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Bill Sr. and Mary Gates STEVE FIREBAUGH
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Filial Disobedience Already at war with his mother, Mary, by sixth grade, Gates was sent to a psychologist. She would call him up to dinner from his basement bedroom and he wouldn't respond. "What are you doing?" she once demanded over the intercom. "I'm thinking," he shouted back."You're thinking?" "Yes, Mom, I'm thinking," he said fiercely. "Have you ever tried thinking?" The counselor's conclusion for Mary: "You're going to lose. You better just adjust to it, because there's no use trying to beat him." |
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Aptitude v. Attitude "In ninth grade," Gates says, "I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn't been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A's without taking a book home. I didn't go to math class because I knew enough and had read ahead. I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam. That established my independence and taught me I didn't need to rebel anymore." |
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Harvard Dropout "Bill lived down the hall from me at Harvard sophomore year," says classmate Steve Ballmer. "He'd play poker until six in the morning, then I'd run into him at breakfast and discuss applied mathematics." In 1975, Gates quit Harvard to start the company he first called Micro-Soft with Paul Allen.
Steve Ballmer in Redmond, Washington |
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