Bill Gates: Software hardman

24:55And that's where they start hiring people with experience in communications and comms. You know, Bill Gates has a VP of comms who actually comes from the cosmetics industry. So this communications person told the Washington Post that before Bill Gates hired him, he pulled out two jars from a drawer in his desk. He said, this moisturizer sells for$40 an ounce, this one for$1 an ounce. There is no technical difference between them. The only difference that exists is within the woman's mind. And he said, I want to try and create a certain image and perception of Microsoft. And this VP has this idea of giving away a demo copy of Word with PC World magazine, which means that customers can try out this new program before they commit to buying the full version.

25:40I remember that really well. Computer magazines routinely came with a disc taped to the front of them. And that was exciting because if you had one of these computers, you were quite keen to try out new things on it. What can it do? And also for those of you who are too young to remember, back in the day, you couldn't download computer programs from the internet. You had to install them off a CD. Not a CD. Before that, even, there was a floppy disk. You shoved it into this little slot and then you clicked and then pulled down a little latch and it made this kind of weird whirring sound. God, back when software was sort of like hardware.

26:14Yeah, in a way, I suppose that's right. So Word is launched, but at this point, there is a big change at Microsoft because Paul Allen, co-founder of the company, steps down from his job at Microsoft. He stays on the board. He's suffering from a form of cancer. And when Paul leaves, Bill becomes synonymous with Microsoft. He appears on the front cover of Time magazine in 1984 for the first time. And Time says that Gates is worth over$100 million. Yeah, he is literally the face of computing. He's the geek in chief. He's the poster child for a new revolution in technology. And the very next year, MS-DOS is upgraded with the launch of Windows, its most important product ever.

26:57And like I say, you walk into any office anywhere in the world, you switch on the computer, what will you see? You'll probably see a Windows sign. Still iconic all these years later. And Microsoft is growing and growing, getting bigger. And then it hits another milestone. Yeah, when it actually sells shares in itself. We've talked about this before. It's called an initial public offering, an IPO. It's where a private company sells shares in itself to the general public. From what we know, we think Bill Gates would have preferred to keep the company private. But he's given so many of his employees stock options.

27:29And once you hit a certain number of people who actually own shares in the company, you have to go public. So they had 500 private stockholders. They would have been staff members. That triggers the need to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. They're basically the police of the financial sector. So Microsoft essentially has to become publicly listed at that point. So there they are. They're now a public company. The shares go on sale for$21. By the end of the first day of trading, the shares go up to$28. So that's 33 % gain in one day. And the IPO ends with Microsoft gaining a market capitalization of$777 million.

28:05But I kind of need some context for this. This is good. What does it mean? Well, I mean, that means it's basically worth three quarters of a billion dollars. That's a lot of money back in 1986. It doesn't make it a giant company by any means. But Bill Gates owns nearly 45 % of the company. So we know exactly how much money he's got at this moment. 45 % of 777 million. So Forbes say his fortune at this point is$315 million. And he lands on their list of the richest Americans for the first time. And the young chief executive celebrates by making a very sensible decision. He pays off his$150 ,000 mortgage.

28:43So no rockets into space for him, just paying off the mortgage. Paying off the mortgage. So he's got hundreds of millions, but excitement about the software industry's potential and the fast growth sees Microsoft shares massively increase in value. In the first year in trading, at one point, shares were selling at six times their initial price. So in 1987, the value of his shares in Microsoft are well over a billion dollars. Bill Gates is a billionaire. Forbes estimates that his net worth is now 1.25 billion and he is just 31 years old. So he is the youngest billionaire ever at the time. Quite a thing.

29:21The youngest self-made billionaire ever at the time. He's been supplanted since then by Mark Zuckerberg, who we'll probably do on this show later. At this point, I would probably bow out. does everyone have a number in their head when they would basically just go fishing I mean five, I mean one no one's not enough these days is it I don't know, but the point is is that one of the themes of our billionaires in this series is that 10 million's not enough, 50 million's not enough do you know what I mean, they're driven by something more than that and he says he's got no desire to retire he says at the time, I'm tied to the wheel

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31:47So Bill Gates' personal life, let's have a little look at that. We now know he's a billionaire. What's he doing in his personal life? So he actually, for a man who is tied to the Rio and an absolute workaholic, ends up conveniently meeting his wife at the company. I suppose if you're going to work that hard, your romantic adventures are going to be found in the workplace. And Melinda was working at Microsoft. She initially turned him down for a date, citing his lack of spontaneity. He went up to her in a parking lot and asked her on a date, can we go on a date two weeks from tonight? Yeah, and she said, I have no idea what I'm doing two weeks from tonight.

