For more than a decade, the public image of Bill Gates has been that of a globe-trotting philanthropist, using his fortune to fight poverty, disease and climate change. A recent three-part Netflix documentary on Gates shows him applying his acumen to invent better toilets for the developing world and extract carbon from the atmosphere.
What gets far less attention is the moonlighting Gates does inside the company he co-founded, Microsoft, where he still spends as much as 20% of his time pushing product managers to use artificial intelligence in Microsoft Office, reviewing upcoming Surface computers and discussing strategy for forthcoming products.
While he left day-to-day work at Microsoft in 2008, Gates has over the past several years deepened his involvement in the company he co-founded in 1975 at the invitation of Satya Nadella, who became CEO of Microsoft in 2014. His official role is “technical advisor.” But that title doesn’t quite capture the extent of his responsibilities at the company, where he acts as a sounding board for researchers and product development teams and is a figure whose stature as an iconic company founder forces Microsoft employees to bulletproof their work.
