- Bill Gates opened up about his past drug use in his memoir, “Source Code: My Beginnings.”
- Gates said he tried LSD as a young man despite what Steve Jobs may have thought years ago.
- During his “trips,” he said he thought about code more than creation or design.
Bill Gates has a more colorful past than the straight-laced image he has in the tech industry implies.
These days, Gates’ name is associated with philanthropy and cofounding Microsoft, but the billionaire reminded us that he was once a teenager experimenting with drugs.
Gates, 69, spoke briefly about taking LSD on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and included an anecdote about Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. He recalled a comment by his late rival suggesting he should “take acid” to help with his design taste.
He said he thought to himself at the time, “I took the acid. It was just that I got the batch that’s about code, not about design.'”
Jobs was open about his experiences with LSD and other psychedelics as a young man. He told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that dropping acid was “a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.”
In his memoir, “Source Code: My Beginnings,” Gates said that Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen first asked him to try acid when they were high schoolers, but he declined. When he was asked again as a senior, Gates said he was “feeling a bit uninhibited” from smoking marijuana beforehand.
“I decided to see what it was all about,” he wrote.
Gates described his first trip as exhilarating at first, but he had dental surgery the next morning while he was still feeling the effects. He said he wasn’t sure what was really happening during the procedure.
“I vowed that if I ever dropped acid again, I wouldn’t do it solo and I wouldn’t do it when I had plans for the next day,” Gates said.
He did end up dropping acid again. While he was a student at Harvard, Gates wrote, he took LSD again on a friend’s birthday. This time, he had a seemingly “cosmic” experience that ended with him worrying that his brain could erase his memories like a computer could delete files.
“That would be one of the last times I would do LSD,” Gates said.
In the past, he’s been much less candid about his drug use. He was asked directly by Playboy Magazine in 1994 if he’d ever done LSD, and his response could be interpreted as an admission.
“My errant youth ended a long time ago,” he told the interviewer.
Read the full article here
