Why Bill Gates Is Telling All About Life Before His Billions, from Trying LSD to Being Put in Therapy by His Parents (Exclusive)

• Microsoft founder Bill Gates is telling his “origin story” in his own words with the memoir Source Code, being released on Feb. 4
• “My parents and early friends put me in a position to have a wonderful life ,” he tells PEOPLE — so he thought “reflecting on that would be good for me”
• That also meant opening up about his challenges and set-backs and some of the wilder moments from growing up, like experimenting with LSD

People know a lot about Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates — one of the world’s most famous businessmen and philanthropists and one of the wealthiest people ever — and they think they know even more. 

Now he’s telling his story in his own words, from the beginning.

He calls it his “origin”: his debut memoir, Source Code, being published on Tuesday, Feb. 4. 

The book, the first installment of a planned trilogy, covers Gates’ childhood and young adulthood in Seattle. Many of his life’s most headline-making moments — his industry-defining success at Microsoft, his marriage to Melinda French Gates, the launch of their international charity and his personal controversies and his divorce — aren’t touched on; those topics would be for later.

But there’s still so much of the story that the public may be surprised to hear.

Gates once feared getting kicked out of Harvard University. His childhood was rocked by the sudden death of a friend in a hiking accident. He could be a “challenging” kid and his parents even put him into therapy because they didn’t know what to do.

He did LSD a few times (… and once asked a girl on a date after telling her that he’d dialed the phone with his toes). 

With Source Code, Gates, 69, is looking back at all of it — the wonderful and the weird. But, he tells PEOPLE, the memoir didn’t come out like he had originally planned.

When he first began gathering material for “some kind of autobiography” just over five years ago, the intention was to write one all-encompassing tome. After the first draft, by his own account, he “just wasn’t happy with it,” he says.

Some parts were “way too detailed,” others weren’t “detailed enough” and, overall, he didn’t feel like the project was coming together. Then came an idea: split his story into a series of separate books.

“That was the first time the project really made sense to me,” he says. 

Still, he says, being so focused on the past is a departure from the norm.  

“Generally I’m totally focused on what’s coming next, the next innovation,” he says, “but a few years ago I realized that 2025 would be the year I turned 70, the year that Microsoft turns 50 and the year that the Gates Foundation turns 25.”

That in turn led him to thinking about how, “through luck and a variety of things, my parents and early friends put me in a position to have a wonderful life and be extremely lucky and be at the center of the digital revolution.” 

And so he thought, “reflecting on that would be good for me.”

He feels the most revealing part of the book was his decision to “explicitly” write that, had he been growing up today, he likely would have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.

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“In the time of my childhood, the fact that some people’s brains process information differently from others wasn’t widely understood,” he explains in Source Code, adding that his “parents had no guideposts or textbooks to help them grasp why their son became so obsessed with certain projects … missed social cues, and could be rude of inappropriate without seeming to notice his effect on others.”

Gates tells PEOPLE the reason why he waited until the epilogue of his memoir to include this realization was because when he was kid, “those words didn’t come up.” 

“I do think when I got to college, the term ‘ADHD’ came up and people started to be prescribed medicine for that,” he says. “I never was, but I probably would’ve been diagnosed with that as well.”

The question of Gates being on the autism spectrum — typically characterized by someone having issues with social skills, communication and behavioral regulation — was only something that arose when he was an adult. 

But, he says, after a “few cases” where people asked him about it, “I had to reflect and say yes.”

There were other times as he worked on his memoir when he was surprised to look back at his memories and see how they matched up with reality — revealing how he had “sort of mythologized” parts of his life, he says.

For instance, he says, “I thought I got straight As in ninth grade, but they went back and got my report card and I got a B.” Then came what happened when his father got the opportunity to become a federal judge but turned it down.

“I remembered my writing him a note saying, ‘Dad, I wish things had lined up differently and I hope paying for all my school and stuff didn’t influence that,'” Gates says. 

What he didn’t remember was that his father wrote him a letter back: “I’m so secure and happy in what I’m doing that a big change would just be silly. Your mother and I were very touched at your concern about this.”

While Gates has great admiration for both his parents, he knew that in order to truly tell his story he couldn’t shy away from sharing some of the more complicated aspects of growing up. (The middle son, Gates has an older and younger sister.)

“I knew that I’d been a challenging child and I wasn’t going to hold back from saying that it wasn’t a straight path for my parents to figure out what to do with me,” he says.

