Bill Gates has written a memoir that will tell his “origin story”. Set to go on sale in February 2025, Source Code: My Beginnings will cover the businessman and philanthropist’s early years, from his childhood in Seattle to his time at university.
“I’ve been in the public eye since my early 20s, but much of my life before then isn’t well known”, Gates wrote in a post on his blog GatesNotes. “Over the years, I’ve often been asked about my upbringing, my time at Harvard, and co-founding the company. Those questions made me realise that people might be interested in my journey and the factors that influenced it.”
Bill Gates' book will release next year The Telegraph
Gates dropped out of Harvard in 1975 at age 20, just before he and his friend Paul Allen wrote the programme that became Microsoft. The book will not focus on the company nor on the Gates Foundation, his charitable foundation. The book’s cover features a photo of a young, gap-toothed Gates that's quite different from the bespectacled adult Gates most people know today.
It will talk about his Seattle childhood, his relationships with his grandparents and parents and his “struggles to fit in”.
The promotional materials make it seem that the memoir will end with the 1975 founding of Microsoft. It may touch upon pickleball, which now is a very popular sport. Gates has been playing it since friends of his father invented it in 1965.
Pickleball was invented in 1965 on Bainbridge Island, Washington which is not far from Gates' hometown of Seattle. His father, Bill Senior, was friends with the game's three inventors: Bill Bell, Barney McCallum and Joel Pritchard. According to USA Pickleball, the game was invented one day when the families could only find part of a badminton set, so improvised with ping-pong paddles and a perforated ball.
It remains to be seen if the billionaire comes up with a second volume that talks about his company and his marriage. Gates married Melinda French in Hawaii in 1994 and the couple divorced in 2021 after Gates acknowledged an affair with a Microsoft employee during the marriage.
