Why has Bill Gates become a bogeyman?

There’s nothing like a divorce among the super-rich to prove that money – or, in the case of Bill and Melinda Gates, subcutaneous mind control devices – can’t bring you happiness.

There is sadness, though, whenever a 27-year marriage ends, and without more information as to why the split has happened, there’s little point in speculating. Nor is there reason to pry. These things should be left private and there’s no requirement for anybody to share anything more than the statement the couple issued last night.

There is, however, something to say about the hold that Bill Gates continues to have on the public’s imagination. Unlike other members of the billionaire set, he is so much more than a cultural stereotype. He is an archetype; Version 1.0 of King Nerd who made good. As the living embodiment of the era of the personal computer, Gates had an advantage over his rivals. Microsoft was founded in 1975, a full year before Apple, giving Gates the edge over the more customer-orientated Steve Jobs and the techno-wonkish Steve Wozniak who was never as public facing.

That left Gates the role as chief prophet for the data-driven generation that followed. But even at the height of his fame and wealth, he was still a degree of ordinary raised to the power of dullness. He never aspired to high fashion, choosing instead the unassuming high-collared shirts with v-neck sweaters in which to geek out over some clever innovation in Windows. Yet, somewhere and somehow, the narrative changed and Gates became something greater and worse. He become a cornerstone of the problem we now have with conspiracies – the techno-tyrant trying to inject chips under people’s skin to control them. Alongside George Soros, his was the name you feared hearing interjected in an argument. It would make you take a step back from the conversation and label the other side as being quite mad.

Gates was a pioneer in the first dot-com boom and argued that new money could change the world. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the amalgamation of two earlier ventures into philanthropy – the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation – and sought to help eradicate “poverty, disease, and inequality around the world”. Gates would also join Warren Buffet to start the Giving Pledge club, whereby the super rich could promise to donate half their net wealth to help the poor.

Why such good deeds translated into the worst fears of the paranoid class isn’t exactly clear, though the way Gates’s public profile interacted with popular culture perhaps perpetuated the belief that there was something not entirely real about young Bill. Gates was an easy shorthand for Hollywood. Elliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies was Bill Gates filtered through a Rupert Murdoch pastiche. His portrayal on The Simpsons (always a big cultural force) certainly didn’t help. In the episode “Das Bus”, Gates – notably not voiced by Gates himself – proceeds to “buy out” Homer’s new kitchen table start-up, “Compu-global Hyper Mega-net”, by having thugs trash the Simpsons’ house. “I didn’t get rich by writing a lot of cheques,” says Gates before cackling maniacally.

It’s all very crude (and perhaps cruel) but culture often works through gestures. It’s less obvious these days when even the gnarliest linebacker has mastered social media and when many computer geeks look like California surf bums with honed core muscles, but there was a time when American culture discriminated quite obviously between “the jocks” and “the nerds”. Bill Gates belonged to the latter group, like Jerry Lewis’s Nutty Professor made flesh. He might have followed the billionaire cliches of buying jets and large mansions but missing were the other forms of ostentation that normally go along with it. He instead released yearly reading lists. It seemed to leave the public wondering that if money did not appear to corrupt him, then the corruption had to be hidden.

When Gates stepped back from his role as CEO of Microsoft in 2000, he was replaced by Steve Ballmer, who was very much his opposite: a heavy set, punchy man who became known for bringing a style of motivational speaking that formerly belonged on the American football pitch. By stepping down from the public-facing role, Gates seemed to indicate a change in America’s corporate culture. Microsoft’s Xbox and Surface brands would thereafter be publicised by salesmen presenting themselves as gaming or tech nerds, all sharp suits worn over scruffy, grungy t-shirts. 

Gates, meanwhile, became more retiring, which only seemed to raise people’s suspicions even further. There is, in all of this, a rather depressing truth about human nature. It’s not simply the antagonism that some people – especially those on the political left – have towards wealth. It’s that a quiet man who tries to do good is so easily portrayed as a man intent on doing some evil. (And, of course, as with any paranoid mindset, even writing this means that the writer must themselves be deceived – I haven’t taken the red pill or seen beyond the curtain where Oz pulls the levers, they’ll say).

Yet there was also some truth to the nonsense. That, after all, is why conspiracies are pernicious. The Gates Foundation has worked towards alleviating disease in poverty-stricken countries. That has meant their advocacy of vaccine programmes, sometimes proactively leaning into the problems in ways that leave them wrongly accused of the worst kinds of human engineering. What can we say about the half a million people who signed a petition for the White House to investigate the Gates Foundation for “medical malpractice and crimes against humanity”? Were they all delusional or was some truth to their allegation?

That, ultimately, is where the debate breaks across the fulcrum that divides the scientific from the supernatural. It goes back to the archetype of Gates, the science-advocating, logic-obsessed atheist with somewhat inferior personal skills. Where Gates has perhaps failed is in understanding what Steve Jobs understood too well. “Technology is nothing,” said the latter. “What’s important is that you have a faith in people.” Or, to turn it around, people are motivated by something more than hot silicon. Gates has failed to win a media and marketing battle because he chose instead to prioritise his interests in the scientific battle. The lesson to learn in all this is even good science can be failed by bad marketing.

Although his critics will also argue that anything less than handing over his entire fortune to the Red Cross or the Salvation Army is proof that he’s not committed to equality and that his philanthropy is nothing more than an affectation of his wealth. But that is the naive lament of levellers throughout the ages. Gates has been extraordinary in being unassuming, and whilst being unassuming has done extraordinary things.

While the divorce, as far as we can tell, looks amicable, there will probably be big numbers thrown around the media meaning that the separation is anything but ordinary. Let’s hope that’s as far as it goes. Anything more will probably be spun by the crazies (yes, let’s give them their right name) as an omen for Gates’s fiendish plot to assimilate us all with the washing machine bots of Alpha Zanussi.