How Bill Gates Won Over Reddit

Alexander Abad-Santos

Bill Gates's Ask Me Anything session on Reddit today pushed its way beyond 10,000 comments and 35,000 "up votes" — in about a half-hour. So, fine, it's not quite President Obama's 24,000+ comments, but the Microsoft founder still seems to know how to get the nerds excited. A lot of it has to do with the so-called verification picture — the way Redditors ask AMA-ers to prove they really are who they say they are — and Gates has proven that he gets it with a mock-up illustration of himself as the Reddit logo. For comparison, just look at Obama's not-so-fun official Reddit picture:

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And look at one (yes, there are several) of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Reddit photos:

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Gates is obviously winning the "rich, important guys who get Reddit" competition. So what's he actually saying? Well, there's some insight on a client/cloud store named WinFS, which is completely sending nerdy tech Redditors a'flutter: 

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And he has come out as anti-trust fund:

And, of course, there was the requisite Microsoft Surface Pro shout out:

And the answer to the age-old question: What do you get the billionaire who has everything?