More than six years have passed since Bill Gates left his day-to-day role at Microsoft to shift to full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This year he stepped down as Microsoft chairman, shifting to a new, behind-the-scenes role as an adviser to CEO Satya Nadella. Gates is no longer the company’s largest individual shareholder — that title now belongs to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer — and last month Gates was absent from Microsoft’s annual shareholders meeting for the first time anyone can remember.
Publicly, at least, Bill Gates and Microsoft are less intertwined than they’ve ever been.
But at 59 years old, Gates continues to be a force in his own right, and not just through his philanthropy. Over the past year he’s demonstrated his ability to influence discussions of key global issues, make some big technological bets of his own, and creatively engage with younger generations.
And nearly 20 years after the publication of “The Road Ahead,” Gates has a new book in the works. The project hasn’t been announced publicly, but an online bio for former Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Guth (who previously covered Gates and Microsoft) notes that he’s working on a book with Gates.
Gates’ Third Place
In the meantime, Gates is making his mark on the literary world in a different way, reading and regularly recommending a wide range of books. His influence on book sales might not be on the level of Oprah in her heyday, but he often brings new attention to authors and highlight books from the past to bring them back into the public discussion.
Many of these projects are run out of Gates’ personal office, a “third place” separate from Microsoft and the Gates Foundation. His personal blog, Gates Notes, provides a sense for what matters to Gates these days — including a recent post highlighting positive developments for the globe over the past year, such as a reduction in childhood death under the age of 5, and progress in the fights against AIDS, tuberculosis and other diseases.
Next month, the annual letter from Bill and Melinda Gates will focus on the world in 2030. Bill Gates explains, “We’ll be writing about a few areas—from health to farming and banking—where life will really change, especially for people in some of the world’s poorest places.” (You can sign up to receive the letter via the Gates Notes home page.)
The Gates Foundation has struggled at times in its other area of focus, education. This year, for example, the Gates-backed education nonprofit InBloom shut down over privacy concerns.
Gates is also active on Twitter, with more than 19 million followers. His new tradition of being a “Secret Santa” in the annual Reddit Gifts exchange shows how savvy he has become in using his celebrity to bring awareness to issues and groups he wants to spotlight. This year, in addition to sending a Loki helmet and a coffee table book to a 25-year-old Reddit user, he made a donation in her name to Shot@Life, which provides vaccines to kids in developing nations.
Long-term investments
Gates’ personal investments include stakes in a wide range of companies and properties — everything from the Canadian National Railway to “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s former 490-acre Wyoming ranch — as documented in this Wall Street Journal story about Michael Larson, who manages Gates’ investments and has helped boost his net worth to $82 billion.
But Gates’ most audacious bets are the ones he’s making with Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft chief technology officer (and co-author on Gates’ original book) who has gone on to fame and controversy as the head of Intellectual Ventures, the patent holding firm and tech company.
Gates has invested in all four of Intellectual Ventures’ spinoffs: TerraPower, developing an alternative nuclear reactor; Evolv, making new security scanning technology; Kymeta, producing a new type of satellite broadband antenna; and, most recently, Echodyne, working on a next-generation radar system.
These are long-term investments, with big risks and potential payoffs that could be decades away, but Gates is hoping to be around and working long enough to see them come to fruition. Toward the end of an on-stage interview at Harvard last year, he answered questions about his legacy and made it clear that he doesn’t plan to “retire” anytime soon.
“Hopefully I can stay at a high level of intensity into my 80s,” he said. “I’m not very good at golf.”
