Bill Gates has announced that he will be telling his “origin story” in a memoir due to be published next year.
Source Code: My Beginnings will cover the businessman and philanthropist’s early years, from his childhood in Seattle to his time at university. Gates dropped out of Harvard aged 20 in 1975, just before he and his friend Paul Allen wrote the programme that became Microsoft.
“I’ve been in the public eye since my early 20s, but much of my life before then isn’t well known”, Gates wrote in a post on his blog GatesNotes. “Over the years, I’ve often been asked about my upbringing, my time at Harvard, and co-founding the company. Those questions made me realise that people might be interested in my journey and the factors that influenced it.”
The book will include “some of the tougher parts” of the entrepreneur’s early life, including, Gates wrote, “feeling like a misfit as a kid, butting heads with my parents as a rebellious teen, grappling with the sudden loss of someone close to me, and nearly getting kicked out of college. And I cover the challenges of dropping out of school to make a bet on an industry that didn’t really exist yet.”
“Throughout it, you’ll also find the stories of the many people who believed in me, pushed me to grow, and helped me turn my quirks into strengths,” he added.
Gates’s UK publisher Penguin Press has described the forthcoming title as “a warm, wise and revealing self-portrait of one of the most influential people of our age”.
Gates has previously written four books: The Road Ahead (1995), a book about the implications of the personal computing revolution co-authored with Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold and journalist Peter Rinearson; Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999), a study of how business and technology are integrated, co-authored with Collins Hemingway; How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (2021), Gates’ ideas about how to address the climate emergency, and How to Prevent the Next Pandemic (2022), his proposal of a Global Epidemic Response and Mobilization team following the Covid-19 pandemic. Source Code will be his first memoir.
Since stepping down as chair of Microsoft in 2014, Gates has been best known for his philanthropic work. He and his then-wife Melinda French Gates co-founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world’s biggest private charitable foundations, in 2000. The foundation is one of the most powerful and influential forces in global public health, having spent more than $50bn over the past two decades to bring a business approach to combating poverty and disease. Following the couple’s divorce in 2021, French Gates announced last month that she would be stepping down as co-chair of the foundation on 7 June. Gates is also the founder of Breakthrough Energy, an effort to commercialise clean energy and other climate-related technologies, and TerraPower, a company investing in developing groundbreaking nuclear technologies.
Source Code is due to be published on 4 February 2025 in hardback, ebook and audiobook editions by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Press. To support The Guardian and Observer, pre-order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
