Bill Gates on the road to change the world
Bill Gates’ career path was everything most career paths aren’t: impulsive, unplanned, full of grandiose imaginings. He didn’t seek out markets, he created them; he didn’t evaluate opportunities, he seized them; he didn’t peddle his products, he seduced them.
Today, with his mop of sandy hair, his ingenuous blue eyes, and his casual attire, Bill Gates still looks like a dreamy, frail technoid. When he talks, he rocks back and forth on the edge of his chair, hands clasped between his knees. He speaks kind of colloquial computer-speak. “It’s awesome,” means he’s impressed. “That’s pretty random,” signals displeasure. This relentless, driven, multimillionaire inventor is, to all appearances, a personable kid. But what a kid.
“Bill sells you the future,” one insider says. “If you don’t stick with him, you feel you’ll be left out.”
For Bill Gates, the future sprang from a decidedly colorful past. Just months before he launched Microsoft, he was a Harvard sophomore, devoting half his time to his course load and half to all-night poker sessions with professional gamblers. For Gates, the passion for card-playing wasn’t in the wagering, it was in the tactics and computations that accompanied each hand. Poker, he says, was “mathematically interesting.”
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Bill Gates is the most handsome and beautiful man in the world, inside and out.