32:20You aren't spontaneous enough for me. So he called her back an hour later and said, is this spontaneous enough for you? it was, so she agreed to the date. And after seven years, Bill and Melinda marry in Hawaii in 1994. The actual destination of their wedding, top secret, the couple bought out all 250 hotel rooms, all the helicopters in Maui. They wanted extreme privacy to avoid the media. And there would have been media interest in this because at this time, Bill Gates is the fifth richest person in the world. And the couple will go on to have three children and all of them, interestingly, end up attending Lakeside, the very same school that set Bill Gates on his way.

32:59If it's good enough for Bill, it's good enough for Bill's kids. Yeah. Kids nowadays at Lakeside, they must feel like they've got a lot to live up to. Yeah, they must do. So he's married to Melinda. Melinda becomes a big part of the philanthropic endeavours. But during this period, he's also going through a divorce. He is. He's actually divorcing his very first partner, IBM. And at this point, Microsoft becomes the first software company with sales exceeding a billion dollars annually. And his strategy becomes about more than just being on an IBM computer. He wants to put Windows everywhere. So he breaks away from this IBM deal in 1992.

33:34Obviously, he keeps hold of MS-DOS and Windows. And Forbes magazine say the decision to divorce IBM stands as one of his best. Microsoft then took control over its own destiny. So, I mean, this is basically one of the key decisions that makes Microsoft get even richer and more successful. Yeah, and his fortune begins to rise steadily through the early 90s, along with Microsoft stock price in 1995. The company releases the Windows 95 operating system and it sells more than a million copies on its first four days on the market. I mean, I still remember Windows 95. Yeah, the look and feel of that is still with us in a way.

34:10And so many of the things we still associate with Windows culturally, like the animated talking paperclip with Microsoft Word. That was part of Microsoft 95. Yeah. Along with the ubiquity of Windows, his fortune is growing fast. So at that year, his fortune was estimated to be$14.8 billion. That sees him top the list of the world's richest people. And he stays at the top of that list for a long time. But he's not content with topping the rich list. He also wants to top bestsellers. So his book, The Road Ahead, goes straight to number one. It's a kind of memoir of building Microsoft although it doesn't quite get very good reviews.

34:47Yeah, people say it was quite dull. Yeah, I mean, I went and looked up a very old New York Times review and it said that it reads as if it's been vetted by a committee of Microsoft execs. Chances are it has been. Yeah, yawn. That's one of the interesting things about Gates. I mean, no one has ever described him as charismatic. Right. He's not a great conversationalist. We know from his early childhood he's not socially skilled. I mean, a few times I've come across him, as I say, He's not someone you think, oh, gosh, I'd like to go out for a beer with him. You feel it would be quite an awkward experience.

35:19A kind of one drink in the pub, man, if at all. If at all. But going back to the company, I remember me saying that it's hard to think of the story of Microsoft without also thinking about the story of Apple. Because while Microsoft has been hitting the cover off the ball and doing incredibly well, Apple is in big trouble. And it's kind of crazy to think that Apple at any time was doing kind of badly. But in 1997, it actually needs rescuing. And Microsoft is the one that comes to its rescue. It's one time and future nemesis. Yeah, and Bill Gates makes a$150 million investment in return for some non-voting shares.

35:56That's important because he couldn't influence the way the company was actually being run. And he gives Apple an assurance that Microsoft would support Office for the Mac for at least five years. And that's important because basically this is the software that everyone knows how to use. If Microsoft don't make a version of their software available for the Mac, then people, certainly in business applications, people won't want to use it. So that assurance is actually really, really important to support Apple. But Microsoft also gets something out of this, right? Because Apple dropped this long-running lawsuit that claims that Microsoft copied the, quote, look and feel of Mac OS for Windows.

36:32And they also get them to agree to make Internet Explorer the default browser on its computers. That's interesting because the look and feel of how a personal computer looked was a very contentious area for a while. So Apple dropping that lawsuit against Microsoft is kind of an important moment. Wow. And it makes you realise how contingent everything in computing is, right? We could have ended up with a completely different interface to the clicker and the pointer and everything. Yeah, you're right in the sense that things become standard by accident and then you forget there was any other standard.

