’t have a halo quite yet. If anything, he was still linked closely to Microsoft. At the end of that talk, the Q&A with students got a little contentious, with many of them quizzing Gates about Microsoft and its business tactics, and why it sought to crush Silicon Valley companies.
“He gave the talk in the same room, but in that first talk it wasn’t Bill Gates the philanthropist,” recalled Jared Cohon, then the president of Carnegie Mellon, who introduced Gates to the audience. “He was viewed by much of the student body as the emperor of evil empires.” By 2008, though, Gates’s image transition to philanthropist was complete. And so to mark both his second career and the venue he was speaking at, Cohon brought onstage a unique thank-you gift: one of the original desk chairs that Carnegie—whose writings on philanthropy deeply influenced Gates’s thinking—had used in his office at Carnegie Steel. The rather modest wooden chair was accompanied by a black-and-white photograph of Carnegie at his desk. “We thought it would be fitting to connect you, the greatest philanthropist of the twenty-first century, with the greatest philanthropist of the twentieth century,” Cohon said to Gates as he presented him with the chair. It was one of the few occasions when Gates, who typically doesn’t accept gifts, appeared delighted. “I got the impression that Bill was very pleased by that,” said Cohon, who stepped down as president in 2013. “He is not very demonstrative.”
In 1999, as Gates approached his twenty-fifth year running the company he had cofounded and tended to for the better part of his life, his energy was leaching away. He had been fighting the government for more than a year, and every arrow loosed upon him hurt his morale. Reporters, commentators, and Microsoft rivals employed an arsenal of increasingly harsh adjectives to describe Gates. They called him arrogant, disdainful, indignant, angry, snide, condescending, petulant, contemptuous, truculent, evasive, hyperaggressive, despotic, bullying, an enfant terrible of the tech industry, and a robber baron. His three-day deposition at Microsoft’s antitrust trial the prior year had been disastrous. If Gates was exhausted, Microsoft was desperate. The company’s top executives were distracted by the government’s attack. It was fighting the worst public relations crisis in its history, and unsure how to fight back.
Microsoft was no novice when it came to dealing with the media. When Pam Edstrom joined Microsoft in 1984 as its first director of public relations, she took the raw material of Gates’s personality and presented him as a nerdy genius out to change the world, putting him at the center of the company’s origin story.2 In some cases, spiffing up the Microsoft boss meant doing so literally—down to brushing his hair and polishing his glasses. But as Microsoft’s heft in the computer industry grew, its public relations strategy was geared toward building buzz around new company offerings. It often involved parceling out “exclusives” and access to Gates, typically by inviting small groups of reporters for briefings where they could ask questions of him directly. Trips to the Microsoft campus, and even tours of the Gateses’ home, kept the mainstream press engaged. Microsoft arranged overnight getaways called “pajama parties” for reporters to Gates’s vacation compound in Washington’s scenic Hood Canal area. Microsoft’s media team also reached out to technology-focused publications, whose reporters—early “influencers”—built excitement around its software by testing new versions early.
Gates himself was an astute, if not enthusiastic, user of the press to promote Microsoft’s products. He understood that public appearances and stories about the company served as important tools for recruiting top talent. He regularly monitored the media’s coverage of Microsoft; as he pored through monthly reports on the state of the business, he would study press write-ups of the company’s products, including individual applications like its Excel spreadsheet, down to the last word. If it looked like a reporter missed the point, the PR person in charge would get the critique. But because he placed communications strictly in the business toolkit, Gates rarely pitched himself as part of the story. Many reporters from the 1990s recalled his barely concealed irritation at having to talk to them. Sometimes, he could be condescending or sarcastic; one recalled a press conference where a fellow reporter asked Gates why flat-panel televisions were becoming all the rage. “Because they’re cool,” Gates responded. Another time, during the antitrust trial, a reporter asked Gates if his budding philanthropic activity was a public relations scheme. “If it was, I’d find a more cost-effective way to do it,” Gates said dryly.
It’s not that Gates was unaware of his shortcomings. In August 1997, as Steve Jobs strode around the stage at Apple’s Macworld event in Boston, electrifying the audience with his forceful, clear, and magnetic delivery, Gates sat in one of Microsoft’s television studios thousands of miles away in Seattle, watching his nemesis. Jobs had just returned to Apple as its interim chief executive through the company’s acquisition of NeXT and was about to announce a partnership between Apple and Microsoft. Gates, who had refused to travel to Boston to join Jobs onstage, was to make a brief speech via satellite link. As he observed the loose-limbed ease with which Jobs spoke to the audience—the pauses at just the right moments, the speech dappled with humor, the sheer performative theater of it—Gates was filled with admiration and envy. He turned to a colleague and asked: “How does he do that?,” recalled a person who heard the exchange.
Gates could never capture for Microsoft what Jobs did for Apple. But he was everywhere, keynoting big tech conferences like the Consumer Electronics Show. If he had to tolerate personal questions in the name of pushing the Microsoft brand, or if he thought his presence would help sell the “product,” he would put up with it, said one former Microsoft executive who worked closely with Gates. Edstrom, who by then had cofounded her own public relations firm, was one of the few people whose feedback on his media performance Gates respected, partly because she was direct. One former Microsoft employee in the communications department recalled Edstrom sharing an email she had sent Gates about an interview he had fumbled. Edstrom’s feedback to Gates was specific, and she had marked the interview transcript with comments like, “here’s where you lost the reporter,” the former employee said. “There was no coddling or sugarcoating.”
