BILLIONAIRE, NERD, SAVIOR, KING

Anupreeta Das, finance editor of The New York Times, examines Bill Gates - a nerdy entrepreneur with a canny grip on business strategy who became the world's first technology billionaire, then a godlike philanthropist - to explore our national love affair with billionaires, who wield excessive influence and use philanthropic aims to create heroic narratives, wash sullied reputations, and bend democratic wills.

In a world overrun by laptops, internet-connected devices, cellphones and wristwatches with more computing power than an early PC, it is hard to imagine just how instrumental Bill Gates was in kickstarting the personal computing revolution, with his mission to put a computer in every home. When Gates cofounded Microsoft in 1975, computers existed largely in government offices and big organizations. Software as a product didn't exist. In 1987, Bill Gates became the first tech billionaire. In 2021, eight of the top 10 billionaires in the Forbes list of the world's richest people were tech billionaires - Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, and Steve Ballmer. As technology has become ascendant, upending our entire lives and changing our personal behaviors, the founders of these companies have acquired immense power and wealth. The new tech fortunes are seen as deserved, as opposed to extracted. Their wealth creation is seen as a byproduct of them having improved lives, not a function of greed. We have bought into Silicon Valley's unofficial motto that those companies do indeed want to make the world a better place. In 2000, Gates turned his full-time attention to philanthropy and remade himself as a global do-gooder and thinker, a saint and a savior. Today, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the world's largest private philanthropic donor. Its work has touched millions of lives, and Bill and Melinda have been honored with the Time Persons of the Year Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But as talk of worsening inequality and billionaire influence has become more mainstream, so too have questions about how the wealthiest wield their influence. At the same time, Bill Gates's golden reputation has been damaged by revelations about his yearslong ties to Jeffrey Epstein, accusations of inappropriate behavior toward women, and his recent divorce. In Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King, Anupreeta Das draws upon an extensive network of over one hundred sources and contacts who operate in the Gates orbit to uncover the truths behind the myth. Das uses Gates as a touchstone to explore the ways in which the world's billionaires have used philanthropic aims to create heroic narratives, wash sullied reputations, and bend democratic wills. It's a story of money and government, wealth and power, and a story of the way in which institutions around the world have yoked their fates and their fortunes to the richest people in the world. Anupreeta Das is the finance editor of The New York Times, overseeing broad coverage of Wall Street, including banking, investing, markets, insurance and consumer finance. Previously, Das helped run the Wall Street Journal's coverage of business and technology, focusing on corporations and the issues affecting them. Between 2010 and 2018, Das was a reporter at the Journal. She wrote highly read stories about finance, investing and Wall Street, including a groundbreaking series she conceived and co-authored about family offices, the private investment firms of the extremely wealthy. She is the recipient of two breaking news awards from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, and is a two-time Loeb Award finalist. She holds degrees from Boston University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Delhi. She is an avid hiker, having hiked across a Himalayan glacier as a teenager and summitting Mount Kilimanjaro in 2019.