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Bill Gates and the New Trumpian Tech Oligarchs

The Microsoft founder discusses vaccine skepticism, his fellow-billionaires’ political pivots, and his dinner with the President at Mar-a-Lago.

Illustration by Diego Mallo

Illustration by Diego Mallo

It says something about the current moment that Bill Gates seems like an outsider. (Accent on seems. But still.) Gates, who will soon turn seventy, has a personal fortune of more than a hundred billion dollars, making him one of the richest people on the planet. He lives in a fashion that would bring tears to the eyes of any sultan or king. A generation ago, his company, Microsoft, was seen as an avatar of not only innovation but antitrust violations. For his critics at that time, he was the epitome of ruthless corporate behavior. The glasses, the knitwear, and the restrained personality fooled no one. And yet he now somehow stands apart from the generation of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech titans who have, without apology or hesitation, cast their lot with magaand Donald Trump.

Gates, for all his wealth, seems almost modest by comparison. (Again, accent on seems.) He is not taking up office space on the grounds of the White House, or wearing a big chain and a new hairdo. No discernible muscles bulge from his Shetland sweaters. Nearly all of his time, and much of the capital he has generated, is aimed toward philanthropy—public health, in particular. But, as he has acknowledged, his reputation has been tarnished of late by his divorce from his wife, Melinda French Gates, and some of the bad behavior that led to it, including a profoundly unwise relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein.

 
 

In a reflective mode, and perhaps in an attempt to create a flattering contrast with his younger, Trumpier rivals, Gates is publishing a memoir, “Source Code: My Beginnings,” a portrayal of his early years as a brilliant, awkward tech geek who did more than anyone to create the era of personal computing. Recently, I spoke with Gates for The New Yorker Radio Hour. He was, at times, cautious, especially when it came to politics and the younger cohort of tech billionaires, but his antipathies were not entirely concealed. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

At a certain point, it emerged that you donated tens of millions of dollars to the effort to elect Kamala HarrisDonald Trump won, and we are now witnessing many of your colleagues in the tech world at the highest level—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos—flocking to Mar-a-Lago and wanting to be as close to power as possible. You’re smiling wryly, but what is the emerging picture here?

Well, President Trump was elected, and he is going to make a lot of policy decisions, and I would say the range of possibilities in many areas has never been as broad. I sought out President Trump and right after Christmas went down to Mar-a-Lago and actually had a really good, very long dinner with him. And—

What did you discuss?

Well, we talked about the world broadly, but my first request was on H.I.V., where there’s a question of whether the U.S. maintains the pepfarprogram that’s over twenty years standing, that keeps over ten million people alive with H.I.V. medicines. I explained to him why we should maintain that, and that I think we can innovate to eventually cure H.I.V. and the need for that, but that that’ll take some time to do, and encouraged him to look at the kind of things he’d done with Operation Warp Speed.

You’re talking about the covid-19 vaccines.

Right. And see if those could be applied to this H.I.V.-cure work.

And how did he respond?

He was quite enthused about that. I talked about polio quite a bit, and how we need to have governments like Pakistan prioritize these campaigns, because we’ve never gotten rid of polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan. My foundation has the U.S. government—both for research and delivery in health—as a key partner, and I will do my best to work with this Administration. I got his ear for three hours. He couldn’t have been nicer. Doesn’t mean that other people won’t come in and say the H.I.V. money should be cut, but I did my best.

Do you worry that you might be in some way punished by being on the Democratic side in the election this last time around? It’s not beyond Donald Trump, history shows, for him to favor his allies and punish what he sees as his enemies.

No, you can definitely worry that there’ve been sort of broad attacks on foundations, and, O.K., some of them are a bit “woke,” but over all I think they serve a valuable purpose. There’s been a broad attack on vaccines.

 

Well, let’s take that. What are your biggest concerns regarding vaccines on a global level when you’ve got the Administration that you’ve got now, and the influence of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in office?

I still think people will come to their senses on this one. The key reason why we went from ten million children dying every year at the turn of the century to less than five million today is because we got new, very inexpensive vaccines out to most of the world’s children. Five million deaths a year—that’s a big thing, and, in fact, if we stay serious about global health, we could cut those deaths in half again.