However, even Edstrom—and Microsoft’s vast in-house communications team—couldn’t convince Gates that his thin-skinned but dismissive attitude toward media questions about the antitrust trial only fed into the case. In 1994, when the government began poking into Microsoft’s practices with vigor, Gates appeared on television for an interview, but walked off the set in a huff when the CBS News anchor Connie Chung pushed him on the matter—although not before demonstrating that he could indeed jump over a chair, as he had been known to do. Microsoft didn’t immediately go on the counteroffensive. Instead, people in Gates’s inner circle, including direct reports, advisors, and communications officers, deferred to his wishes, embarking on a PR strategy to dismiss the government’s stance and unleash a campaign designed to argue on the merits of the case, rather than counter the image that had been forming of the Microsoft leader in the media. Over the span of five years starting in 1995, Gates went from being seen as a brilliant entrepreneur and innovator to being portrayed primarily as a ruthless businessman. People may have fallen in love with the computer nerd on his way to stardom, but they hated the hard-nosed businessman with his unrelenting desire to obliterate the competition. A ravenous press couldn’t get enough of the narrative. In 1998, the Microsoft cofounder achieved the heights of pop culture notoriety when he showed up in an episode of The Simpsons, telling Homer Simpson he intended to buy his online business rather than risk competing with it, even though he didn’t know what it made. About three years later, the actor Tim Robbins played a Gates-like character in the action thriller Antitrust, about a young programmer and the menacing billionaire founder of the company he worked at. Although the movie was panned by critics and flopped at the box office, the very fact that his alleged villainy became Hollywood fodder showed how the theater of the trial had seeped into the wider world. The king of software had been dethroned—swiftly, embarrassingly, and rather gleefully—in the court of public opinion.
Eventually, Microsoft’s despairing public relations team decided to launch a media blitz aimed at salvaging Gates’s reputation. The company hired Mark Penn, a longtime political strategist who had been an aide to President Bill Clinton. Penn was skilled at polling and applying political strategies to determine public opinion. He specialized in negative ads, which were designed to sow doubt about the target. But initial polling showed that Gates had a better public reputation than Justice Department officials and the media did, according to a person with knowledge of the campaign. Gates was “the ultimate Horatio Alger story” in people’s minds, according to this person, not unlike Henry Ford who was able to develop a product that became universal—and therefore deserved to be the world’s richest person. “The robber-baron view was a little overstated in the public eye,” this person added.
The polling also found that people knew little about the Microsoft cofounder or his family, his charitable giving, or his thoughts on American innovation. Rather than pursue negative advertising, Penn and his team focused instead on what they deemed Gates’s positive attributes. They began to fashion an image of Gates centered on three things: family, philanthropy, and innovation. By then, Gates was a new father and had stepped up his philanthropic efforts. With his prognostications about the future of computing and the web, he had also come to be regarded as a tech visionary. Gates wasn’t initially on board, but the pollster and spinmeister got through to him the only way anyone could: He appealed to his intellect and made a rational, data-based case. Penn would patiently explain to Gates that people were making judgments about him based not on the facts but on his behavior. It was only after he and his pollsters showed Gates data charting the changes in public mood that Gates realized that his behavior had contributed to the anti-Microsoft sentiment. Gates “didn’t care about his image” until that moment, said a person involved in those conversations. “He was like a lot of people. Until Washington comes knocking, you’re just doing your business, you’re not focused on the external world at all.” Once Gates understood that interacting with the media was essentially a game where you could score points based on performance, and the data reflected that thesis, his competitive nature kicked in. Gates would sit through hours of media training on how to respond to tough questions by journalists. Rather than responding to their questions literally, he practiced saying what he wanted them to take away. Concerned with being portrayed as “dehumanized,” he once asked a member of his public relations coterie if they could make him “more human.”
On February 5, 1998, Gates was in Brussels, on his way to meet European Union regulators about Microsoft, when he was pied in the face by two people. Photographers for U.S. newspapers paid thousands of dollars for the image of a surprised Gates wiping cream off his face and glasses. Just three days later, Gates made a day tour of Silicon Valley, where he said he was “humble and respectful.”3 He appeared on TV in an interview with Barbara Walters, crooning “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to his young daughter. He appeared in ads for golf clubs. He offered mea culpas on the Charlie Rose show. Microsoft ran essays in national newspapers, penned by several of its senior executives, defending the need for innovation. Gates himself appeared in a series of ads calling for the “freedom to innovate.” In 2000, as the government pushed Microsoft to break up into two parts, Gates appeared in several television commercials for the company, including one that came to be known as the “blue sweater” ad. In the brief commercial, Gates, dressed in the kind of V-necked sweater that would become his signature, is talking about the software giant’s products. The New York Times described it as a “visual antidote” to the way Microsoft and Gates were being portrayed in the press.4
To squeeze out some additional image points, Microsoft’s media team also began highlighting the occasional philanthropic gifts that Gates and French Gates had begun to make. In 1994, Gates had bought a codex of Leonardo da Vinci’s for a record $30.8 million, one of his first billionaire purchases. The 72-page manual, which Gates named Codex Leicester, contained the Italian Renaissance painter and scientist’s elaborate drawings and musings on the science of water, including on tides and how they connected with the earth and moon. The codex had been on a museum tour since the Gates purchase. When it made its way to the Seattle art museum, Microsoft communications employees jumped at the chance to hold a Q&A with students where Gates could tell them about his interest in hydraulics.
