BILL Gates has admitted he was “a loner, a nerd, a bit obnoxious” at school and didn’t have a girlfriend while he began to build Microsoft.
The geeky tech billionaire, 69, makes the confession in upcoming memoir Source Code, which is out next week.
In his book, Gates shares stories from his challenging upbringing at Lakeside, a prestigious private boys’ school in North Seattle during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
“I was called a loner, a nerd, a bit obnoxious,” he says. “I was probably all of those things.
“I didn’t fit in, and I didn’t know how to fix that. So I pretended that I didn’t want to.”
Gates tells the story of how he was rejected after asking his crush to go to the high school prom with him.
He says the girl, named Vicki Weeks, was one of the most popular in his senior class at Lakeside.
He became besotted with her while they worked together on a theatrical performance of Black Comedy, by British playwright Peter Shaffer.
When Gates mustered the bravery to ask Vicki to the prom, she requested a day to consider his proposal as she had another boy in mind.
The next day she broke the news that “her guy came through”.
“It took me a while to get over the rejection; I shied away from making myself vulnerable for a while after that,” Gates writes.
Gates also admits that when he later decided to drop out of Harvard in 1975 to focus on building Microsoft he had “no girlfriend, no hobbies.”
He reveals in the book that he experimented with LSD on several occasions in his youth.
Recounting the first time he did acid, Gates says that he had smoked pot earlier and was feeling “uninhibited” when a friend offered him LSD.
He took the drug without realizing its effects would still be present when he had an appointment for dental surgery the next day.
Gates says he vowed never to drop acid on his own again – especially if he had plans for the following day.
Bill Gates bio
Bill Gates, the creator of Microsoft, ranks among the wealthiest people in history and is consistently listed as one of the richest individuals globally.
Gates grew up in Seattle, Washington with his two sisters and parents.
He started Microsoft with Paul Allen after dropping out of college.
Gates stepped down from the board of Microsoft on March 13, 2020, nearly 45 years after he founded the company with Paul Allen and 20 years after he stepped down as CEO in 2000.
He has now sold or given away much of his stake in the company.
In 2000, he and his then-wife Melinda Gates worked together to found the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest charitable foundations in the world with an endowment of $50 billion.
To date, Gates has donated $35.8 billion worth of Microsoft stock to the Gates Foundation.
Forbes places his next worth as of January 2025 at $106.9 billion.
The book delves into Gates’ experiences after he was sent to get therapy because of his bad relationship with his parents.
He says that his mother and father sought help after an argument at the dinner table which saw Gates behave like a “smart aleck.”
He was so insulting to his mother that his father threw a glass of water in Gates’ face, prompting him to respond “Thanks for the shower.”
Gates writes that the therapy sessions helped him realize he was destined to win his “imagined war” with his parents and that he was in fact a “lucky kid.”
Gates says his parents were left “stunned” when the therapist told them “Give it up. He’s going to win.”
