I know that Bill Gates has done an immense amount of philanthropic work through The Gates Foundation for the good of millions of people and the planet itself. I simply had no idea what a creep he was when he ran Microsoft.
Will the mask drop?
Gates was by many accounts a nightmare boss, “prone to expletive-laden fits of rage,” Anupreeta Das, a New York Times correspondent, is quoted by Ben Tarnoff as reporting in her new book Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World.
Her book includes multiple stories of Gates hitting on his subordinates; in 2000 he conducted an affair with an employee that led, after she reported it years later, to his departure from the Microsoft board in 2020. By the 1990s the unpleasant parts of Gates’s personality were becoming more widely known. The press increasingly portrayed him as
arrogant, disdainful, indignant, angry, snide, condescending, petulant, contemptuous, truculent, evasive, hyperaggressive, despotic, bullying, an enfant terrible of the tech industry,
and a robber baron.
This public relations crisis culminated with the Justice Department’s antitrust suit against Microsoft, which began in 1998 and continued for years. Gates’s videotaped deposition from the trial remains a masterclass in how not to behave in a deposition: slouched and pouty, he debated the definition of words like “we” and pretended not to understand simple questions. He was so obnoxious that when the Justice Department lawyers played excerpts in court, the judge laughed.
I hope Gates is no longer that kind of creep . . . or any kind of creep. My guess is that he’s a reformed creep. Yes, it’s a low bar.
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