The press, however, was buying none of it. The blue-sweater commercial elicited derisive comparisons to Mister Rogers, the kindly and beloved television show host famous for his colorful V-necked cardigans who reigned over children’s public television for decades. Cynical writers called it a blatantly obvious attempt to launder the billionaire’s image and reputation. Writing in The New York Times, the columnist Frank Rich didn’t mince his words: “As a hard-knuckled tycoon he was at least true to his arrogant self,” Rich wrote. “Now he is morphing into another phony full-time actor in the sentimental P.R. pageant that has become American public life. He must turn himself into a lovable character that the entire populace will adore, if that’s what it takes to deflect the Feds.”5 In his book on the Microsoft antitrust trial, Ken Auletta notes that Gates’s charitable activities became “significantly more visible” after the company settled with the Department of Justice.6 By the following year, Auletta writes, “Bill Gates became America’s most generous living philanthropist.” When the Gates Foundation made a $100 million donation to establish a children’s vaccine fund, Auletta wrote: “The Gates Foundation… had made many generous gifts in the past, but what was unusual about this gift was that it was made in such a public way.”
Gates did receive some favorable coverage. In the August 1999 issue of Newsweek magazine, the tech journalist Steven Levy portrayed Gates as a family man “who just wants to have fun.”7 As Gates told Levy, “When somebody’s successful, people leap to simple explanations that might make sense. So you get these myths. People love to have any little story. Yes, I’m intense. I’m energetic. I like to understand what our market position is. But then it gets turned into this—the ultra-competitor. It’s somewhat dehumanizing. I read that and say, ‘I don’t know that guy.’ ”
In early 2000, Gates announced that he would step down as Microsoft’s chief executive, but would stay on as chairman, a role he finally stepped down from in 2014. Microsoft created for him the role of “chief software architect,” which allowed Gates to stay close to software development, but also yanked him out of overseeing the company’s operations as it tried to remake its public image. Despite its dominance in the software industry, the antitrust trial and focus on Gates’s public behavior had become enough of a challenge that Microsoft risked losing clients and employees and found it harder to attract new talent. Understanding that he needed to get out of the way, Gates told the press that he would focus “100 percent” of his time on software, which is what he liked best. He would also make time for his philanthropy. One former Microsoft employee recalled asking a confidante of the billionaire why Gates had decided to step down. “Bill feels like he’s at the top of a very narrow peak, and the only way is down,” the confidante replied. His switch to philanthropy once again elicited comparisons with Rockefeller, who had turned to prolific charitable acts partly to change his reputation as a hard-charging, extractive monopolist. Philanthropy was always something Gates was going to turn to; he had grown up in a family that encouraged charitable giving. On the eve of his marriage, his mother, Mary Gates, had written his then fiancée French Gates a letter about the couple’s obligation to do something bigger with their vast fortune, which ended with the words: “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.” However, the timing had always been undecided. Gates wouldn’t acknowledge it at the time, but in recent years he has admitted that the bad publicity surrounding the Microsoft trial hastened his move to philanthropy.8
Gates started his philanthropic career with conventional donations in the early 1990s, some years after he became a billionaire. One of his earliest gifts was in 1991, when he gave $12 million to the University of Washington to start a new department of molecular biotechnology. It was, at the time, the single largest commitment by an individual to the Seattle-based institution. As part of the donation, the university created the William Gates III endowed chair in biomedical sciences. He also made donations to Stanford University and United Way, the nonprofit his mother had been closely involved with. In 1995, a year after he married French Gates, the couple gave $10 million to the University of Washington in honor of Gates’s mother who had recently passed away, and who had been a major influence on his thinking about charitable giving. The prior year, he had started the William H. Gates foundation with a gift of $94 million, roping in his father, William Henry Gates Sr., to oversee it. The elder Gates, who died in 2020, was a longtime community leader and retired lawyer who ran the foundation’s activities from the basement of his house. The foundation initially focused on community development in the Pacific Northwest and health-related causes. It also looked at funding curricula in U.S. schools. Three years later, Gates recruited a Microsoft executive, Patty Stonesifer, to start a second foundation with a primary focus on wiring the nation’s libraries. At the time, many American libraries, especially those in smaller communities, were still without internet access. Stonesifer oversaw a program to provide hardware, software, and training to libraries around the country. Choosing to support libraries was partly a nod to Carnegie, whose money funded the creation of a network of more than 2,500 libraries around the country—and whose ideas on giving back had shaped Gates’s thinking. But his philanthropic efforts remained ad hoc for a few more years. The former couple donated $20 million to Duke University, French Gates’s alma mater. They gave money to the Seattle Public Library and the city’s theater endowment fund. Gates made other gifts sporadically, including $2 million to aid refugee health and $50 million to PATH, a Seattle-based global health organization, to help with cancer research.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation came to life at the turn of the century after Gates merged his two separate philanthropic efforts and added his then wife’s name. Its initial bequest was about $22 billion through transfers of Microsoft stock, which meant that the foundation had to give away hundreds of millions of dollars annually in keeping with U.S. law governing nonprofits. As Gates often did when tackling a new subject or challenge, he dived into philanthropy with the same intensity that he had used to build Microsoft. He read endlessly, learning about the intricacies of diseases, poverty, and healthcare in developing countries. He met with leaders in the field and sought insights from experts. He fired off emails at all hours to the small group of staffers at the foundation. He flew to New York to meet with leaders at the United Nations. He sought partnerships and collaborations with other foundations and corporations, all the while learning from their operations. Doors opened easily for the world’s richest man and business legend. People lined up to meet him, and they welcomed his interest and his dollars.
