My five minutes with Bill Gates

Tue, 06 Jul 1999 16:00:00 +0000

You don't just get an interview with Bill Gates. You ask Microsoft PR for time with His Billness and then you listen to the polite but firm lecture they deliver even to the media's heaviest hitters: Oh, the demands on Bill's time. The barrage of demands from inconsiderate reporters, so often in pursuit of the frivolous. The random and nasty things they write when we do get them in to see Him. Only then, when you've been duly shamed, is the consolation prize offered -- time with others inside the company. That's when the scheming begins.

Admittedly, the make-do interviewees often have more direct knowledge about the topic at hand than Gates himself. But who's kidding whom? The media game is to bag the big lion. My purpose -- even as I was granted access to top-tier people at Microsoft, names such as Nathan Myhrvold -- became divining those issues I would touch upon in the book I was writing ("The Plot to Get Bill Gates") that no one on this earth could possibly answer but Lord Gates himself.

Salon.com > Gary Rivlin

My five minutes with Bill Gates