Bill’s great adventures - what the tech billionaire did for fun

Rumours abound of Gates’ ‘clumsy’ advances on women, and a boss who memorised employee number plates to ensure they stayed late.

Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates (main picture), dancing with revellers at a launch party (bottom right) is said to have sought marital advice from Jeffrey Epstein (top right). Pictures: AFP/Getty/AFP

The most telling of the new revelations about Bill Gates’s conduct during his long personal and professional partnership with his wife, Melinda, is in the message he sent to one of his female employees at Microsoft. This was in 2006, 12 years into his marriage to Melinda, who was then the parent pulling more weight, looking after their three young children. He had already had an affair with another female employee in 2000, which, said his spokesman, “ended amicably”.

According to a New York Times investigation Gates was casting around again. He saw one of his female employees give a presentation and immediately sent an email asking her to have dinner with him. He seems to have anticipated that this might come across as sleazy, but, being the innovator that he is, had come up with a novel solution. “If this makes you uncomfortable,” Gates’s email goes on with perverse gentlemanliness, “pretend it never happened.”

“Pretend it never happened” is the moral equivalent of the delete button. This is a tech mogul fantasy: one click and it is gone, expunged from the record. Human brains without that upgrade might quietly insist, “But it did happen,” yet it is easy to see why one of the world’s richest men is drawn to this approach.

Bill Gates descibed himself as ‘a minor wizard’. Picture: Supplied Contributed

Seven of the ten richest men in the world are tech moguls. From Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook to Larry Page of Google, they create products that are about, and have become our means of, communication, information and editing thereof. They are powerful enough to shape the reality of the inhabitants of most of the planet. That power may naturally lead to distortions closer to home, for example in the events leading up to Melinda Gates’s filing for divorce this month.

It is time to reacquaint ourselves with the “reality distortion field”, a leadership ability that is spoken of with reverence in Silicon Valley. The term was first applied to Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, by an early colleague, and because we are dealing with the outer — bowl-cut — fringes of the nerdverse here, it is lifted from a Star Trek episode.

In Star Trek the reality distortion field allowed a species of aliens to manifest their wishes through sheer mental force. When Gates was interviewed by CNN in 2019 he was asked about the reality distortion field surrounding Jobs, his one-time great rival. Gates became animated. Jobs was a magician, and Gates added, “I always said I was like a minor wizard.” Jobs “mesmerised” normal people, Gates said, but Gates, sharing his gift, could see “that spell should not work at all — it has no reality to it”.

Reality distortion

To see the reality distortion field in action, glance at the photos of Gates at a Microsoft-sponsored party during the 2010 Sundance Film Festival (above). There he is, aged 54, gyrating on a banquette at the Bing Lounge in glasses and a blue office shirt, the top button racily undone.

Everyone within arm’s reach of him is a woman who seems decades his junior. To the objective observer this has strong “Dad home from the office embarrasses his daughter’s 16th birthday party” vibes. Except, due to the power of the reality distortion field surrounding him, exactly zero eyes are rolled. Gates, whose hobby is online bridge, is free to boogie in blissful revenge on his teen self’s classmates.

What we are talking about here is the old-fashioned wielding of boss influence merged with a new headiness of conquering virgin territory. Around the middle of the 19th century there was a similar sudden bubble of entrepreneurs from the west of the United States who got rich from new territory too.

Assets and land were there for the exploiting, and a small group of ruthless visionaries did so to the max. Leland Stanford and Cornelius Vanderbilt from railways, John D Rockefeller from oil, Andrew Carnegie from steel; they all generated vast amoral fortunes.

Their entitlement was called “manifest destiny”, and it gave them irreproachable illusions of grandeur as they secured their legacies with philanthropy that is still famous. Now, the small bunch of tech billionaires who colonised the virtual world have a reality distortion field instead.

Bill Gates sits on stage during a video portion of the Windows 95 Launch Event in 1995. Picture: AP

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has become a vehicle for some of the most generous philanthropy in human history, and with it the rehabilitation of Gates’s reputation for being a monomaniacal boss who would memorise the number plates of employees to ensure they were staying late in the office.

In October 2019 Melinda Gates announced that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would spend dollars 1 billion fighting issues detrimental to women in the workplace, like “pervasive sexual harassment”, wrote Melinda in Time magazine. Yet Bill Gates was apparently able to run two incompatible operating systems.

Allegedly “multiple people” who worked for Gates and spoke to The New York Times said Gates engaged in behaviour inappropriate for the head of one of the world’s most influential philanthropies, including “clumsy” advances on women.

Perhaps the best example of this distortion was in Gates’s dealings with Jeffrey Epstein. The Gates Foundation championed the wellbeing of young girls. By the time Gates and Epstein first met in 2011, Epstein had served jail time for soliciting prostitution from a minor.

At that first soiree at Epstein’s New York house was a former Miss Sweden and her 15-year-old daughter. The next day, Gates emailed colleagues, according to reports in the New York Times in 2019, praising Epstein’s charm; “A very attractive Swedish woman and her daughter dropped by and I ended up staying there quite late.”

Gates’ association with convicted sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, pictures, is said to have enraged his wife. Picture: Supplied

The Daily Beast website reported that Gates continued the association and even sought advice on his marriage from Epstein, a man who would later kill himself while in custody charged with child sex trafficking. A spokeswoman for Gates denied the claims reported by the Daily Beast and The New York Times.

It is true that the tumultuous personal lives of some of the tech moguls can give the appearance that they have invested in “wife” hardware, but like to frequently upgrade the software. Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, both on the list of top ten billionaires in the world, have seven divorces between them.

However, with Gates it feels different. After 27 years with his wife, overlapping with over 20 years of jointly running a charitable foundation, he had one of the most famous, as well as thoughtful, progressive and idealised, marriages in the world. Yet when the reality distortion field stops working even the techiest nerd can’t save it. It has crashed.

The Times