When Trevor Neilson joined the Gates Foundation in 2000 as its first spokesman, one of his tasks was to create a firewall between the foundation and Microsoft to ensure that the budding organization could build an identity separate from the company. At the same time, Microsoft had to reprogram its communications strategy following the antitrust trial, ensuring that announcements from the company didn’t collide with foundation-related news. A former staffer in the Clinton White House who had returned to his hometown of Seattle to work with the city’s public schools system, Neilson tried to shape the foundation’s image around Gates, taking the essential elements of his approach to philanthropy—his reliance on metrics to establish why donations were needed, as well as his desire to be an engaged partner rather than a passive donor—and fashion it into a pitch. “I had to reverse engineer the themes that Bill Gates spoke about to create a message and story around the foundation’s focus,” Neilson said. Although he left the foundation after a few years and parlayed his Gates Foundation credentials into a philanthropy advisory business, Neilson said Gates never once specifically asked him to polish his public image. “All this was driven by this profound sense of what is right and what is wrong, in terms of equity and justice.”
No sooner had he started his new career than the accolades began pouring in. In 2001, the Gates family was presented with the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in recognition of their commitment to giving. Four years later, Gates, French Gates, and Bono, the rockstar, were named Time magazine’s Persons of the Year for their contributions to global poverty relief. Gates had first met Bono at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2002. By then, the U2 front man was already a well-known activist working on improving the financial health of people in Africa through an alliance called Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa (DATA), and his legendary band had won more than ten Grammy awards. But Gates, the newly minted philanthropist, was slowly discovering the world beyond Microsoft, and had never heard of the singer or the band before then. Later, DATA, and another campaign led by Bono, would merge into an organization called ONE, with funds from the Gates Foundation and led by one of its executives. Gates’s joint philanthropy with Bono also sparked a friendship. In Seattle for a U2 concert in May 2005, Bono stayed with the billionaire, who attended the band’s concert along with “20,000 screaming fans.”9 However, despite their yearslong friendship, Gates admitted in 2020 that he knew very little about Bono’s life growing up until he read Surrender, the singer’s memoir. In 2005, Gates also received an honorary knighthood from Buckingham Palace, joining other Americans such as Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York; the movie director Steven Spielberg; and former President Ronald Reagan, who had received the dubbing before. The following summer, Gates was absent from Microsoft’s annual meeting for the first time since the company’s founding, on sabbatical in Africa.10 His full-time role at Microsoft was shrinking by design. And his pivot to philanthropy was well on its way. By 2008, the man who had been labeled a rapacious capitalist a decade earlier was calling on the world’s leaders at Davos to practice “benevolent capitalism.”11
Today, the world has a completely refurbished image of Gates, the jagged edges of the monopolist softened by the halo of the philanthropist. His uniform of trousers and a sweater, worn over a collared shirt, signals an everyman look. Although he owns two Gulfstream jets, Gates does not appear to embody his wealth. His hair is grayer but still messy and slightly disheveled. His skin is now more tan than wan, but his glasses still appear more functional than fashionable. The image-making around his philanthropy is endless, an iconography building around a billionaire. There he is, learning about grain production from a farmer in Nigeria. Administering the polio vaccine to an infant in India. Rocking in his chair and chewing on his glasses onstage as he ponders a question about math education in American schools. Out in the field, dressed in khakis and a plaid shirt, listening intently to a community activist. Sitting on a colorful rug on the dusty earth with French Gates, knees folded, deep in conversation with a woman holding her baby. Shaking hands with a head of state. Getting “trained” by Roger Federer ahead of a charity tennis match to raise funds for Africa. Playing finger puppet soccer with David Beckham in an Instagram post as the two discuss the challenges of addressing malaria. Engaging in a fireside chat about growth—from bacteria to babies, from economies to empires—with one of his heroes, the Czech Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil. Pushing companies and governments to take climate change seriously. Gates’s star power, wealth, and influence are so potent that he has become a sought-after voice on global health and development, vaccines, viruses, pandemics, sanitation, education reform, climate change, philanthropy, and, of course, technology, including the emerging field of artificial intelligence. His skill at digesting and explaining complicated topics—he once took an online MIT course on solid state physics, even doing the homework—and his ability to envision and map how the future might play out have made him a roving scientist-statesman of sorts.12 Gates can come across as professorial in his public appearances, but people who have interacted with him offstage say that he is often in student mode, deferring to the expertise of academics, constantly learning and responding to new information. Occasionally, he steps into the role of Cassandra, as he did in 2015 when he appeared to predict the coronavirus pandemic by remarking on the likelihood of such an event, and its threat to humanity.
Gates is not above stunts to make a bigger point. At a TED conference in 2009, he unsealed a jar of mosquitoes onstage to make the point that the insects killed dozens of people in poor, tropical countries because they can carry the parasite that causes malaria. (The mosquitoes were shipped from a lab at the University of California, Berkeley, and spent a night in the hotel room of a foundation employee before making their way onstage.) Gates reassured the rather unsettled audience that those mosquitoes were not infected. In 2018, he took a sealed jar of human feces with him onstage in Beijing at an expo about reinventing the toilet. The stunt was meant to draw attention to the problem of open-air defecation; for years, the foundation had made grants to researchers to develop innovative toilet technology.
