He was your best friend, and more focused on his ambition than you were, reading business magazines as a teenager. His accidental death at age 17 haunts this book, and your life.
Kent helped shape me as a forward-looking person. And then Paul was reading about chip stuff, and he showed it to me. He was two years ahead of me but he sought me out.
Paul also gave you LSD. Steve Jobs once said that LSD was a formative experience and opened his mind in a way that helped him with creativity and design. I don’t get the impression that taking acid was life-changing for you.
I think the batch that Steve got must have really been good for product design and marketing. My God, just think if I’d had that batch! Yeah, I did some crazy things when I was young. Paul deserves some credit for that. By the time we got serious about work, we weren’t doing that anymore.
You also briefly write about the famous time you got busted for speeding. Were you freaked out by spending a night in jail?
No, it was just kind of a funny thing. They thought it was strange that somebody so young had a nice car—what was the story with this kid? Was I a drug dealer or something?
You bought yourself a Porsche in your early twenties.
I clearly didn’t fit their normal pattern. We kept enough cash around that Paul was able to come down and bail me out.
Speaking of cash, on the recent Netflix series you host, you did an episode about inequality. You didn’t condemn the idea of billionaires but advocated for more equality. How would that work?
The world economy has created some hyper-rich people. Like me. And maybe 50 or 60 others. Elon Musk is at the head of that list, but with Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, there’s a lot of people with a stunning level of wealth. I think that’s OK. I would have a much more progressive tax system, so I would have about a third as much money as I have. It would still be a gigantic fortune.
The New York Times reported that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is on track to avoid $8 billion in estate taxes. When you read that, did you think, “I should consult his tax lawyer”? Or say that this is not a good thing?
I’m quite certain I’ve paid more taxes than anyone alive—over $12 billion. There are techniques I could have used, like to borrow against my Microsoft shares and not sell them. But if people are getting away with paying less in taxes in a legal way, blaming them is a little strange. We ought to change the tax system.
They are culpable because they use political pressure to preserve their loopholes and cut funding for the IRS.
The votes of these billionaires shouldn’t influence our tax system. Also, several of the 50 hyper-rich are for more progressive taxation. I’ve been surprised that even the Democratic Party hasn’t gone very far to make tax stuff more progressive. I’m a huge defender of the estate tax, I think it’s a fantastic thing. I would make it even tougher to avoid it.
Photograph: Sinna Nasseri
Let’s talk about artificial intelligence. You’ve been working with it for years, but you were slow to embrace the recent transformational breakthrough of generative AI. It wasn’t until OpenAI did a demo of GPT-4 at your home and aced an AP Biology test that you became bullish on it. What was the reason for your initial skepticism?
The idea of AI is pervasive throughout my whole history with computers. Bizarrely, when I left Harvard to start Microsoft, one of the things I thought I might regret was that the progress in AI in academia might move quickly while I was doing BASIC interpreters. That turned out to be so wrong. I expected that when we could encode knowledge in a rich way, where it could read a biology textbook and pass the AP exam, that we would explicitly understand how we’re encoding that knowledge. Instead, we discovered a weird statistical algorithm that we don’t understand. Why does GPT work? We don’t have a clue. But when OpenAI showed me GPT-4, it stunned me that they had crossed a very important threshold. We still have reliability problems, but we have a path now where I think those will all get solved.
