Robber Baron Redux

Reviewing Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King--a book about Bill Gates.

In 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, Mathew Josephson, a writer influenced by progressive historian icon Charles Beard and his digestion of the works of Karl Marx, penned The Robber Barons. The book examined the careers of such leaders of finance and industry as J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Henry Clay Frick.  Several concepts run through Josephson’s work, including economic inequity and what he believed was the corrupting influence of these men. In Josephson’s view, they were not rags-to-riches embodiments of the American dream, nor were they the ones who laid down the industrial infrastructure for the United States, leading the nation to economic preeminence.  Instead, they were unscrupulous, rapacious criminals who used every lever to amass wealth while grinding the poor under their heels.  Josephson used terms such as “tyrants” and “Mephistophelian” to describe these men.  

Ninety years later, we get a book with eerily similar themes. It is certainly in the same ethos that the former financial editor of The New York Times, Anupreeta Das, brings to the subject of a current “Robber Baron,” Bill Gates, in a work entitled Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World. She does not begin the book with a biography of Gates, a story of Microsoft, or the creation of the Gates Foundation.  Instead, the author describes a photo of Gates with the odious Jeffrey Epstein to signal how the book will treat the Microsoft founder.  

This is not a standard Gates biography in the Ron Chernow Titan model. Instead, Microsoft’s founder is a stand-in for all billionaires, a symbol of inequity, and an example of how the super-wealthy attempt to control our nation.  The author titles one of the first chapters “Why We Love Billionaires” and then provides content clearly illustrating that she does not, in fact, love billionaires. A later chapter is named “Why We Hate Billionaires.” To make her points, Das cites a cavalcade of progressive voices from all the usual suspects, including progressive media, left-leaning politicians, and denizens of the academy.  

Das’ obvious disdain for the wealthy and the inequity she perceives in our system is palpable.  One example revolves around the founding of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  It is not truly about charity or wellness but polishing an image, tax breaks, building naming conventions, or sheer boredom that drives the giving in Das’ estimation. She even claims that charity by the mega-wealthy is inhibiting small donor contributions.  And Billionaires allocating money as they see fit, and not through existing, general non-profits, is selfish because it is allocated towards the wealthy’s designated causes.  Because the focus is on billionaires, it is never discussed whether government, where politicians allocate other people’s money, ostensibly in the name of helping the population but truly rewarding their constituencies, is somehow more beneficial and altruistic than private individuals. 

In discussing Microsoft’s business, words like “crush, obliterate and destroy” consistently make their way into the narrative.  Some of this was from Microsoft’s early tech bro days. But most of it, in Das’ telling, is from their competitors or antitrust lawyers who had a powerful incentive to turn a very successful company image into, as Das puts it, an “Evil Empire.” And in this narrative, the antitrust lawyers are the heroes.  Even today’s rabid antitrust initiator, FTC Chair Lina Khan, gets a positive shout-out.  

It is not all plutocrats who get short shrift. One chapter focuses on Melinda French Gates, who divorced Bill Gates in 2021 for among many reasons, infidelities.  But because French Gates uses her billions to support women’s causes, she receives flattering praise from the author. 

One of the many discrepancies laid out in the book is the US Government’s antitrust case against Microsoft.  At the core of the lawsuit was whether Microsoft, with Windows running on 90% of PCs, was bundling their applications with shipments of Windows, excluding all other apps, and charging accordingly.  One of the applications in question was Microsoft’s browser, Internet Explorer. Thinking that the value brought to consumers would shield him, Gates did not yet realize the value of public relations in running a major tech company.  His public image was something that he tried to clean up after a disastrous deposition in the antitrust case and Das contends the Gates Foundation was part of this effort,

Yet, at the same time frame as the accusations of antitrust brought by many Silicon Valley companies and celebrated legal scholars, one of Microsoft’s apps, Money, was flailing.  Intuit, a Silicon Valley darling, was dominating personal finance software, so Microsoft tried to purchase the company, again to the consternation of Gates’ many adversaries. But this begs the question at the heart of the justice department case. If Microsoft was so powerful through their alleged monopoly, why could they not simply bundle Money with their operating software without having to fork over the cash and stock for Intuit?  Das has no answer.  

The author (and the original antitrust suit) never makes the case that the one group for which antitrust is supposed to help, the consumer, experienced harm.  Instead, Microsoft brought PC computing to the masses on a scale that, before the 1990s, would have been unheard of.  Both IBM’s and Apple’s efforts to do so in the 1980s, if not outright failures, could never match the volume and low cost of what Gates and his company achieved.  I would argue the same for the iPhone.  

Das calls out Apple’s current monopoly on iPhones—except that is blatantly false. As of September 2024, Apple’s iPhone had a 16% global market share. Samsung is the leading smartphone brand, with a market share of 18.9%. Only in the US alone does Apple have a barely 50% share, and even that is shrinking as the market, that concept of which Das seems to struggle, decides the fate of corporations.  

