For many, the meeting was perhaps the only direct opportunity to interact with and impress Gates and French Gates. Employees also felt pressure at these meetings to showcase their accomplishments so they could defend their budgets.

Several former executives who attended strategy review meetings recalled that in the days leading up to the meeting, the atmosphere in the office was almost carnival-like, but also tinged with fear. Employees were frantically running around, preparing presentations, reviewing their work, and bracing for possible questioning by Gates.

A king holds court

The meetings themselves were a spectacle, recalled some participants; one described them as “almost comical”.

They were usually held in a large room with set seating arrangements. Strict etiquette was observed. One former executive who attended many of the meetings said it felt like a king was holding court, as if Gates was Louis XIV and the staff were courtiers bowing before him at Versailles and asking for their ruler’s favor.

Another recalled how executives watched Gates’ facial expressions closely when asked to present their team’s accomplishments over the past year to the former couple and to emphasize how closely their work aligned with the foundation’s strategies and priorities. The slightest smile or nod could mean he agreed; a blank face could mean he didn’t.

Gates and French Gates listened attentively to the presentations, usually saving questions for last. After the meeting ended and participants returned to their offices and desks, they spent days analyzing Gates’ questions and comments, often celebrating when they concluded they had impressed their boss, said a third former attendee.

To this person, it seemed that many employees were more motivated by Gates’ praise—sometimes even the absence of insults was seen as validation—than by the success of their grants.

“Sometimes interpreting Gates’ wishes took hours of back and forth between directors and teams,” this person said. “I felt like we spent more time managing upwards than meeting people’s needs.”

Torn between two centers of power

More than two decades after its founding, the foundation’s internal culture is still one of subservience, with hundreds of employees tiptoeing around Gates, afraid to disagree and eager to obey his orders.

If anything, the respectful culture has ossified along with the many layers of bureaucracy and processes. People who moved away more than a decade ago describe a place not very different from those who moved away in the last two years.

A recent departure noted that the foundation’s staff can be divided into three types: the consiglieres who defer to Gates; the young aspirants who are in awe of him; and the skeptics who find Gates domineering and eventually leave the foundation.

After the couple’s divorce, a media strategy consultant at the foundation said there were instead two centers of power – Gates and French Gates – and employees were increasingly torn between the two.

The former couple tried to maintain a professional relationship and gave each other at least two years to see if they could work together, with the understanding that if that wasn’t possible, French Gates would leave. In May 2024, she severed her ties with the foundation, saying she wanted to pursue her own path in philanthropy.

Gates can be bossy in strategy meetings with small groups of executives, launching into a topic at length without asking for their opinion. For example, he might reprimand an employee who failed to cite the source of a statistic in a document presented to him. Not surprisingly, heads of government, CEOs, and large corporations have many employees who are paid to deliver things exactly the way their bosses want them—no tomatoes in sandwiches, double-spaced briefing documents, no phone calls after 8 p.m.

“Gates and Melinda were not alone in the way they dealt with them,” said an outside public relations expert who has worked with the foundation. “Many clients are treated like royalty. It’s like Succession,” the person said, referring to the hit HBO series about a scheming media mogul and his children. “People were bustling around with clipboards, but these people were also very busy and you were assigned a meeting place, so you had to know in advance what the meeting was about.”

A quiet hum of fear

What strikes many about Gates is the fear he inspires for several reasons: the fact that he and French Gates ran a company without being accountable to outside shareholders or other stakeholders; the fact that he is brilliant and famous, which intimidates many; and his arrogant behavior, which may seem familiar to his colleagues from his time at Microsoft, but which terrifies those who work for him.

Those who worked for Gates at both Microsoft and the Foundation point out that Gates’s behavior did not change much, but 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 his private persona led many Foundation employees to privately remark that Gates was a global statesman on the outside and an absolute monarch on the inside.

“He is the scariest person in the world when it comes to giving recommendations or instructions because he will skim a page and then respond with statements like, ‘What you say in the footnote on page 9 does not match the footnote on page 28,'” said a former foundation employee.

There was a constant sense of fear at the foundation in case an email came in from the boss asking about a grant proposal or pointing out something in your area of ​​expertise that you had overlooked. If Gates sent an email asking them to do something, the staff—after they took him off the job—might send up to 100 emails trying to decipher what he meant, why he meant it, and how they should do it.

There was no manual for dealing with the foundation’s co-founders, especially Gates. Those who know Gates better said the billionaire respects people who do their homework and hates it when his time is wasted. If you repeat information in a meeting from a document that has already been sent to Gates, you will incur his wrath.

But Gates is also known for respecting a good argument that someone can defend. He’s a bit quieter now, and people who have engaged with him more recently said both French Gates and Warren Buffett – who has become a close friend and confidant of Gates’ – have shown him that it’s possible to be a strong leader while also being warm.

Quiet simmering

Still, many people were angry about Gates’ actions for years. Ultimately, it came down to the individual’s tolerance. Some dismissed it. Others tried to outdo Gates or couldn’t stand him. And still others kept quiet but were seething with anger.

It was especially difficult for those who had joined the foundation at the peak of their careers and had been hired because of their expertise – the very expertise that Gates apparently did not value and which he liked to outsmart others with.

During a meeting, he would often ask why a proposed solution was the best until it frustrated the executives.

A former senior executive compared the style of discussion to the Socratic method, often used in law schools by professors who encourage their students to argue through dialogue.

But while professors are great at asking questions in a thought-provoking way, Gates was far less adept at delivering them, and so conversations with him could be an uncomfortable experience, the former employee said. “It’s like applying the Socratic method … to an autocrat.”

Out of BILLIONAIRE, NERD, SAVIOR, KING: Bill Gates and his quest to change our world by Anupreeta Das. Copyright © 2024. Reprinted with permission from Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Editor’s note: A spokesperson for Bill Gates told Business Insider, “The book relies almost entirely on second- and third-hand hearsay and anonymous sources and contains highly sensationalist allegations and outright falsehoods that ignore the actual documented facts that our office has presented to the author on numerous occasions.”