Before he was one of the richest men alive, Bill Gates had a speeding habit that kept landing him in trouble. The Microsoft co-founder loved fast Porsches, drove them hard, and collected enough tickets that traffic cops became a regular fixture of his early years. At one point his driving record got bad enough to put his license—and reportedly his freedom—on the line.So Gates did something unusual. When Seymour Rubinstein, one of Microsoft’s biggest competitors, showed up expecting a business meeting, Gates told him the meeting was moving to traffic court. Rubinstein, the founder of MicroPro and the man behind the hugely popular WordStar, ended up coaching his young rival on how to avoid jail time and keep his license.
The speeding habit that Bill Gates’ radar detector couldn’t fix
Gates’s love of speed went back to Microsoft’s earliest days. He owned a green Porsche 911 and pushed it constantly. During the company’s move from Albuquerque to Seattle, he reportedly drove the Porsche past 100 mph and got caught more than once. One time his radar detector was useless—police were clocking his speed from an aircraft overhead.The traffic court episode is documented in Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, the 1992 book by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. Rubinstein arrived for what he thought was a normal Microsoft meeting, only to be told he was heading to court to watch Gates answer for his driving.
How Microsoft rival Seymour Rubinstein saved Bill Gates in traffic court
Rubinstein wasn’t just any competitor. WordStar was one of the first commercially successful PC applications, and he later claimed it held 72% of the word-processing market going into 1984. Microsoft had released Word for MS-DOS on September 29, 1983, putting the two men on a direct collision course.But they went back a long way. Rubinstein was about 21 years older than Gates and had signed an early OEM deal with Gates and Paul Allen during his IMSAI days. They talked often and traded advice. Gates wanted to fight his ticket on a technicality—owning a radar detector was legal, he argued, and he felt the officer had treated him unfairly for spotting it. Rubinstein knew that wouldn’t fly with a judge. He told Gates to apologise, promise to bin the radar detector, and swear he’d stop speeding. Gates listened, and dodged the worst of it.
Why Bill Gates’ slow diesel Mercedes failed to curb his speeding
Gates later tried engineering a fix. He bought a sluggish brown Mercedes diesel—no working radio, so he could think while driving—treating it as a self-imposed speed limiter and a test of discipline. It didn’t work. Fortune reported in 1986 that he kept collecting tickets even in the slower car. The Mercedes eventually died from an engine failure tied to an oil oversight, and Gates went back to a Porsche capable of roughly 155 mph. The problem, it turned out, was never the car.