'Mom, I'm busy'

Tech giants, mentorship, and a fateful lunch. Also, 7 other things worth your time.

Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg will be testifying by video today before a Judiciary Committee subcommitte about Big Tech business practices — things like privacy, antitrust, and other controversial Internet issues.

It’s the first time they’ve appeared together like this, and some observers say it reminds them of the feeling before the CEOs of the Big Tobacco companies testified before Congress in the 1990s.

I’d like to take the moment, then, to talk briefly about someone who isn’t testifying: Bill Gates — and what he was doing back around the time those tobacco executives testified. Because this month marked the 29th annivesary of what I think was the single most important meal in Gates’s life.

The date was July 5, 1991. Gates was a 34-year-old billionaire and still CEO of Microsoft at the time, known to the world then as sort of an Evil Empire, much as Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook are today.

His mom and dad were having lunch with Warren Buffett, who was a …