37:03Yeah, but in the process, people get very rich of these contingent decisions, right? Because, you know, Gates's wealth is getting more and more stratospheric. And this comes alongside the dot-com boom. And his wealth doubles by 97 to nearly$40 billion. Yeah, but he's not cutting down on his work hours. Because most days, I don't work more than 12 hours. On weekends, I rarely work more than eight hours. Right. So this is him trying to say, I don't actually work that much. Yeah, but despite the massive success of Microsoft, there is a threat that emerges on the horizon at the moment. And some people have called this Bill Gates' oh shit moment because there's a company out there called Netscape.

37:40And this is tied to the rise of the internet, right? Because when the internet comes around, Bill Gates and he goes, oh man, none of the stuff we do has anything to do with the internet, really. And actually he goes on the internet and says, I didn't see any kind of Microsoft type files on there. I saw lots of different types of files. We are nowhere in the internet space. And so he basically realises that Netscape could be a massive threat. For example, you might be able to download applications from the internet which are not Microsoft, God forbid. And so he sees this as a real threat and sort of trains his guns on basically dealing with the Netscape threat.

38:17And some of his monopolistic and ruthless tendencies definitely come out here. Right. And in building Microsoft 95, there are accusations, of course, which Microsoft deny that Internet Explorer is actually based on Netscape. And this is important because a lot of the monopolistic stuff that they get in trouble with with the regulators is that they are building stuff into Windows, which shuts other people out. Because if you've got the Windows operating system, they are basically preloading their software in to try and make you use their stuff rather than the competitors. That same New York Times review of his memoir that I mentioned, The Road Ahead, it also says that Gates comes across as someone who, despite his company's dominance, wakes up in a sweat every night fearful it could all fall apart tomorrow.

39:01So although Microsoft is totally dominant in the operating system world, Windows 95 is just about everywhere, they're not dominant when it comes to browsing the internet. And in fact, it's an area where they've never dominated. The browser wars era was illuminating to see how Microsoft and Bill Gates approached competition and pretty ruthlessly. Right. And the popularity of Microsoft also brings them to the attention of the US Department of Justice, right? Because these monopolistic tendencies suddenly start ringing alarm bells. Yeah. In 1998, Microsoft loses this landmark antitrust, means competition case, basically, and they have to pay a settlement.

39:40And this kind of kicks off four years of legal wrangling with the DOJ, right? So Microsoft eventually agrees to share its application programming interfaces with third party companies. but his image has kind of been tarnished. Yeah, so basically he's brought in front of the regulators and there's a video of his deposition where Bill Gates is giving evidence. He's described as consistently truculent, evasive and non-responsive and this is the moment when the Bill Gates halo, if you like, begins to slip a little bit. Once they were exciting, thrusting, whatever, now they're monopolistic, they're squashing competition, they're a juggernaut, it's a different kind of vibe coming off them then.

40:19And you can actually still watch the deposition on YouTube and it's kind of excruciating. I actually went and looked it up. He comes off as so snobbish. You can kind of see the echo of that 12 year old kid arguing with his mother. Yeah. And so, like I say, rather than the revenge of the nerds, this geeky wunderkind, he's now a noxious mogul. Right. I also feel like at this point, we should kind of explain to people who don't quite get it. But why are monopolies considered bad? Why does the DOJ have to go after people who are trying to impose a monopoly on their industry? Well, the idea is, is that if one company becomes too dominant, it means that you will stifle innovation.

40:57It means that other companies won't try and come up with new ideas because they get squashed by the incumbent player. And it's also kind of an interesting thing about the US state of mind, actually, the United States has always had this phobia of monopolies. In a way, it's an encapsulation of this kind of land of the free kind of idea that concentrated power blocks are bad for that idea and need to be broken up whenever they begin to coalesce. So it's almost like they view them as cartels that need to be broken up. Correct. And technology has been a very fertile ground for monopolistic practice to take hold because once you've got someone within your kind of walled garden, it's quite hard for other people to break in.

41:41For example, how many times do you go to the third page of a Google search? Never. Google's got so much monopolistic power in search that other people will struggle to break in because of the way a Google algorithm works. So they're kind of like the gatekeeper in many ways. Right. So it's almost like in the same way Google is a walled garden, an operating system can be a walled garden. If it stops you from downloading other applications or programs, they've got a monopoly on you as a consumer. And it's things like that the regulators look out for. and that Bill Gates, you know, in his deposition, there's a kind of outrage that he has.

