Gates

Computer journalists Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews wrote an independent biography of Bill Gates drawing on close to a thousand hours of interviews with his friends, family, employees and competitors, along with a dozen sessions with Gates himself. They follow him from the computer ventures he ran for profit in high school, to co-writing Microsoft BASIC at Harvard before dropping out, to offering IBM, at twenty-five, a program called DOS that he did not yet own. The book also covers his refusal of a buyout offer from Ross Perot, his battles with IBM over Windows, and his clashes with Steve Jobs and John Sculley of Apple over the Macintosh.

Cal Newport called it excellent and drew on it for the Microsoft founder's fierce, at times near-sociopathic, competitive instincts.