Before we started our data collection, we anticipated some of the celebrities who might come up – from entrepreneur and Reality TV star Kim Kardashian to Olympic diver and TV presenter Tom Daley. But we never expected Bill Gates. Yet he came up unprompted in nine of the 24 group interviews and across five of the six schools in which we collected data, He was the most popular of a large number of ‘geek celebrities’. There were some regional variations, suggesting a more business-oriented metropolis: Gates came up least in the two rural schools (in only one group in Merlin School and not at all in Hardy) and most in the London schools (in three groups in Jackson School and two in Jordan). His charitable giving was the most common reason for his inclusion, being mentioned in eight of the nine groups where his name was mentioned. In this blog post I explore some patterns in young people’s talk about Bill Gates.