42:16He can't see the logic of trying to stop him from dominating the world. It's like, you know, we've got this product as the best, let's get out of our way. Right, so that whole attitude of I'm the best and I can't see, from a human point of view, why this lack of competition is bad kind of comes into play. Yeah, so they have a scrape with the regulators, but it's not doing anything to dent his wealth. Right, because in 1999, Gates' net worth actually tops$100 billion. Hang on a second. I thought that when we did the Jeff Bezos episode that he was the first centibillionaire, the first hundred billionaire.

42:48Well, Gates was very briefly won in 99. So I don't know, you know, brief centibillionaire, permanent centibillionaire. I think we have to gave it to Jeff. OK, but he was briefly won in 1999. But by 2000, we have the sort of beginnings of the dot-com bust after the boom. His wealth shrinks from nearly$100 billion to$63 billion. first significant decline in his wealth, as I say, because the tech bubble is popping. And also the loss of that antitrust trial meant that there are potentially regulatory limits to Microsoft's power. It's also at this point that Gates starts stepping back, right? He relinquishes the role of chief exec to Steve Ballmer, who is still at the company after becoming its 30th employee all those decades ago.

43:33And he's a very different character, seen as a hard-nosed business people. Some people say that the time that Steve Ballmer was in charge was the period of least innovation. And two years prior, for the first time in 13 years, he is also not the world's richest person. He's surpassed by, you know, investment guru, Warren Buffett, a Mexican telecom tycoon. So, you know, Gates is no longer the richest person in the world. No, it's interesting. I often wonder whether they ever care about this. And I know for a fact that they do, because I saw an interview with Bill Gates once where he talks about, because he's very good friends with Warren Buffett.

44:07There was a moment previously when Warren Buffett had fallen at one point to eighth richest person in the world. And Bill Gates said that he sent him a pool eight ball. He sent him one through the post. So they know where they sit on the Forbes list. They're not unaware of it. It's interesting, right? Because at this point, Bill Gates could have gone, I'm going to work even harder. I'm going to work 36 hours in a day. But he actually announces he's going to stop working full time at Microsoft to dedicate more of his time to philanthropy Rolling back a few years, when he got married to Melinda, Bill founded the William H.

44:39Gates Charitable Foundation, got his father to direct it with the plan of using his money to improve things like reproductive and child health in the developing world. And in 2000, the foundation changed its name and becomes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a real powerhouse for philanthropy. And if you go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, it's this whopping great building. As I say, it looks like the United Nations of philanthropy. It's a very serious project. And in 2010, he gets even more serious about philanthropy. He co-creates what's called the Giving Pledge, which asks extremely wealthy people to sign up, to commit to giving almost all of their wealth away.

45:16And he leads by example. He's given more than$59 billion to the foundation. And he's actually planning to give away virtually all of his wealth to the charitable foundation in his lifetime. I remember him talking about his kids and they said, how much money will you give your children? and he said, I will give them enough money to do anything, but not enough to do nothing, which is kind of an interesting one. I thought it was quite a nice way of phrasing it. But also, on this philanthropy point, he approaches it almost like he's solving a problem. He wants his money to be used as impactfully as possible and it's like he's debugging a programme.

45:52That's the way he's thinking about it, rather than saying, oh, look at the poor little children. Yeah, it's almost like he's looked at something like child poverty and gone, that's a glitch in the system. If I throw enough money at it, I could work the bug out. But he's also quite, you know, he wants, he measures the impact of how wealth, his wealth is actually used. I mean, it's quite a, quite an analytical thing. It's not just, you know, oh, they just need some more money. He's quite analytical about how the money is deployed, whether you get a return on that money. He wants to bring his nows to bear in a different sphere.

46:26Right, and that's classic billionaire to think that you know better than everyone else. But, you know, he undoubtedly has saved millions and millions of lives. And he's done that, but not without attracting some shady criticism, I would say. I mean, there's a famous quote attributed to Steve Jobs where he said, Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he's more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people's ideas. He'd be a broader guy if he'd just dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.

