Don’t expect this book to bother with Gates’s biggest achievements ... Rather than weigh Gates’s accomplishments against his failures, Das focuses on his personal weaknesses ... Frustratingly, Das sheds little new light on the Gates-Epstein relationship ... Reporters are urged to show rather than tell, but in this case the reader is left craving an unambiguous polemic — something to agree or disagree with — rather than this slightly flabby mixture of reported events and other people’s opinions.
Das doesn’t even open or close with Gates, but bookends the volume with the complementary chapters Why We Love Billionaires and Why We Hate Billionaires, which set out America’s centuries-long obsession with wealth and how it’s ruining the republic. It’s hard to disagree with this stuff, but it’s very generic ... Das has found no new smoking gun, and her summation of him... is overblown. The penultimate chapter is titled Cancel Bill, and that’s what the whole book feels like: an appeal to public opinion to write Gates off.
Ruminative ... While this exposé intrigues, Das’s sociological framing—which revolves around how billionaires are perceived by the public and Gates’s PR management—never quite coheres. Still, it’s a perceptive and vibrant character portrait.
