| | Bill Gates seems enigmatic. He bleats statist left-wing platitudes, he suffers quietly--apparently without public protest--while his competitors beat him over the head with anti-trust law suits, and I'm sure he and Swarzenagger get together regularly to worry about global warming. On the other hand, he thinks for himself in his business, and he's creative, energetic, highly generous, and extremely effective at making things happen. He married his secretary, a somewhat attractive, intelligent woman a few years his junior; instead of acquiring a gorgeous shapely trophy wife 25 years his junior. Why someone with such outstanding personal qualities would passively accede to the "public wisdom" about politics and ethics mystifies me.
I saw him interviewed recently on some TV show. I felt sorry for him, because his interviewer misunderstood what inspired Gates' business success. The interviewer, a typical anti-capitalist, viewed Gates' achievements as another instance of capitalist "greed" (he didn't use this term); and expressed his opinion that Gates would be just as "aggressive" if he were operating a lemondae stand, as he supposedly has been in founding and running a global information technology business. Gates tried to politely explain to his clueless interviewer that he is inspired by the challenge and method of creating new solutions to technology limitations, rather than by an obsession with commercial "conquest".
I assume that anyone who has ever built or created anything of value would intuitively grasp what Gates expressed. But not his interviewer, who remained clueless. Affecting a jovial comradery toward his guest, the interviewer's line of questioning and commentary--and the expression in his eyes when he looked at Gates--revealed hostility and resentment toward his guest. At the conclusion of the interview, he gratuitously insulted Gates with some throw-away comment that eludes me now.
Why Bill Gates does not pause to question the ethos of his interviewer, and of anti-trust legal jackals, astounds me.
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