46:57burn. That's quite bad, isn't it? It's really bitchy, actually. It's like, yeah, basically unimaginative. That is harsh. He's not a university popular person. Probably one of the reasons with his vast wealth and his role in vaccines, which is why he became this target for conspiracy theorists. Yeah, exactly. And I think a lot of the conspiracy theories, which are completely baseless and actually quite deranged if you look into them, You know, they have all these theories about Microsoft using the COVID vaccine to insert microchips into you. You know, a lot of these conspiracy theories in a way are slightly complementary of Microsoft and Bill Gates because they assume that he's got so much more power and influence than, you know, anybody probably has.

47:41Yeah, conspiracy theories are odd, aren't they? I mean, I generally think most of them are not true simply because people aren't organised enough to actually pull them off. Oh, no. And if you look at almost all the billionaires we talk about, so many of the things that ended up making them are just complete accidents and chance encounters like his mum with IBM. And the Bill Gates story is the story of the emergence of the computer. So his success is basically a mirror of the success of computing.

48:11But let's bring the story up to date. 2014 is when Bill Gates steps down as chairman of Microsoft. And in 2020, he just steps down from the board entirely. Remember, he owned 45 % of the company at one stage. He now owns about 1.3 % of the company. Having said that, 1.3 % of a company worth$2.5 trillion is still$26 billion. So he's still got plenty of stock in the company. And he's also got, you know, other things going on. He's got an investment firm called Cascade Investment. He's got other assets like a$143 million estate in Washington, which he's called Xanadu. He's one of the largest owners of US farmland.

48:50Random. Yeah. What's he doing with that? Cascade is his sort of investment company and that owns a bunch of things. It owns a controlling stake in the Four Seasons Hotel. It owns 14 % of a car dealership called AutoNation. It owns shares in waste management. The tractor maker, Deere & Co. So Canadian National Railway and much more. These are kind of like, if you like, his family office. So he's still one of the 10 richest people in the world. And he is also not just a brief centibillionaire. He is a confirmed centibillionaire right now. He's also been tainted by his association with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex trafficker.

49:23Jeffrey Epstein is not someone you want to be seen in a picture with that often. No, and the Wall Street Journal actually reported that Epstein threatened to expose an affair that Bill Gates had had. Yeah. In 2021, in fact, he got divorced from Melinda after 27 years of marriage. And he admitted that he had an affair. But Melinda Gates did say that his links to Epstein were a factor in their divorce in an interview with US TV. But having said that, because they never had a prenup and, you know, by all kind of, you know, non-prenup divorce standards, they actually quite amicably split their possessions.

49:57Yeah. According to him, the version was like, I'll keep this amount of billion to give away. you can have a few billion to give away. I don't think they cared that much about it. Yeah, which is pretty rare when you get right down to it. So that's brought us right up to date. We now need to judge Mr. William Henry Gates III, Bill Gates. Wow. Let's start with wealth. I mean, he was the world's richest man for over a decade and the youngest billionaire. So for my generation, he was the rich man. To my generation, he was the Rockefeller of the past, the Musk of the present. So he's still riding high in the top 10.

50:29Yeah. Which I think for me makes him at least a nine. Yeah, for sure. He's not the richest man in the world anymore, but he was for a very long time. Nine, nines all round. What about rags to riches? Definitely not rags. No, no. Dad was a tech lawyer, went to private school. It sounds like they were basically very well-to-do, upper-middle-class Americans. Right, and hothoused in the way that those people can only be. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, basically pushed hard to achieve. not only that but also the thing that made him rich came through his mother's connections to the chairman of IBM you know he's wealthy and lucky yeah which is a killer combo if you want to get rich right so I I think rags to riches he scores quite low yeah I think maybe even a one I would yeah I would say a one out of ten because I mean if it wasn't for old giggles his mum yeah who knows that IBM deal might not have never materialized so nines for wealth ones for rags to Rich's villainy.

51:23This is an interesting one. Yeah, I mean, we talked about Paul Allen, and Paul Allen is kind of the Waluigi to his Luigi, isn't Paul? Because Paul has actually gone on record as saying that Bill Gates is a kind of schemer who conspired to, you know, rip him off following his treatment for cancer and says that Gates was actually constantly demeaning his employees and famous for saying, this is the stupidest idea I've ever heard. Yeah, apparently early in his career, Bill Gates memorised the licence plate of every employee to keep tabs on them, see how hard they were working. I mean, yeah, he doesn't come off as a very socially adept guy is probably the nicest way of putting it.

