The Bill Gates Tunnel in Washington State, the highway that led in front of it, would have cut the Gates property, and so they reroute it.

So they paid the state to have the highway reroute it so that Gaines can maintain his privacy.

To me, that was an example of how people do live by different rules.

Can get a lot done that the rest of us can't.

Welcome to GeekWire. I'm GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop.

Who is the real Bill Gates?

Ony Prita Doss focuses on that question in her new book, Billionaire,

Nerd, Savior King, Bill Gates, and his quest to shape our world.

Doss is the South Asia correspondent for the New York Times.

She speaks on this episode with guest host Ross Reynolds, the longtime interviewer and public radio

host from the Seattle region.

Here's Ross.

Why did you decide to write this book?

You know back in 2021 when Bill Gates and Melida French Gates got divorced I

got pulled into the reporting because I had written about Gates's fortune that

going back to 2014 and the question of what was going to happen to that money

became pertinent because of the Gates Foundation and so you know leading up to that

divorce there was this period where you had Jeffrey Epstein, you know the

convicted sex offender and Gates's connections and so leading up to that moment I

was like who is this person you know I at least had thought of him of him as the Microsoft co-founder and this global philanthropist and beyond that wasn't really paying that much attention so that for me was the aha moment to try to explore who this persona was and who the person was and what does it say about sort of how we engage with billionaires?

Did you get to interview Bill Gates?

No, he turned out my requests for an interview.

...