The evolution of his image might seem to be a natural byproduct of his activities. The reality is anything but. Rather, it is the outcome of a yearslong campaign by a small army of communications professionals, at both the Gates Foundation and Gates Ventures, the billionaire’s personal investment and image management firm, who are paid to shape the public persona of Gates in a way that elevates his stature to benefit his foundation’s goals and burnish his individual brand. The Microsoft cofounder’s very public image switch from an all-knowing, imperious boss of a technology giant to an earnest student of the world and a thoughtful practitioner of philanthropy is largely a manufactured one, according to several people with insight into those efforts. Gates isn’t someone who wakes up each morning thinking about how he comes across in public. If he has to speak to an audience, he’s more focused on rehearsing his talking points. If the day involves travel, he might be preoccupied with what’s in his book bag and the emails he needs to fire off. If there’s a meeting at the Gates Foundation, he’s lining up the questions he wants to ask and perhaps, the gaps of logic he wants to point out in a briefing document.
However, people in Gates’s orbit, including current and former advisors, foundation employees, and communications professionals, say that as a philanthropist, the billionaire is far more receptive to the importance of creating and controlling his media personality, and projecting certain attributes to sustain his personal brand, than he ever was at Microsoft, having learned that image management lesson the hard way. It took plenty of coaching and training to get Gates in shape for his role as front man for the foundation, people who worked with him said. The task was to “transition Bill’s profile from wealthy technologist to inspirational global leader,” according to internal documents from the time. There were rehearsals and run-throughs, mock Q&A sessions. Foundation employees had to remind him not to condescend to someone asking a question he found dumb, and to respond in broad brush strokes rather than the technical style that was his instinct. It also helped that he saw real returns: The more he put himself out there, the more positive feedback he got about his foundation’s work. “He liked the transformation of his image and the adulation for obvious reasons,” one former senior foundation employee said. “Rubbing shoulders with celebrities and heads of state, the king’s welcome all over the world, people desperate to hear his opinion. He liked the impact of putting himself out there.” The foundation and its mission—which the former employee described as Gates’s “we can save the world” thinking—also resonated in a world exhausted by America’s protracted war in Iraq and the great financial crisis of 2008.
The media was largely receptive to the new Gates. News stories breathlessly charted his evolution as a public intellectual on global health, disease, education, and climate change. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal published a story about Gates’s “think week.”13 Gates would take similar trips while at Microsoft, but the peek into this bit of his life helped to crystallize the brainiac image. The technology columnist David Pogue found himself confronting the “apparent contradiction between Bill Gates, the merciless businessman with ambitions for world domination, and Bill Gates, the compassionate scientist whose goal is to save millions of lives.”14 The 2019 documentary Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, a three-part film on Netflix, treats Gates’s brain like a national treasure, juxtaposing events from the billionaire’s childhood with his philanthropic endeavors. Directed by Davis Guggenheim, who made An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for Superman, the film received mixed reviews. Some found it inspiring. Others dismissed it as hagiography.
Some called it the gold prize. For years, some employees in the Gates orbit had made it an informal goal to push their boss’s name for the Nobel Peace Prize. Gates and French Gates had won multiple public service laurels, including the highest honors from countries like India, so it wasn’t a stretch to eye the top prize. It was a “front and center” goal among some employees at Gates Ventures and the Gates Foundation to push Gates’s name periodically as a contender for the Nobel prize, according to several people who were aware of those conversations, although another person said he wasn’t aware of any specific strategy conversations during his time at Gates Ventures. There would be an open and ongoing conversation about how to massage Gates’s so-called brand to appeal to the Nobel Prize committee, and about how the team could opportunistically use global health milestone moments—the potential eradication of polio, or breakthroughs in malaria research—where the foundation played a big role to create a media campaign about his candidacy.
At the Gates Foundation, it was more chatter and aspiration than a “ten-step plan,” according to one former senior employee of the foundation. Many saw such a prize as validation of the work they had signed up to do. It was especially buzzy as the foundation suddenly began playing an outsize role in global health and development, supercharged by Buffett’s decision in 2006 to turn over billions of dollars to its endowment. The Giving Pledge, the campaign started by Gates and Buffett in 2010 to get more billionaires to engage with philanthropy, put him on an even higher pedestal, coming as it did right after the financial crisis, which spotlighted the country’s widening economic inequality. “Everything was done with an eye to that goal,” said the former senior employee, referring to the Nobel prize. “That’s why we were positioning in the media and PR as we did. It boiled down to—the foundation is here to save the world, every life has equal value, and Bill is the front man.” Alex Reid, a spokeswoman for Gates Ventures, said, “There was never any goal or discussion about securing a Nobel Peace Prize for Bill or the Gates Foundation.”