52:02It's one of those things though, isn't it? These people are very driven. He was working 12 hours a day. Even when he toned it down, he said he doesn't work any more than 12 hours a day, only eight hours a day at the weekends. I think when you're like that, you don't understand why other people aren't seeing things the way you're seeing them, why they're not working as hard as you do. We know that he's not a particularly empathetic person. He probably came across as pretty brutal, pretty ruthless. Yeah, I think it's interesting because you can't go around expecting every single successful person in the world to be the most empathetic, nurturing figure ever, right?

52:40Sometimes their wealth and success comes from the fact they're quite hard on themselves and therefore hard on other people by extension. And you've got to be pretty driven in a pretty weird sort of way, not to sort of basically after your first 10 million or 20 million, whatever your number is, to say, I'm just going to go on holiday for the rest of my life. If you to keep going through the 10 million to 100 million to half a billion to a billion to 100 billion takes a very unusual kind of mindset and probably one that is quite hard to be around. Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of on the fence with this one when it comes to villainy, right?

53:12Steve Jobs arguably was very mean about Bill Gates's actual ability to innovate. But, you know, for actual sheer villainy, when you compare him to the other billionaires that we've talked about before, literal arms dealers, I just kind of come down right in the middle. I'm like, I wanted to give him a five out of ten. I'm going to be a bit harder than that. I think the reason is because of the way they set out to absolutely crush any competition. And it's not the only tech company to try and be monopolistic. You know, Google's had plenty of scrapes with the regulators themselves. And it's not unusual if you've got a dominant position to try and protect that position.

53:47But I think that a lot of people in those early 2000s, when people were going to work for other companies, it's because they thought that Microsoft had basically become this monolithic enemy of innovation rather than an engine for innovation. So I'm going to give him a seven for villainy. Interesting. OK, a five from me, a seven from you. The next category I think will be quite straightforward is just philanthropy. Well, I mean, I don't know if it's the most money ever given, but I think that Bill Gates, Bill and Melinda Gates have given more money to fight disease and poverty than the World Health Organization has.

54:27having said that people do criticize the gates foundations approached right because they've been said to come off as almost colonial in their approach you know they kind of decide from their privileged position where to direct this money what needs money you know it's a kind of top-down approach that you see more in a corporation than really an organization that wants to benefit the entire world yeah in fact there's a book coming out called the bill gates problem which looks at exactly that which is that do you use that vast wealth to have political influence in other countries about how people are fed educated medicated vaccinated some people find that quite a troubling model and it's actually a something that we've raised before on this podcast right it's a chuck feeney question he also gave away the vast majority of his wealth to his own kind of causes a lot of projects pet projects is the way to look at it yeah so you know should we let people with their own biases have such an extreme amount of power in something like public health?

55:29Well, yeah. I mean, although he's given away$71 billion and it's estimated that he saved the lives of 122 million children since 1990, there is such a thing as doing the right thing for the wrong reason. And in situations like, who cares? It's very true. I'm sure the 122 million kids they say don't actually quibble about this yeah i mean he's got to go down as one of the biggest figures in philanthropy of all time and also inventing the giving pledge right basically bullying other rich people into giving away their money yeah i think he's got a claim to be one of the most remarkable people of the second of the that's after the 20th beginning of the 21st century would you give him a 10 out of 10 for philanthropy i think you have to 71 billion dollars come on man that's a lot of money money talks in business and money talks in philanthropy i've got to get it it's a 10 so as they say in strictly it's a 10s 10s across the board from both of us 10s across the board well done william henry gates the third what about power how does he rank when it comes to power i think weirdly i mean there's no doubt that microsoft has had and still has enormous power in the commercial world.

56:44I mean, they've got a stranglehold over personal computing, enterprise computing in the world at the moment. So that is a very powerful position. He revolutionized the way that we interact with computers. And through his philanthropy, he's an incredibly important person in, you know, a lot of poor countries. I mean, you know, When the Gates Foundation comes to town, it can be transformative. So I think power is pretty high up. I mean, I've got the feeling that if he wants to talk to the President of the United States, he can whenever he likes. Yeah, that is really the gauge of power, right? Will the President pick up the call?

57:21Will you get through all the layers of telephones and secretaries? Yeah. I wonder whether other billionaires go, oh, my God, no, Bill Gates is coming around. He's going to ask me to give all my money away. I'll tell him I'm out. When you have other billions scared of the Gates Foundation. He's like, no, please, I don't want to be on Bill Gates's list. Go away. I'm going to hide. Tell Bill Gates I'm not home. I think he's got enormous power, both in the business world and in philanthropy. And actually that translates in sub-Saharan Africa into political power, probably. So I would give him a nine in power.

