In September 1987 Bill Gates became, at 31 years old, the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. Personal computers were rapidly becoming ubiquitous and Gates’s company, Microsoft, made the software (the operating system) that allowed people to use the machines without having to write code themselves. Microsoft didn’t make the devices, but for every one sold it earned a royalty, a river of money that swelled as Gates and his colleagues monetised the entire digital revolution.
At the same time, on the other side of the world, 42-year-old Ren Zhengfei was divorced, unemployed, and living in a shack on an industrial estate. When it rained, water seeped through the thatched roof. He had arrived in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone a few years earlier after the army unit he had worked for was disbanded. In this fenced-off strip of land next to the Hong Kong border he experienced his first supermarket and his first sip of Pepsi. He was going to try starting a minjian – a type of private company, newly allowed in China – to make telephone switches, but felt washed up among the young entrepreneurs of Shenzhen. “People of my age group,” he later reflected, “were the most worthless. We didn’t understand computers, and our English was not good.”
To become a successful entrepreneur requires an unusual appetite for risk. One way to acquire this is to be born with it – to have enough wealth that failure has no real consequences. This is the model that supported the early careers of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and that gave Bill Gates – whose great-grandfather founded one of Seattle’s largest banks – the confidence and security to establish Microsoft. The other route is to have so little that failure is what the world expects of you; it can hardly make things worse. It was in these conditions that Ren Zhengfei would establish Huawei, which would become the world’s biggest provider of telecommunications equipment.
Despite their very different backgrounds, Gates and Ren are both products of the systems that surrounded them. Gates grew up in postwar America, a country he felt was being built anew for his generation, and specifically for those with his combination of intellect, curiosity and greed. Ren was born into a communist dictatorship, where he learned pragmatism and political aptitude. Like Gates, he was a gifted engineer and was in the right place when the world’s largest country turned to capitalism.
These two men would achieve something historic: monopolistic control of technologies used across the globe. Theirs would be a new kind of power, desired and feared by politicians, and their companies would become emblems of the new geopolitical order.
When I look at Holbein’s picture of Henry VIII I think: if that’s flattery, what must honesty have looked like? Holbein’s job was to make the king attractive, but believably so – a dangerous job when depicting a serial killer – and clearly the king was happy with the result. But if the vacant, jowly bloke in the painting is the nicest possible version of Henry, the man himself – covered with boils and ulcers, a gout-riddled drunk – must have been a vision from a nightmare.
A similar question, more politely put, might be asked of Source Code, Bill Gates’s account of his early life from birth in Seattle in 1955 up until the late 1970s, when Microsoft began making deals with companies such as Apple and RadioShack, and Bill bought his first Porsche. This book has its Holbeins, an army of them. One of the more interesting parts of it is its acknowledgements: the long list of researchers and ghostwriters who actually composed the book, using interviews and archive material to compose an autohagiography of the boy who would become the richest man in the world. This portrait of the technologist as a young man took ten years and a staff whose names cover five pages.
The result is a picture of a man who likes nothing better than the taste of his own boots. Gates never tires of pointing out how clever he was and is. As a small boy he mastered card games and read the family’s 20-volume World Book Encyclopedia cover to cover. The foundations of his personality were “intellect, a good memory, and my own power of reason”. School was too slow for him. By age nine he was “intellectually forceful”. At ten he felt that “by applying my brain, I could solve even the world’s most complex mysteries”. Of his young teenage self he declares: “I was raw intelligence.” By 14, he “possessed the ability to hyperfocus… I could instantly recognise patterns”. He admires the “processing speed” of his own mind: “I could come up with the right answer, the best answer, on the spot.” At Harvard he was “intellectually fearless”. As a young man he was of an “always-on intensity”; Gates and his Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen, were “outliers brimming with energy and ideas”. Good for you, Bill.
But Gates is honest, too, about what he describes as his fantastic good luck. He was born rich in what was then the world’s only economic superpower; America in 1960 accounted for 40 per cent of global GDP. His mother, heiress to a banking dynasty, was ambitious in both her career and for her children’s development. His father (also a Bill) was a successful lawyer and a progressive activist in Seattle’s local politics. Teachers were invited to dinner at the Gates’s home. When his behaviour became difficult, he was taken to a therapist who told him: “You’re a lucky kid.”
This was an understatement. At Lakeside School, where tuition now costs almost $45,000 per pupil, Gates became, at 13 years old, one of a small handful of people with regular access to powerful computers. The Lakeside Mothers’ Club raised “about $3,000” (about $29,000 in today’s money) to buy a Teletype machine, which allowed Seattle’s most fortunate sons to connect to a computer in California. In 1968 it was very rare to have seen a computer, let alone to have used one, but as Gates and his friends developed their skills, one of the Lakeside mothers arranged for him and his friends to have free access to her company’s computer, a PDP-10 that would have cost around $4.6m in today’s money.