Any book featuring Gates’ considerable achievements in corporate technology and philanthropy must also address his many shortcomings, including that photo mentioned at the beginning of the book.  It was not just Gates but a who’s who of corporate titans, politicians including Bill Clinton, linguist Noam Chomsky, and even a British prince caught up in Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit.  How could so many smart men be captivated by a sex offender and thoroughly disgusting character?  For some, it might have been to exercise their more criminal instincts.  Yet Gates never visited Epstein’s infamous Caribbean Island.  Nor was he accused of participating in anything illegal.  But Gates did do business with Epstein after the latter had been charged as a sex offender, and that, as Das correctly notes, will forever be a stain on his career and character.  

However, Bill Gates’s career, and many mistakes, is not really the point of the book.  Das gives the game away when she cites a professor who speaks of the “myth of individual achievement in the United States.”  You can almost hear Obama’s admonition, “You did not Build that,” echoing on the pages.  After a lengthy diatribe against Gates, including a delve into his divorce, Das gets to her real goal in the chapter “Why We Hate Billionaires.” Here, we get the rogues gallery of those constantly citing inequality and privilege.  Politicians, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, economists such as Thomas Piketty, and even Bill Gates’ father are all cited.  Bill Gates Sr, who died in 2020, testifies that his son’s privileges, not his brains, ambition, or hard work, built Microsoft.  A two-parent family, a mother connected to power brokers at the United Way, a private school, and computer exposure at a young age mean that Gates is not entitled to his wealth or claims of success, the elder Gates contested.  That this description of Gates’ upbringing could fit hundreds of thousands who did not build Microsoft is never mentioned.  

If there is a consistent theme throughout the book, it is that the American dream is an illusion perpetrated by wealthy white men to keep the rest of the population in thrall. Das even cites a Forbes list that rates billionaire wealth by inheritance as compared to self-made wealth. Her final point is the outsize influence these men wield to maintain their monopoly of wealth.  

The concept that dark money plutocrats in America are ruling us is at least 130 years old.  Standard Oil controlled 90% of petroleum refining in 1890; this stat is cited ad nauseum.  What is not mentioned by Das or any of the class warriors is that by the time of the breakup of Standard in 1911, its control of refining was below 64% and continually eroding.  The market corrected Standard, not the government.  

And who is no longer in the top 100 wealthiest? Names like Astor, Frick, Gould, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller or Mellon.  If you take the top of the top, you must get to number 13, Jim Walton, to find anyone who inherited their wealth.  None of the top 12 were even multi-millionaires when they started out.  Some came from wealthy families and were white. But 50 years ago, Oprah Winfrey, Sheila Johnson, Robert Smith, David Steward, Lebron James, or Shawn Carter (better known by his sobriquet Jay-Z), billionaires all today, would simply not have been allowed to accrue such wealth.  They are symbolic that the American dream is more, not less, accessible than ever.  

If these billionaires could shape the world to their visions as Das contests, then how can we explain the political fate of Michael Bloomberg? By the end of March 2020, Bloomberg had spent one billion dollars on a presidential campaign. And for all his cash, Bloomberg got the nominating delegates of … American Samoa, or about $20 million per delegate.  Billionaires such as Meg Whitman could not buy the California governorship in 2010.  In 2022, Peter Theil could not purchase a Senate seat in Arizona for his protégé Blake Masters.  If there is any billionaire whose money seems to politically matter, it is extreme leftist George Soros purchasing positions for progressive, soft-on-crime attorney generals.  But the election of many of these prosecutors had more to do with another George, surnamed Floyd, than Soros’ largesse. 

Early in the book, Das mentions the fictional financier Gordon Gekko and his infamous line, “Greed is good.”  Greed is listed among the seven deadly sins, but so is envy. That attribute is unmistakable when Das complains about Jeff Bezo’s yacht or Gate’s Washington estate. 

If communism is about envy, capitalism, in many ways, is greed channeled. Yet, it is a channeling that has proven, over the last 300 years, to be the single greatest wealth generator in human history.  The gap between Gates and poor Americans is often cited.  Das never mentions that poor Americans enjoy a living standard greater than 99.9% of humanity over the past 5,000 years.  Even super-rich, so-called robber barons Rockefeller and Carnegie did not have electric lights or automobiles for most of their lives.  And they never even conceived of jet travel, central heating, air conditioning, personal computers, the Internet, or smartphones, which 96% of Americans possess.  Das concludes with many of the shortcomings of the Gates Foundation.  A strong argument could be made that instead of founding yet another philanthropy, America and the world would do better with another Tesla, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft. 

AD Tippet is the founder and Publisher of the Conservative Historian. Aves has conducted extensive research in Political, Religious, Social, and Educational history across all eras and geographies. He has been writing and podcasting for over 12 years. In 2020, he published his first book, The Conservative Historian. He has degrees in history, education, and an MBA. @BelAves