“There's a gaping hole in the dashboard… So I said, Bill, what happened? Where'd you get ripped off? And he said, I didn't get ripped off. I had it removed… I don't want to have a radio that I can switch on that takes my mind away from Microsoft. And I thought, maybe that story should be a definition of the word obsession in the Oxford English Dictionary.”
The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · October 2026
Moritz recalls reporting on a young Bill Gates for Time magazine in the early 1980s, when Gates gave him a ride in a Mercedes with the radio missing. He offers it as an example of how Gates cut every distraction from his life to focus on Microsoft.
Transcript
…obviously, to the two of them. But I think the contemporaneous nature of our age may have been a little bit of an advantage. I mean, these, I'm not putting myself for even the slightest moment comparing that. The only thing I had in common with them was, you know, I was really roughly the same age.
…you say he looks like an undernourished grad student as he waits for his plane at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. But then you just describe, you know, there's this really lovely portrait of just a fanatically focused guy. And I wonder if you could talk about that. That really comes through.
…a great sponge for knowledge and had such enormous curiosity. But I think the thing that you were referencing was after we finished our interview, we were both flying back to, or I was flying back to San Francisco and he had a meeting with Intel and with Andy Crow. And I got into the car and he offered me a ride and he had this, you know, he had this Mercedes sedan and there was no radio in it. There's a gaping hole in the dashboard, which looked just like every gaping hole in the dashboard of a of a radio that had been ripped off from a car. So I said, Bill, you know, what happened? Where'd you get ripped off? And he said, I didn't get ripped off. I had it removed. Why did you have it removed? Well, I'm in the car between my apartment and the office and then between the office and the airport. And I don't want to have a…
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All right, back to the show. Yeah, it's really fascinating. I think I was very struck as I was going through those old stories that you wrote about him of how many, in how many ways he sort of established a prototype for what you would see again and again with great founders, right? So you would…
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