Whither the Nerd-Bully?

Bill Gates was the monopolistic father figure who Silicon Valley’s young founders rebelled against—and, in so rebelling, became. His reputation rose and fell; then rose and fell again, most recently because of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Ben Tarnoff considers Gates’s legacy in the context of a new biography about the Microsoft founder and a new memoir by the man himself:

He may once have waged war on Silicon Valley, but the Valley owes much of its present eminence to the playbook he drew up at Microsoft. Gates bent and broke laws, asked not for permission but for forgiveness (and rarely), helped himself freely to the intellectual property of others while vigorously protecting his own, and endeavored not merely to beat his competitors but to extinguish them by any means necessary. Above all he understood that software was the choke point in the personal computing revolution, that as computers proliferated, the code that made those computers useful—and especially their operating systems—would become critically important. Monopolies in the new era would be assembled not from agglomerations of infrastructure such as railroads but through mediating people’s access to the digital world. This privileged position would enable a firm to obtain what economists call “rents”: rather than compete with other companies on price and quality, the digital monopolist could demand something like tribute from his captive customers.