From pariah to sage: Bill Gates puts some distance between himself and Trump’s supine tech bros

I’m posting this because tomorrow is the last day of January and I still have a bunch of gift links to The New York Times that I haven’t used. The clock resets at midnight on Friday. (Let me know if there are more that you’d like.) Both links below should work even if you’re not a Times subscriber.

David Streitfeld as an interesting interview with Bill Gates, the one-time bad boy of tech who now looks pretty good compared to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg et al. Gates has just published a memoir, “Source Code,” which is the subject of this Times review by Jennifer Szalai.

Unlike his tech brethren, Gates, who co-founded Microsoft, has remained left-of-center and devoted to his philanthropic endeavors. He is far from perfect, of course, and Streitfeld observes that his reputation took a hit when he divorced his much-admired then-wife, Melinda French Gates, and when it was revealed that he’d spent time with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein (Gates has never been tied to Epstein’s monstrous sex crimes).

But Gates seems to have a mature, bemused attitude about what other people think of him. He also doesn’t shy away from admitting when he’s been wrong. He says he’s paid $14 billion in taxes over the years and adds that it should have been $40 billion if we had a fairer system. We also learn that donated $50 million to a group supporting Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign.

When I listened to Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs some years ago, I was struck by Gates thoughtful take. He was by far the most insightful of the many people whom Isaacson interviewed. Jobs is someone I admire, but I wonder if he would have found himself up on the platform with Donald Trump last week. Gates, to his credit, was not.