Ren Zhengfei’s early lessons were of a very different sort, as the technology reporter Eva Dou recounts in her history of Huawei and its founder. Ren was born in 1944, when China was still under Japanese occupation. His father, Ren Moxun, was a bookseller and then a teacher who set up a school in rural Guizhou in southern China. In his childhood, the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s rush for industrialisation, caused a famine that killed one person in ten in their province. Ren and his six siblings ate wild plants; grain rations in Guizhou were measured in tablespoons.
He was at university in Chongqing when his fellow students began hanging posters denouncing their teachers as enemies of the people. The Ren family’s meagre background was not meagre enough. His father’s political background – he had worked for the nationalists rather than the communists during the occupation – made him a target for the Red Guards. Ren Moxun’s students dragged him onto a podium and beat him with a wooden stick until it broke.
Ren found safety in a cave: after graduating he joined the army and was sent to a secretive military factory complex that operated in the limestone caverns of Guizhou, where he worked as a cook and then an engineer. He married and started a family, but saw them little, because he was sent to a northern province, where he and his fellow engineers lived in tents while they built a nylon factory. But the military showed Ren the protection institutions can offer. At the factory, he could read broadly and be creative without incurring political risk.
This lesson would be invaluable in later life. In 1989, when Huawei was still a fledgling manufacturer of telephone switches, China’s answer to IBM was the Stone Group founded by Wan Runnan. In that year’s rebellion against the Chinese authorities – and its brutal conclusion in Tiananmen Square – Wan chose the wrong side; he barely escaped China, never to return.
Like the early Microsoft employees, Huawei’s engineers worked night and day to build their company. During breaks, Ren would tell his colleagues military stories, eyes glowing with fervour. In the capitalist system, Gates had navigated the legal and financial competition – defending his intellectual property, negotiating with his friends for a greater share of Microsoft – but in China, Ren’s aptitude for political survival was what counted. In 1992, knowing the government preferred employee-owned companies, he changed Huawei’s structure. Party officials came to see the value in his growing communications empire, both for surveillance of their own people and for security from the technological power that America wielded.
Huawei began to sell internationally, first in Russia and then, as mobile and broadband networks began to cover the globe, in Europe and America. The company would come to provide about a third of the world’s mobile infrastructure, including two-thirds of the equipment in BT’s network by. In the West in the 21st century, this became an urgent problem: were the Chinese listening in?
The CIA would naturally have expected the Chinese to provide other countries with rigged technology, because that’s exactly what America has done for a long time. For decades, the governments of 120 countries used encryption machines produced by Crypto AG, a company of about 250 people in politically neutral Switzerland. What Crypto’s employees didn’t know was that in the 1970s, their company had been secretly acquired by the CIA, which gained backdoor access to its machines in order to read the most private communications of America’s enemies, rivals and allies.
As technology allowed for even cheaper surveillance, the US and Britain began a mass collection of telephone and internet traffic, as revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013. This was straightforward because many of the companies that handed over the data were American – including Microsoft – which gave the National Security Agency backdoor access to the web chats, emails, Skype calls and cloud storage of hundreds of millions of its customers.
Companies such as Microsoft and Huawei are now major geopolitical actors, because their products are a source of power. If you make a technology that others can’t – semiconductors, operating systems, mobile infrastructure – you can present your rivals with a choice: either use our stuff, which we might have bugged, or watch your economy dwindle as you fall behind. Nowhere was the entwining of technological and political power more obvious than at the inauguration of Donald Trump, attended not only by the Silicon Valley elite but by Shou Zi Chew, CEO of the Chinese-owned social network TikTok. Bill Gates, who had previously donated $50m to the Harris campaign, flew to Mar-a-Lago just after the election for an “intriguing” dinner with Trump, after which he declared himself “frankly impressed”.
Trump is not the kind of man whom Bill Gates’s father envisaged as an inhabitant of “Gatesland”, his progressive vision of an equal society, one that must have seemed entirely possible for a family like his during the magical era of America’s postwar dream. But today, no successful technologist can choose to be an apolitical dreamer. The Bill Gates of the future will have to think a lot more like Ren Zhengfei.
Source Code: My Beginnings
Bill Gates
Allen Lane, 336pp, £25
House of Huawei: Inside the Secret World of China’s Most Powerful Company
Eva Dou
Abacus, 448pp, £25
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[See also: This Christmas, spare a thought for the world’s richest man]
Content from our partners
Related