57:53Yeah, I'd agree. You know, just from Microsoft alone, he's probably one of the more powerful people we've spoken about on this show. but what he's turned that power into into philanthropic influence i think that's remarkable yeah i'd give him a nine for power if not even a 10 actually yeah maybe i'm gonna i've i've gonna you're gonna hold off i'm gonna hold off on the moment i'm on my 10 i'm too generous okay well let's look at legacy then how will we remember bill gates we'll remember bill gates as the person who reinvented what the nerd was you know basically he was the person who turned being a computer geek from being someone sort of unpopular into the master of the universe.

58:35There would have been a time when every person leaving kind of some kind of prestigious university would have gone to work for Goldman Sachs. Now they go and work for technology companies. I think Bill Gates changed that. Right. The whole narrative of the tech genius, you know, the tech visionary, you know, so many of those beats that we now kind of associate implicitly with someone in that world, dropping out of school, learning how to code from a young age, you know, the kind of socially awkward, you know, that is something that Bill Gates kind of set the narrative for. Yeah. No one wanted to be a computer geek in 1975.

59:11Do people want to be a computer whiz now? Definitely. Oh, yeah. That's not anywhere riches lie, but also social prestige of being a tech leader. Yeah. And cultural capital as well, right? Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, that, I mean, everything we've just said would mean, I think he scores pretty highly. I mean, Bill Gates will go down as one of those people, like a Rockefeller, like Andrew Carnegie, who combined great wealth with philanthropy. So I think legacy, I'm going to give him a nine. Yeah, I'm going to give him a nine because I feel now bad that I've been too generous with my tens. Okay. I give him a nine for this, but part of me wants to say ten.

59:48Okay. Has definitely left a very lasting impression on the world, for sure. So William Henry Gates III, private school kid, running a red light and driving without a license to one of the towering figures of the 20th and 21st century. Definitely. So is he good, bad or just a billionaire? He's not just a billionaire. He's not just one of those rich people. He's too powerful for that.

1:00:15This is hard. It's really hard. I mean, how can you say someone who's given$71 billion to charity is bad? Yeah. But I want to. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because I think that is the tension at the heart of the Bill Gates story. Because we know that, listen, he can be quite nasty. He's a smart ass. He's not very social. He's intolerant. He treated regulators with disdain. Contempt. Contempt almost. He tried to squash competition wherever he found it. And yet the world would be a very different place without him. I'm going to say, and it's difficult for me because I might have to try and get an interview with him.

1:00:55I've said this before. I've spoken to him a few times. Will he ever speak to me again if I say that? I think that he just nudges into, oh, God, man. No. Okay. I've had a road to Damascus conversion. He gave$71 billion to fight poverty and disease. He's good. I think the$71 billion edges him into good. I think he, for me, he was kind of tiptoeing the line of bad in the way that he kind of handled Microsoft and, you know, the things he did along the way to make it such a dominant force. But then the fact he kind of does this heel turn almost, right? Like when Microsoft starts, you know, slightly floundering, you know, he doesn't double down on the nastiness and the, you know, anti-competition.

1:01:40You know, he then chooses to become a philanthropist. And that decision for me to start redirecting his energy and his time into giving money away, that for me edges him into good. Yeah, it's problematic, but he's good. So next week's billionaire, I'll confess, I'd never heard of. He's got an interesting story that takes him all the way from apartheid era South Africa to the billion dollar halls of American biotech industry. Yeah, with a lot of famous friends along the way. It is Patrick Soon Chong, surgeon, businessman, biotech billionaire. Also sued by Cher. Thank you for listening to Good, Bad, Billionaire.

1:02:24This podcast is produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward. James Cook is our editor and it's a BBC audio production.

1:02:34I'm Mark Chapman and this is Everton. Nothing will be the same. This is the story of what happened over one of the most difficult and controversial seasons in the club's history. If we go down, I don't think we'll even exist in five years' life. We've been inside the club, talking to players, coaches and managers. I had nine and a half years in my previous club. I've probably got one book in me. In four months, I've probably got three. Everton, nothing will be the same. Listen now on BBC Sounds. Thank you.