Source Code

[Source Code] arrives at an unusual moment, as the tech billionaires have been unleashed. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg – their success has given them power that they are enthusiastically, even gleefully, using in divisive ways ... He is a counterpoint to the moguls in the news ... Writing an autobiography is another way Gates is different from his peers, few of whom seem so introspective

The New York Times

An unexpectedly revealing account of the swirl of factors leading to the birth of Microsoft and the ascent of personal computing

Wall Street Journal

Charmingly told ... Source Code isn’t so much a book about the early days of computing software as a lament to a bygone America: it’s as filled with nostalgia as Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie or Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. It immerses us fully in how it felt to be a middle-class child in the 1960s Seattle suburbs, and what it was like, a decade later, to be at the forefront of a small but world-altering technical revolution.

Tom Knowles, Telegraph

Refreshingly frank ... Bill Gates is John McEnroe of the tech world. In the first of what the author threatens will be a trilogy of memoirs, [he] recounts the first two decades of his life, from his birth in 1955 to the founding of Microsoft and its agreement to supply a version of the Basic programming language to Apple Computer in 1977. There is a genuine gratitude for influential mentors, and a wry mood of self-deprecation throughout ... a sense of the writer, older and wiser, trying to redeem the past through understanding it better

Steven Poole, Guardian

A gentle, pensive autobiography ... The pleasure of this reflective book is the sense of Old Bill Gates peeking over your shoulder, as bemused by Young Bill Gates as you are.

Alexander Masters, Daily Mail

A highly readable account of his early life up to the creation of Microsoft, Source Code is unusually personal and laced with self-awareness. [Gates] doesn’t hold back from admitting his own shortcomings [and] delivers a fast-paced account of the rise from programming prodigy to budding tech mogul, replete with cliffhanger moments and revealing new details. Through all of this, he looks back with detachment on the competitive intensity and intellectual ferocity that characterised his rise to the top

Richard Waters, Financial Times

A remarkably introspective and personally revealing tour through some of the key moments and experiences that shaped Gates the boy and teenage programming whiz, years before he became a business titan

San Francisco Chronicle

Bill Gates’s career has been defined by his ability to peer into the future. In Source Code, he meditate[s] on his past. Touching ... [its] brief humanising moments are the closest we get to learning more about the man behind the businessman.

Rhiannon Williams, i Paper

There is utility to be had … but there is also joy: the joy at marveling at genius coming into focus — confident, watchful, disciplined, exuberant, boyish and prickly — and the joy at watching a door left ajar kicked open wide. Yet the book is more than just that. Subtly, searchingly, always trusting the reader, Gates explores the mysteries of why he of all people became the Bill Gates: not only the first of the world-conquering tech titans of our era but also, in his second act, likely the best of them

Bloomberg

Very much a book about Gates’s beginnings ... frank, self-deprecating ... a book for the real Gates aficionados

Times, Tom Whipple