In Source Code, Gates opens up about “generating so much turmoil” as a boy — a self-described “smart aleck” with a penchant for being “particularly mean.”

He recalls one episode that prompted even his “gentle” father to empty “a glass of water in my face.” 

“Thanks for the shower,” Gates snapped back, according to Source Code. 

Eventually, his parents put him into therapy at age 12, which continued for around two and a half years.

“My whole family came to the first visit, but everyone knew that we were there because of me,” he writes. Through the sessions, he came to see how “my parents loved me” and “I wouldn’t be under their roof forever.” 

“They were actually my allies in terms of what really counted,” he realized, and “it was absurd to think that they had done anything wrong.”

Gates is also candid about one of the time-old traditions of boundary-testing for teenagers: experimenting with alcohol and drugs (in Gates’ case, LSD and marijuana). Those moments largely involved the same name: Paul Allen, his late friend, who co-founded Microsoft with him in 1975.

In the book, he writes about getting drunk for the first time — “I threw up and passed out that night in the Lakeside teachers’ lounge” — and dropping acid during senior skip day … and still feeling the effects the next morning, during a dental procedure.

“It’s all Paul’s fault,” Gates playfully tells PEOPLE. “Everything I did, I’m blaming it on him and Jimi Hendrix.”

“Paul always got a kick out of challenging the things like [not] drinking. And he gave me a bunch of whiskey, which I still don’t like the taste of, because that first night I drank too much,” Gates says. “I’m a huge risk-taker willing to try new things, but I also like my mind working well. And so both during those trips and even after, you wonder, ‘Hey, did I scramble up my mind?’ ”

“So I gave it up after, I think we did [LSD] four or five times in total. I think the last time was when I was like 21. And I’m definitely not recommending that because even though you think some of your thoughts are profound, in retrospect, they’re not,” he continues.

Smoking pot seemed like a way “to try to look cool,” he says — “maybe some girls would be impressed.”

“It didn’t work out,” he says. “But I tried.”

Another girl-related memory that didn’t play out so well? The time he worked up the courage to ask a date to his senior prom and decided to mention that he’d used his toes to dial her phone number. (“Perhaps not the best way to make the case for myself,” he writes.) 

“My asking her out was a very ambitious thing that I knew was a bit of a long shot and something that I was very inept at doing,” he tells PEOPLE. “And so I hesitated, and then I tried to use a little bit of humor.”

“She said she was waiting for a very cool guy to ask her, and eventually he did ask her. So it didn’t work out in the end, but she treated me fairly nicely,” he says, and the two later became friends.

Other notable moments in the book include the time Gates got into trouble with Harvard administrators over his computer lab usage. Although he was afraid he’d be kicked out at the time, he ended up getting off with nothing more than an “admonishment.”

“I try not to distort things,” he says, going on to bring up another less than perfect moment of his past, which is also included in the memoir: his 1977 arrest for driving without a license and running a stop sign  in Albuquerque, N.M., when he was in his early 20s. Allen bailed him out.

“If you’re willing to read a book about somebody, you hope that they’re not writing some expurgated hagiography that I never got any math problems wrong and always got A’s, and I never broke any rules or got in trouble,” Gates says. “I think the main thing you read these things for is to understand, okay, these people are human.”

The memoir is also a way to let his children — daughters Jennifer, 28, and Phoebe, 22, as well as son Rory, 25 — learn more about their grandparents, Gates says. 

“I think it kind of completes the story for them,” he tells PEOPLE.

His mom, Mary Maxwell Gates, died in 1994, before he became a father; and his dad, William Henry Gates II, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and died in 2020, only got to know his grandchildren “a bit” due to his declining health.

Part of what has been particularly interesting about writing this first memoir for Gates is “a lot of the key people, almost all the key people in this book are not alive [today], starting with my parents.” The list also includes Allen and his childhood pal Kent Evans, who fell during a mountain climbing trip in 1972 and died after being transported to the hospital.

“But talking about them and talking about what they did — well, it’s what you have left that you can still find that connection and inspiration,” Gates writes.

With two memoirs still on the horizon, Gates says he’s “enjoyed the process a lot,” even if at times he has worried whether it doesn’t distract him from his other work, particularly through his foundation.

“As I am taking time off from working on HIV, malaria, polio and when I look at my calendar, it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s a little self-indulgent that I’m working on my memoir this week, and not telling those teams how to move forward a bit faster,’ ” he says. “But hopefully there’s enough that people can learn that it’s valuable.” 

Source Code will be published on Tuesday, Feb. 4.