「经济学人」He said, she said

The battle of the billionaire books

Source Code: My Beginnings. By Bill Gates. Knopf; 336 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £25

The Next Day: Transitions, Change and Moving Forward. By Melinda French Gates. Flatiron Books; 176 pages; $25.99. Bluebird; £17.99

Bill and Melinda Gates divorced in 2021 after 27 years of marriage. But lately the tech billionaire-turned-philanthropist and his ex-wife have been spotted together in an unusual setting: on the shelves of bookshops. Both have published memoirs in recent weeks, telling new stories about their unusual and gilded lives. In some ways the books are similar: they aim to burnish the public personas of their authors. But the ways in which the books differ are more telling.

In “Source Code”, the first of a planned three-volume series, Mr Gates recounts his origin story, from his birth in 1955 to the early years of Microsoft in the late 1970s. Folk tales abound about the childhoods of American innovators such as Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin. This book seems to be an effort to define the mythology around the young Mr Gates.

It is no rags-to-riches tale: Mr Gates freely admits that his was a middle-class upbringing. A crucial event in his life was gaining access to a computer at school for the first time at 13. But he also describes his love of hiking with friends in the mountains round Seattle, sometimes for days at a time—a counter to the stereotype of the lonely nerd who never goes outdoors. In these passages you can sense the presence of a ghostwriter.

Mr Gates’s programming prowess and entrepreneurial zeal were entwined from the start. Even as a youngster, he had a propensity to bend rules and push boundaries. Mr Gates describes how, as a schoolboy, he would climb out of his bedroom window and sneak off to use the computer at night. At Harvard he and a friend, Paul Allen, made unofficial use of the university’s computers to develop Altair BASIC, the first product of the company they founded, known as Micro-Soft.

Also striking is how Mr Gates lucidly describes his childhood awkwardness. These days, he speculates, he would probably be diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. This makes the self-awareness on display in the book (“my ability back then to filter my reactions wasn’t very highly developed”, he recalls of his Harvard days) all the more surprising.

By contrast, his ex-wife’s book, “The Next Day”, surprises with its lack of self-awareness. In what is pitched as an inspiring self-help book, Ms French Gates recounts various turning-points from her life, in each case explaining—using quotes from TED talks, mindfulness teachers and psychology books—how she navigated difficulties and transitions. Like her ex-husband, she admits that she has “benefited from a tremendous amount of privilege...that has insulated me from some of life’s hardships”. However, she writes, “I believe that there are many aspects of the human experience that are universal.”

As the ex-wife of one of the world’s richest people, though, her examples of how to handle life’s hardships come across as tone-deaf. She recounts the heart-stopping moment when one of her children nearly falls out of a hot-air balloon over the Maasai Mara. (What parent has not experienced that?) When she starts to realise her marriage is falling apart, her immediate response is to distract herself with a trip to South Africa, followed by a retreat in New Mexico. Oprah Winfrey, a media personality, offers advice. Ms French Gates eventually asks for a divorce. Her advice to others is “Distill your inner voice.” (Other suggestions include “Be a greenhouse.”)

Both accounts are self-justifying in places. And, thanks to its limited scope, “Source Code” avoids tricky topics from later in Mr Gates’s life, such as antitrust investigations, marital infidelity and his controversial association with Jeffrey Epstein, a now-dead convicted sex offender.

His association with Epstein is not mentioned in Ms French Gates’s book either. The episode that triggered the end of their marriage, in her telling, was that Mr Gates offered a generous severance package to a “toxic” employee who was being pushed out at the Gates Foundation, the charity they co-founded, which made her feel “disrespected and disregarded”.

Neither book offers any insight into the workings of the Gateses’ marriage. Ms French Gates notes that Mr Gates admitted to infidelity, but she always refers to him respectfully. Indeed, she dishes no dirt whatsoever. Presumably their divorce agreement has some pretty strict terms; readers may at times feel the hand of the lawyer, not the ghostwriter.

All the same, the books offer very different portraits of their now very separate authors. Mr Gates’s memoir emphasises “the set of unique circumstances—mostly out of my control” that shaped him; Ms French Gates’s tries to make her seem down-to-earth, even ordinary. Good luck trying to be like me, says Bill; I am just like you, says Melinda. Somehow it is the ruthless, socially awkward business titan who comes across as the more sympathetic.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Gates v Gates”(Apr 16th 2025)

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