From the finance editor of The New York Times, an examination of Bill Gates—one of the most powerful, fascinating, and contradictory figures of the past four decades—and an eye-opening exploration of our national fixation on billionaires that reveals how the wealthiest wield their power, manipulate their image, and pursue philanthropic aims to become heroes, repair damaged reputations, and direct policy programs.

When Bill Gates cofounded Microsoft in 1975, computers were found mainly in government offices, and software as a product didn’t exist. But by 1987, Gates had become the first technology billionaire, and by 1995, the richest man in the world, forever influencing how we think about tech founders, as the products they make and the ideas they sell continue to dominate our lives. But there is more to Gates’s story, and here, Anupreeta Das’s revelatory reporting shows us that billionaires have secrets and philanthropy can have a dark side.

Today, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the world’s largest private philanthropic donor, touching millions of lives, and transforming Gates into a new kind of high-profile, do-gooder billionaire. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with current and former employees of the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, academics, nonprofits, and those with insight into the Gates universe, Das delves into Gates’s relationships with Warren Buffett, Jeffrey Epstein, Melinda French Gates, and others, to uncover the truths behind the myth.

Insightful, illuminating, and timely, Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King is an important story of money and government, wealth and power, and media and image, and the way in which institutions have tied their fates and their fortunes to the richest people in the world.

Anupreeta Das is the finance editor of The New York Times, overseeing coverage of Wall Street, including banking, investing, markets, insurance, and consumer finance. Previously, Das spent nearly a decade at the Wall Street Journal, where she helped run the paper’s coverage of business and technology, focusing on corporations and the issues affecting them. Das was also a reporter at the Journal. She wrote stories about finance, investing, and Wall Street, including a groundbreaking series she conceived and coauthored about family offices, the private investment firms of the extremely wealthy. She holds degrees from Boston University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Delhi. She is an avid hiker, having hiked across a Himalayan glacier as a teenager and summiting Mount Kilimanjaro. She is the author of Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King.