The unofficial campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize may have been one reason why Gates met with Jeffrey Epstein at least once in 2013, according to media reports. Between 2011 and 2014, the Gates Foundation ran a highly visible campaign about its polio-related grant-making. Eradicating polio had been one of Gates’s biggest priorities and the foundation had partnered with Rotary International, the nonprofit that was leading those efforts. Foundation staffers were hoping their work would win them the honor. Epstein, who had cultivated a wide network of powerful people, told a former foundation employee that he could help the philanthropist win the award for his work to eradicate polio. In late March 2013, Thorbjørn Jagland, then the secretary general of the Council of Europe, a human rights organization, and chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, hosted a dinner for Gates at his official residence in Strasbourg, France. Gates had sought the meeting, Jagland said, to learn more about the European Pharmacopoeia, a body affiliated with the council that oversees quality control for medicines distributed across European markets. To Jagland, it seemed natural that the philanthropist would be interested in learning about the council’s work, and to the extent he knew, there was no other reason why Gates wanted to meet. Jagland, a former prime minister of Norway, said no one had put forth a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for Gates or the Gates Foundation that year, but he was given to believe that the billionaire brought Epstein to the dinner. “I don’t know why he brought Epstein with him, I was not informed in advance,” Jagland said. Asked about the meeting, Reid said that Gates had not brought Epstein to “a meeting with Jagland. If he was there, he was not invited by Bill, nor did he arrive with Bill.” Also present at the dinner were officials from the International Peace Institute in New York, an independent organization that sometimes works with the United Nations, and whose president, Terje Rød-Larsen, had had several interactions with Epstein. An influential Norwegian diplomat who played a central role in negotiating the Oslo Accords, Rød-Larsen was not at the 2013 dinner, but seven years later, he quit the peace institute after revelations that he had taken money from Epstein to support his work.15
High-profile individuals, such as celebrities, business and political leaders, and billionaires who maintain an active public presence, often hire public relations firms or pay staff to handle media queries. What’s revelatory about Gates Ventures is the highly organized and intricately detailed plan that goes into shaping and sustaining its founder’s public persona, and its evolution over time. The firm started as an entity called bgC3 LLC. The awkward name, made up on the fly by Gates’s assistant, consisted of his initials, the number “3,” which was a reference to his formal name William Gates III, and the letter “C” for “catalyst,” a word that stood for Gates’s belief that philanthropy was a catalyst for change. Today, it is a much more professional operation, with an office on the top floor of a building in Kirkland, Washington. Its severe marble, gray, and steel interiors are leavened with quirky touches—there is an installation of a periodic table in the lobby area—reflecting the sciencey interests of its founder.16 More than two dozen of its roughly 100 employees work full time to constantly shape, monitor, and polish Gates’s aura in the press, and fashion the positive aspects into a consistent, relatable brand across his various roles: entrepreneur, technologist, philanthropist, and family guy, or, as one former employee put it, “lovable nerd philanthropist.” Other key elements include casting Gates as a practical problem solver of social ills and a strategic philanthropist who invented a new standard of rigor in the field. It is all part of a meticulously planned campaign to build “brand fidelity” across the Gates empire and “exploit” social media channels to create positive attributes around the Gates brand. It was also designed to build engagement and activism around Gates’s pet causes and highlight the habits of his that fit in with the broader storylines essential to the marketing of his brand. By now, the public knows that the philanthropist is a prodigious reader and thinker. Gates always travels with a book bag containing his current reading, carried at a respectful distance by his security detail. One person formerly in Gates’s circle remembers having a discussion with him on meteorology, which the billionaire was trying to understand to aid the foundation’s agricultural efforts in Africa; he later happened to peek into Gates’s book bag to find three books on the subject. He has been known to spend at least a couple of hours walking on a treadmill while reading up on subjects like astrophysics. He reads The Economist magazine from cover to cover every week. The specific details might not make their way to the wider world, but the habits are valuable raw material for his media handlers. Gates’s deep insight into technology and science, and his innate ability to map out the future, has also meant selling him as a prophet and seer with a polymathic brain. When Gates talks about artificial intelligence as the next leap in technology, his media handlers want to promote those aspects. “All the problems I take on require a lot of participation, whether it’s scientists, or governments, or brilliant people in the field,” Gates told The Wall Street Journal in 2019, reflecting on his high visibility.17 “They won’t succeed unless you can talk to broad audiences and shift perceptions.” It has become less uncomfortable—but no easier—for Gates to deal with people in public settings, according to people who have dealt with him. Yet the decades-old mainstream media narrative about him as an awkward, sometimes robotic man unable to connect easily with an audience hasn’t faded, and his team is constantly seeking to counter that storyline.
The rise of social media platforms gave Gates a direct way to communicate with his fans. In 2010, Gates launched his blog, GatesNotes, extending a tradition he had started the prior year of writing an annual letter for the foundation. The letter, which Gates began writing at the encouragement of Buffett, whose own annual letters to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway have become a treat for investors, became very popular with readers. GatesNotes is a more casual platform for his musings, book recommendations, and updates on his work and thinking, typically written with a staff member. The posts are written in an accessible and engaging style, often laced with humor. Gates Ventures employees commission polls and surveys, usually called “sentiment analysis” in the public relations industry, to gauge what people wanted to hear from Gates about on GatesNotes. The GatesNotes blog was built to “dimensionalize” him, to give readers a better sense of his personality and make him appear more well-rounded, according to one person who worked on these strategies. Once, Gates posted an item in August 2022 about his tips for solving Wordle, the popular word puzzle, but said that in the end, he preferred Nerdle, which calls for a player to solve equations by guessing digits instead of letters. Typically, one of the blog’s writers will put together a post and send it to Gates, who reads it in his spare time—sometimes on flights, or in between books—and sends it back with his annotations. His book recommendations, often posted on GatesNotes, have become so influential that in 2016, The New York Times labeled Gates the “billionaire book critic.”18 Gates has even launched a podcast and video channel called “Unconfuse Me with Bill Gates,” in which he invites guests whose expertise helps him understand a topic better. In August 2023, he invited Questlove, the musician and entrepreneur, to discuss the future of food; earlier guests included the comedians Seth Rogen and Lauren Miller, who discussed the role of humor in raising awareness of diseases like Alzheimer’s.
