In praise of Bill Gates’ minimal and un-status-y Casio

How do you flex when you’re a member of the billionaire’s boys club?

The beauty of watches is that on a relatively small bit of real estate – the few inches of flesh that comprise your wrist – you can easily slip on the equivalent of a professional person’s annual salary, just like that. There’s that brilliant scene in Glengarry Glen Ross when a real estate boss played by Alec Baldwin humiliates a colleague by showing him his gold Rolex and saying: “This watch costs more than your car.” In the analogue world, watches are not only for telling the time but for telling the world who you are and how much you earn.

However, in Silicon Valley, where success is measured in billions not millions, wrist candy takes on a slightly different role. Silicon Valley disrupts not only technology, politics, society and everything else, but also, how we semaphore status. Obvious olde worlde luxuries from Europe: Swiss watches and fine tailoring are rejected in favour of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, super casual understatement.

Normcore tech titan Mark Zuckerburg, who famously wears the same style of grey T-shirt and black jeans every day, doesn’t even bother with a watch, which perhaps represents the ultimate flex. Presumably, he doesn’t have to be on time for anything because time simply revolves around him. It’s his underlings that need watches, not the boss.

Bill Gates, the man who inadvertently invented dad style, famously wears a succession of inexpensive Casio watches. His arch-nemesis, the late Steve Jobs, also wore a cheap watch: a simple 33mm Seiko with a circular black case and white face. It’s about as minimal and un-status-y as a watch can possibly get. The horological equivalent of one of those famous black turtlenecks by Issey Miyake. Similarly, the current Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, was spotted at a developers conference in May this year wearing a $199 Fossil Sport smartwatch.

It’s not so much that tech titans don’t want to show off, it’s just that when they do, they go big. It’s besides the point that Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, with a net worth of $100 billion, wears a Ulysses Nardin Dual Time, a perfectly nice Swiss-made sports watch you can pick up for between £8,000 and £10,000. Almost anyone can do that. What you can’t do is spend $42 million on a 500-foot tall “10,000 Year Clock”, housed inside a hollowed-out mountain in Texas. Powered by the earth’s thermal cycles, it ticks just once a year, has a century hand that goes round once every 100 years and a cuckoo that will emerge when it’s a new millennium.

Now, that’s how you tell the time when you’re a member of the billionaire’s boys club.