Bill Gates Exclusive: I’m On The Autism Spectrum, It Never Goes Away

About two hours from Los Angeles, Palm Springs is a desert resort city – arid and beautiful with the San Jacinto mountains as a scenic backdrop.

Bill Gates has a home here, within an upscale Golf and Resort Community.

In early January, the Microsoft co-founder met me in Palm Springs, a short drive from his home, for what would be a very personal, intense conversation on a project very dear to his heart – Source Code: My Beginnings – part one of what may end up being a three-part memoir.

In Source Code, the most intimate look at his growing up years, Bill Gates makes an astonishing statement – ”If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum. In the time of my childhood, the fact that some people’s brains process information differently from others wasn’t widely understood.”

I asked the billionaire philanthropist if he was willing to speak some more on this intensely private part of this life. ”I still rock [my legs] a bit, which is kind of characteristic of, they call it self-stimulation. So, you know, I have to catch myself because it can make people nervous if I’m sitting doing that. So, no, I don’t think it ever goes away. It’d be harder to diagnose now because it’s less acute and I’ve learned, you know, how to shape my behaviour.”