Source Code
My Beginnings
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Named one of the Most Anticipated Releases of 2025 by The New York Times, The Times, Financial Times and BBC.
The origin story of one of the most influential and transformative business leaders and philanthropists of the modern age.
The business triumphs of Bill Gates are widely known: the twenty-year-old who dropped out of Harvard to start a software company that became an industry giant and changed the way the world works and lives; the billionaire many times over who turned his attention to philanthropic pursuits to address climate change, global health, and U.S. education.
Source Code is not about Microsoft or the Gates Foundation or the future of technology. It's the human, personal story of how Bill Gates became who he is today: his childhood, his early passions and pursuits. It's the story of his principled grandmother and ambitious parents, his first deep friendships and the sudden death of his best friend; of his struggles to fit in and his discovery of a world of coding and computers in the dawn of a new era; of embarking in his early teens on a path that took him from midnight escapades at a nearby computer center to his college dorm room, where he sparked a revolution that would change the world.
Bill Gates tells this, his own story, for the first time: wise, warm, revealing, it's a fascinating portrait of an American life.
"Well crafted and self-aware: a readable, enjoyable visit to the dawn of high tech." --Kirkus Reviews
About this Author
BILL GATES is a technologist, business leader, and philanthropist. In 1975, he cofounded Microsoft with his childhood friend Paul Allen and today he is chair of the Gates Foundation. Bill is the founder of Breakthrough Energy, an effort to commercialize clean energy and other climate-related technologies, and TerraPower, a company investing in developing groundbreaking nuclear technologies. He has three children.
Reviews
"Well crafted and self-aware: a readable, enjoyable visit to the dawn of high tech." --Kirkus Reviews
"Subtly, searchingly, always trusting the reader, Gates explores the mysteries of why he of all people became the Bill Gates . . . . Its best bits come when kids are punks and left alone. Its energy comes from our national, stubborn yearning for wild individuality. Its heart comes not from the things we do, but the good we can become." --Bloomberg
"A remarkably introspective and personally revealing tour through some of the key moments and experiences that shaped Gates the boy and teenage programming whiz, years before he became a business titan." --San Francisco Chronicle
"In contrast to the current crop of swaggering tech bros, the Microsoft founder comes across as wry and self-deprecating in this memoir of starting out. . . . [This volume] is more than just a geek's inventory of early achievements. There is a genuine gratitude for influential mentors, and a wry mood of self-deprecation throughout. . . . There is a sense of the writer, older and wiser, trying to redeem the past through understanding it better, a thing that no one has yet seen Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg attempt in public. That alone makes Bill Gates a more human tech titan than most of his rivals, past and present." --The Guardian
"The book has been in the works for at least a decade but arrives at an unusual moment, as the tech billionaires have been unleashed. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg - their success has given them power that they are enthusiastically, even gleefully, using in divisive ways.... He is a counterpoint to the moguls in the news.... Writing an autobiography is another way Gates is different from his peers, few of whom seem so introspective." --The New York Times
"Gates' enlightening childhood memoir finds a fresh angle on his achievements as an IT pioneer. Source Code fills in key blanks of the tech guru's pre-Microsoft life, with Gates detailing his formative years in his own words, covering emotional topics. . . . More tender than you might expect. . . . Source Code pulls back the curtain on a global leader with thoughtful ruminations on the contributions of love, friendship, and family to his success." --Apple Books Review
"A highly readable account of his early life up to the creation of Microsoft, Source Code is unusually personal and laced with self-awareness. [Gates] doesn't hold back from admitting his own shortcomings [and] delivers a fast-paced account of the rise from programming prodigy to budding tech mogul, replete with cliffhanger moments and revealing new details. Through all of this, he looks back with detachment on the competitive intensity and intellectual ferocity that characterised his rise to the top." --Financial Times
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