Gates is also a star on Reddit, the online community where people discuss everything from stocks to news to sports. He has participated in at least 10 of Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” sessions, which involve an online Q&A between Reddit users and persons of interest and stature. The AMAs, as they are known, have provided everyday fans with a level of accessibility to the billionaire that might never happen otherwise. Gates has answered questions about the cellphone he uses (a Samsung Galaxy Fold 3), what his favorite snacks are (he doesn’t snack much because if snack foods were lying around he would eat them), if he ever makes himself a peanut butter sandwich (he makes tomato soup sometimes, but isn’t much of a sandwich man), is he a beer drinker (no, he only drinks light beer at baseball games to “get with the vibe”), and so on and so forth. There are questions about his views on climate change and whether he reads philosophy. It’s a digital version of a king holding court with his people.
The unceasing rhythm of spit-and-polish has helped Gates sustain a media voice that is earnest, curious, playful, serious, and relatable. In speeches and articles, he communicates with an unshakeable, almost childlike faith and optimism, studded with scientific facts and figures. It’s a distinct “here’s what I learned today, let me share it with you” approach. He is very much the socially conscious, civic-minded billionaire, but also the goofy elder statesman who dresses as one of Santa’s elves putting books in the mail for his friends. He appears in carefully edited YouTube videos, such as the one in which he learns how to make baked chicken from Seattle’s teacher of the year in 2019. For Buffett’s ninetieth birthday in 2020, Gates’s team shot a video of him baking an Oreo cookie cake for his friend. There was enough of the dorky personal stuff to make him an everyman (but a star), accessible (but only via social media), and grandfatherly (beyond reproach). In 2022, he appeared on his Instagram account with a festive holiday scarf wrapped around his neck, dropping off five of his favorite books of the year in free libraries around the world. Some of the downright silly videos were produced by Gates’s media team to “humanize the guy,” one person said, although some people on the media team aren’t quite sure that they worked.
He also displays flashes of dad charm in interviews, talking about how his three children get frustrated that he still uses email as a primary form of communication, and that he is so large-screen focused, and how he must remind himself to check Instagram and WhatsApp because each child prefers to communicate via a different platform. When his elder daughter, Jennifer, who got married in 2022, gave birth to her first child in 2023, his social media feed carried photos of him holding his first grandchild. In his 2022 annual letter, he talked about how typing the words “I’ll become a grandfather next year,” made him “emotional”—a word that people rarely, if ever, associate with Gates.19 Not long after, Gates showed up in an Instagram video post made by his team, where he is looking through a stack of made-up children’s book titles. Among them: Robotics for Babies, Climate Change for Babies, and Pandemics for Babies. “Deciding first book to read to my granddaughter,” the caption reads. In the end, he picks I Am a Bunny by Richard Scarry and looks at the audience with a smile. The journalist Theodore Schleifer, musing about the damage to Gates’s image after the bad press that followed his divorce, wrote in 2021 that much of the philanthropist’s “soft power” came from his “seemingly unimpeachable profile.”20
Gates’s political views and leanings are rarely part of the public sketch. That’s partly because he frames issues through a technological and scientific lens, but also because it is essential to the foundation’s work that he be seen as above politics. In interviews, Gates has described himself as a centrist who has steered clear of party politics partly because it would hurt his philanthropy. He has made the occasional donation to political causes in his home state of Washington. In 1993, he publicly opposed propositions to curb state spending, allying with teachers and healthcare officials and contributing $80,000 to the campaign. When he has taken a position on fraught or politicized topics, he often uses carefully considered words and only occasionally uses the digital town square of X, formerly known as Twitter, to advertise his views. He has said he supports higher marginal tax rates for the wealthy and that a lower capital gains tax rate is not ideal. He took aim at the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Before the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, reversing the constitutional right to an abortion, Gates said it would be devastating for the country, adding that he supported a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her healthcare.
Each year between 2014 and 2019, Gates was the “most admired man in the world,” according to YouGov polls. (He was replaced by Barack Obama in 2020 and 2021.) As of the first quarter of 2023, Gates was as famous as President Joe Biden on YouGov’s list of public figures and ranked just below Biden in a measure of popularity. Such polls were often moments of celebration among Gates Ventures employees, worth flagging to Gates himself. In a 2021 survey of billionaires during the pandemic, 55 percent of Americans told the news publication Vox in a poll that they had a positive opinion of Gates. That was far higher than any of the other billionaires the survey identified as popular and having total recall in the public mind, including Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. Gates’s image transformation to optimistic, populist billionaire was complete.
Every year, Gates—and, until she left, French Gates—would hold multiple meetings with executives of the Gates Foundation to approve plans and budgets, and review strategies. One of the highlights was the annual strategy review meeting, where the two of them listened to employee presentations about how well a program was working and whether adjustments needed to be made to improve their chances of success. For many, the meeting might be the only direct opportunity to interact with, and impress, Gates and French Gates. Employees also felt the pressure at these meetings to showcase their accomplishments so that they could defend their budgets. Several former senior executives who attended strategy review meetings recalled how, in the days leading up to them, the office atmosphere felt almost carnival-like, but suffused with dread. Employees rushed around preparing presentations frantically, reviewing their work and readying themselves for a possible inquisition by Gates.
