Every time Bill Gates comes up in the news, you should realize it is PR. Just like his website is something his PR team created. The thing about PR is that it works. Look at all the comments fawning over and idolizing Gates in this thread. Something you'd never have imagined in the 90s or 00s.
For all the talk here about how PR and ads don't work and ad spending is a waste of time, it sure seems like it works wonders on the HN crowd.
People often tell pretty stories, to themselves and to others, about who they are, and what they do. Rich people often have skilled artists print and paint those stories. Completeness, fairness, correctness... are not much selected for. Reflecting well on themselves, and supporting what they do, are.
So for example, there was a PR/press story of Gates "turning his attention to opportunities for innovation in VR", not one of "he's helping his colleague Myhrvold patent troll VR, because the opportunities there are too rich to pass up". Or here, Gates's dad "pushed him to excel", not as an old biography suggested IIRC, "taught him the most important thing was to win, leaving him ethically impaired".
As a rule of thumb, if you hear a self-serving story that lacks nuance, it's likely... incomplete. Maybe someday, hagiography will work less well, and we'll get self-serving stories with nuance, but for now, that doesn't seem the common case.
For all the talk here about how PR and ads don't work and ad spending is a waste of time, it sure seems like it works wonders on the HN crowd.