Bill Gates Reveals His LSD, Girls, Drink and Arrest Secrets

Shortly after Bill Gates got rejected from prom by his high school crush, he decided to give LSD a shot, he reveals in a new book.

Gates' experience with acid is detailed in his forthcoming memoir Source Code, out Feb. 4. The book, a copy of which was obtained by the Daily Beast, recounts Gates' early life through his first few years running Microsoft.

The memoir is the first in a planned three-part series also documenting his time running Microsoft and the Gates Foundation, Gates wrote in the book. It is why Source Code does not touch on Gates' more lurid moments of the last two decades, including his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein; his eventual split, personally and professionally, from Melinda Gates; or an admitted affair with a Microsoft employee.

In the book, Gates does admit how he would speed through Albuquerque’s Sandia Mountain roads in his 1971 Porsche II with his then-roommate, Chris Larson. Gates was arrested in 1977 for running through a stop sign and for driving without a license, resulting in a widely circulated mugshot.

The book details his lifelong friendship with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen from their time at the private, all-boys high school Lakeside in Seattle through their founding of Microsoft in 1975. Allen died in 2018, and Gates praised him as ”a brilliant technologist and philanthropist who wanted to accomplish great things, and did."

In one of Source Code’s chapters, Gates, now 69, details how he and Allen reveled in the music of Jimi Hendrix, particularly in his debut album Are You Experienced? The title, Gates wrote, became a mantra for Allen to test someone on their experience with substances.

“Aimed at me, the song’s chorus was another goad from Paul: ‘Are you experienced? Have you ever been experienced? Well, I have.’" Gates wrote.

Eventually, Gates allowed Allen to get him drunk on “really cheap scotch” as the two worked in Lakeside’s computer room one summer on a coding project. Gates was so inebriated, he wrote, he ended up passed out in the teacher’s lounge.

“That episode was followed days later by a demonstration of how to smoke a joint,” he wrote. “And then, of course, Paul argued, I couldn’t be truly experienced without trying LSD.

“I declined.”

A reversal came during Gates' senior year, shortly after his then-crush Vicki rejected his invitation to go to prom. (A phone call Gates partially made by dialing her number with his toes. He also told her, when asking her out, that he had used his toes in his attempts.)

A 17-year-old Gates and his high school class embarked on Lakeside’s “senior sneak,” a tradition where seniors would skip school for the day and head out on an adventure. While high at a classmate’s “sprawling” Bainbridge Island home that night, Gates was again offered acid by a different friend, he wrote.

“I had always resisted Paul’s assertion that I needed to ‘be experienced’ by taking LSD,” Gates wrote. “This time, I decided to see what it was all about.”

Gates conceded that while part of the trip was “exhilarating,” he regretted the timing of his Hendrix-inspired experience, as he took the drug the day before a dental surgery.

“I sat gaping at my doctor’s face, his drill grinding away, unsure if what I was seeing and feeling was really happening,” he wrote. "Am I going to jump out of this chair and just leave? I vowed that if I dropped acid again, I wouldn’t do it solo and I wouldn’t do it when I had plans for the next day, especially a dental procedure."

Gates went on to cement Microsoft as a founding pillar of personal computing, developing the Windows operating system and now has a net worth of $166 billion, ranking 7th on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index.

He later set up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with his then wife. It is now one of the world’s largest charitable foundations with a $75 billion endowment and a focus on global healthcare initiatives. The foundation was formally renamed the “Gates Foundation” earlier this month, following Melinda’s departure last year in the wake of the ex-couple’s divorce.

The book also comes at a time of tech leaders getting politically vocal. Gates accepted a dinner invite by President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, calling the conversation “intriguing” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. He also criticized Elon Musk’s encroachment on national affairs in an interview with The Times of London, calling his support for far-right leaders across the globe “insane s---.”

“It’s really insane that he can destabilize the political situations in countries,” he said.