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Every year, Bill Gates — and, until she left, Melinda French Gates — would hold multiple meetings with executives of the Gates Foundation to approve plans and budgets, and review strategies.
One of the highlights was the annual strategy review meeting, where the two of them listened to employee presentations about how well a program was working and whether adjustments needed to be made to improve their chances of success.
For many, the meeting might be the only direct opportunity to interact with, and impress, Gates and French Gates. Employees also felt the pressure at these meetings to showcase their accomplishments so that they could defend their budgets.
Several former senior executives who attended strategy review meetings recalled how, in the days leading up to them, the office atmosphere felt almost carnival-like, but suffused with dread. Employees rushed around preparing presentations frantically, reviewing their work and readying themselves for a possible inquisition by Gates.
A king holding court
The meetings themselves were spectacles, some attendees recalled; one described them as "almost comical."
They were usually held in a big room with a seating pattern. Strict etiquette was followed. One former senior executive who participated in many of the meetings said they had the feel of a king holding court, as though Gates were Louis XIV and the employees were courtiers bowing and scraping before him in Versailles, hoping to earn their ruler's favor.
Another recalled how, as executives were called upon to present to the former couple, highlighting what their team had done the previous year and how closely their work hewed to the strategies and priorities of the foundation, people would scrutinize Gates's expressions. The slightest hint of a smile or a nod could mean that he approved; an impassive face could mean he didn't.
Gates and French Gates followed the presentations closely, usually saving questions for the end. Once the meeting ended, and people went back to their offices and desks, they would dissect Gates's questions and expressions for days, often celebrating if they concluded that they had impressed their boss, a third former attendee said.
To this person, it seemed that many employees were motivated more by Gates's praise — sometimes, even the absence of opprobrium was seen as validation — than by the success of their grant-making.
"Sometimes, the interpretation of what Gates wanted could take up hours of back and forth among the directors and teams," this person said. "I felt we were spending more time managing up than working to meet the needs of the people."
Torn between two power centers
More than two decades after its founding, the internal culture of the foundation remains one of deference, where hundreds of employees tiptoe around Gates, afraid to disagree and eager to do his bidding.
If anything, its deferential culture has become ossified along with the multiple layers of bureaucracy and processes. People who left more than a decade ago describe a place not too different from those who left within the last two years.
One recently departed employee observed that people at the foundation fall into three types: consiglieres who bow to Gates; young aspirants who are awed by him; and the skeptics who find Gates domineering and eventually leave.
After the couple's divorce, one person who advises the foundation on media strategy said that there were instead two power centers — Gates and French Gates — and employees were increasingly torn between the two.
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The former couple sought to maintain a professional relationship, giving themselves at least two years to see if they could work together, with the understanding that French Gates would leave if they couldn't. In May 2024, she cut her ties to the foundation, saying that she wanted to chart her own course in philanthropy.
Gates can be imperious in strategy meetings with small groups of senior executives, launching into a topic at length without seeking their input. He might be censorious, say, of an employee who didn't cite the source of a statistic in a document provided to him. It's not surprising that leaders of governments and companies and large entities have large staff paid to deliver things just as their bosses would like — no tomatoes in a sandwich, double-spaced briefing documents, no phone calls after 8 p.m.
"Gates and Melinda weren't unique in how they were handled," said one outside public relations professional who has worked with the foundation. "A lot of clients get treated like royalty. It's like Succession," the person said, referring to the hit HBO show about a scheming media mogul and his children. "People scurrying around with clipboards, but also that these guys are really busy, and you're given a meeting spot, so you have to know going in what your meeting is about."
A low hum of fear
What comes through about Gates for many is the fear he inspires for a number of things: for the fact that he and French Gates ran an organization without accountability to outside shareholders or other stakeholders; for the fact of his brilliance and fame that many find intimidating; and for the type of arrogant behavior that colleagues of Gates from his Microsoft days might find familiar, but that terrifies those who work for him.
Those who have worked for Gates at both Microsoft and the foundation point out that Gates's behavior hasn't changed much, but it was more acceptable in Microsoft's competitive culture; the foundation is full of people from the more genteel and collegial culture of the international development and academic communities. This dissonance between his public image and private persona led many foundation employees to remark in private that outwardly, Gates is a global statesman and inwardly, he is an absolute monarch.
"He's the scariest person in the world to provide a recommendation or briefing to because he scans a page and comes back at you saying something like, 'what you say in the footnote on page 9 does not match with the footnote on page 28,'" one former foundation employee said.
The low hum of fear was a constant presence inside the foundation, in case an email came in from the boss asking about a grant application, or he pointed out something in your field of expertise that you had overlooked. If Gates sent an email asking for something to be done, there might be a flurry of as many as 100 emails among employees — after taking him off the chain — trying to decipher what he meant, why he meant it, and how they should follow through.
There was no handbook for how to deal with the foundation's cofounders, especially with Gates. Those who know Gates better said that the billionaire respects people who come in doing their homework and hates it when people waste his time. A person who repeats information from a document already sent to Gates at a meeting will be the target of his ire.
But Gates is also known to respect a good argument that a person could defend. He is somewhat mellower now, and people who have engaged with him more recently said that both French Gates and Warren Buffett — who has become a close friend and confidante to Gates — had a hand in showing him that it was possible to be a strong leader and be cordial.
Silent seething
Still, many people spent years bristling at Gates's approach. Ultimately, it came down to an individual's level of tolerance. Some brushed it off. Others tried to outargue Gates or couldn't stand him. And there were yet others who kept their mouths shut but seethed silently.
It was particularly challenging for those who joined the foundation at the peak of their careers, hired for their expertise — the very expertise that Gates appeared to disregard and enjoy outsmarting someone on.
Often, during a meeting, he would keep probing about why a suggested solution was the best one, to the point that it frustrated senior executives.
One former senior employee compared the style of discussion to the Socratic method, often used in law schools by professors who push students to reasoning through dialogue.
But while professors are great at asking questions in a thought-provoking way, Gates was far less polished in his delivery, and as a result, conversations with him could be an unpleasant experience, the former employee said. "It's like using the Socratic method . . . with an autocrat."
From BILLIONAIRE, NERD, SAVIOR, KING: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World by Anupreeta Das. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Editors Note: A Bill Gates spokesperson told Business Insider, "Relying almost exclusively on second- and third-hand hearsay and anonymous sources, the book includes highly sensationalized allegations and outright falsehoods that ignore the actual documented facts our office provided to the author on numerous occasions."