The meetings themselves were spectacles, some attendees recalled; one described them as “almost comical.” They were usually held in a big room with a seating pattern. Strict etiquette was followed. One former senior executive who participated in many of the meetings said they had the feel of a king holding court, as though Gates were Louis XIV and the employees were courtiers bowing and scraping before him in Versailles, hoping to earn their ruler’s favor. Another recalled how, as executives were called upon to present to the former couple, highlighting what their team had done the previous year and how closely their work hewed to the strategies and priorities of the foundation, people would scrutinize Gates’s expressions. The slightest hint of a smile or a nod could mean that he approved; an impassive face could mean he didn’t. Gates and French Gates followed the presentations closely, usually saving questions for the end. Once the meeting ended, and people went back to their offices and desks, they would dissect Gates’s questions and expressions for days, often celebrating if they concluded that they had impressed their boss, a third former attendee said. To this person, it seemed that many employees were motivated more by Gates’s praise—sometimes, even the absence of opprobrium was seen as validation—than by the success of their grant-making. “Sometimes, the interpretation of what Gates wanted could take up hours of back and forth among the directors and teams,” this person said. “I felt we were spending more time managing up than working to meet the needs of the people.” Criticism was not valued in a place “where personal stakes are too high for anyone to stick their necks out.”
More than two decades after its founding, the internal culture of the foundation remains one of deference, where hundreds of employees tiptoe around Gates, afraid to disagree and eager to do his bidding. If anything, its deferential culture has become ossified along with the multiple layers of bureaucracy and processes. People who left more than a decade ago describe a place not too different from those who left within the last two years. One recently departed employee observed that people at the foundation fall into three types: consiglieres who bow to Gates; young aspirants who are awed by him; and the skeptics who find Gates domineering and eventually leave. After the divorce, one person who advises the foundation on media strategy said that there were instead two power centers—Gates and French Gates—and employees were increasingly torn between the two. The former couple sought to maintain a professional relationship, giving themselves at least two years to see if they could work together, with the understanding that French Gates would leave if they couldn’t. In May 2024, she cut her ties to the foundation, saying that she wanted to chart her own course in philanthropy.
Gates can be imperious in strategy meetings with small groups of senior executives, launching into a topic at length without seeking their input. He might be censorious, say, of an employee who didn’t cite the source of a statistic in a document provided to him. It’s not surprising that leaders of governments and companies and large entities have large staff paid to deliver things just as their bosses would like—no tomatoes in a sandwich, double-spaced briefing documents, no phone calls after 8 P.M. “Gates and Melinda weren’t unique in how they were handled,” said one outside public relations professional who has worked with the foundation. “A lot of clients get treated like royalty. It’s like Succession,” the person said, referring to the hit HBO show about a scheming media mogul and his children. “People scurrying around with clipboards, but also that these guys are really busy, and you’re given a meeting spot, so you have to know going in what your meeting is about.”
What comes through about Gates for many is the fear he inspires for a number of things: for the fact that he and French Gates ran an organization without accountability to outside shareholders or other stakeholders; for the fact of his brilliance and fame that many find intimidating; and for the type of arrogant behavior that colleagues of Gates from his Microsoft days might find familiar, but that terrifies those who work for him. Those who have worked for Gates at both Microsoft and the foundation point out that Gates’s behavior hasn’t changed much, but it was more acceptable in Microsoft’s competitive culture; the foundation is full of people from the more genteel and collegial culture of the international development and academic communities. This dissonance between his public image and private persona led many foundation employees to remark in private that outwardly, Gates is a global statesman and inwardly, he is an absolute monarch.
“He’s the scariest person in the world to provide a recommendation or briefing to because he scans a page and comes back at you saying something like, ‘what you say in the footnote on page 9 does not match with the footnote on page 28,’ ” one former foundation employee said. The low hum of fear was a constant presence inside the foundation, in case an email came in from the boss asking about a grant application, or he pointed out something in your field of expertise that you had overlooked. If Gates sent an email asking for something to be done, there might be a flurry of as many as 100 emails among employees—after taking him off the chain—trying to decipher what he meant, why he meant it, and how they should follow through. “Something that was a foregone conclusion to him required a lot of back and forth to understand,” said another employee, who found it almost laughable that people walked around on tenterhooks. Because of his bias toward numbers, Gates often wouldn’t greenlight projects that didn’t have enough data to support a use of funds, creating a conundrum for employees and, in the eyes of one former executive, reducing the ambition of philanthropy.
There was no handbook for how to deal with the foundation’s cofounders, especially with Gates. Those who know Gates better said that the billionaire respects people who come in doing their homework and hates it when people waste his time. A person who repeats information from a document already sent to Gates at a meeting will be the target of his ire. But Gates is also known to respect a good argument that a person could defend. He is somewhat mellower now, and people who have engaged with him more recently said that both French Gates and Buffett had a hand in showing him that it was possible to be a strong leader and be cordial. Still, many people spent years bristling at Gates’s approach. Ultimately, it came down to an individual’s level of tolerance. Some brushed it off. Others tried to outargue Gates or couldn’t stand him. And there were yet others who kept their mouths shut but seethed silently. It was particularly challenging for those who joined the foundation at the peak of their careers, hired for their expertise—the very expertise that Gates appeared to disregard and enjoy outsmarting someone on. Often, during a meeting, he would keep probing about why a suggested solution was the best one, to the point that it frustrated senior executives. One former senior employee compared the style of discussion to the Socratic method, often used in law schools by professors who push students to reasoning through dialogue. But while professors are great at asking questions in a thought-provoking way, Gates was far less polished in his delivery, and as a result, conversations with him could be an unpleasant experience, the former employee said. “It’s like using the Socratic method… with an autocrat.”