But do you see an impulse, either at your three-hour dinner with the President or whatever contact you’ve had with the returning Administration—do you have confidence in them where that’s concerned?

Well, I said to him that he’d done a very good job on Warp Speed, which accelerated the availability of the covid vaccine, and I encouraged him to be more public about that, or said that was a worthy thing. And we talked about why the pandemic kind of drove people apart and the fact that we’re less ready for a pandemic today. You would’ve thought that, at least for a while, we’d get serious about it. . . . So, I’m a bit surprised. But, because millions of lives are involved, I do think the whole vaccine thing—people will remember that this is a miraculous invention.

There’s a lot of talk now about oligarchic structures in the United States—far more than before. Is there an oligarchy growing in Washington?

I can’t relate to that term. I think of it more in terms of Russia, actually. And, weirdly—

Why is that, though?

We can’t say that money was the key to this election. The party that spent—I think it’s widely accepted—the party who spent less money won the election.

I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about the influence that somebody like Elon Musk will exert. I’m talking about the way Mark Zuckerberg has been behaving of late. I’m talking about the influence on media barons, like—well, one of his interests is Jeff Bezos, and his reversals when it comes to the Washington Post. Does that not concern you?

The balance between following the new theme that the voters have chosen versus sticking up for enduring principles. [Laughs.] I do think we can look at this behavior and say, O.K., which is this? And maybe have they gone too far? Trump will be making a lot of very key decisions, and the idea that people in the Gates Foundation will be trying to help them make those decisions well—that part I’ll have to stick up for. We are not going into opposition. We are continuing the partnership we’ve had with every Administration.

Vaccine development has been a gigantic focus of the foundation’s work, and, as a result, you’ve become the subject of a boatload of conspiracy theories, especially around covid. One of the most amazing of these conspiracy theories was that you wanted to use a covid-19 vaccine to implant—wait for it—microchips in people. Where does this come from? How do you explain vaccine skepticism, and where do you lay the blame for the way these theories and attacks come at you and whoever else believes in that vaccine?

 

Well, I guess, to start with: the idea of sticking metal needles in children, and they scream and get a fever, and that’s the best thing you can do to protect their life—it is counterintuitive. And in most of the countries we work in—our vaccine work is mostly in the poor countries, where the deaths are—if there’s a period where people are skeptical about vaccines, very quickly you’ll see kids die of measles. So there’s a correcting factor that, “Wait a minute, these kids died.”

In the U.S.—because these infectious diseases don’t come into the country much at all and kids are well nourished—you can have a laxity in vaccine coverage that is dangerous, but you don’t see the problem for quite some time. And, even when you see it, it won’t be tens of thousands of deaths; it will be a very small number. We have good sanitation, good nutrition; we’re very lucky. I couldn’t believe the craziness. And Robert Kennedy was part of promoting some of these things. He wrote a book about how [Anthony] Fauci and I, he said, kill millions to make money, which is exactly correct if you invert the sign. I give billions to save millions, not the other way around. And so you have to have a little bit of a sense of humor.

It’s been pretty clear for a while now that there’s been a kind of ideological battle in the tech world and a new ethos began to take hold. Did you have D.E.I. initiatives at the foundation or at Microsoft?

Oh, sure, absolutely.

To your distress, or do you think it was a good thing?

I think all those things had a core of excellence. I have a scholarship that’s been given to tens of thousands of kids. It’s only for minorities. That’s it. And that was attacked. I think that was legitimate. I’ll stand up for that. But we did a thing about mathematics and somebody who got a little bit of money from us said that the idea that there’s just one answer in math is a racist sort of white thing. So, when you let something run, it can get pretty extreme. Look, I’m a centrist, and I’m more of a technocrat than a political person. On many social values, I’d lean to the left because of the influence of my parents. And so I was sorry to see the left go so far that some of it deserved a backlash.

You’re talking about cultural issues, mainly.

Mainly, yes.

Tell me about your encounter with Bernie Sanders. I watched that conversation between the two of you on your Netflix series, “What’s Next?” It wasn’t unfriendly, exactly; it wasn’t rude. But I was watching two people on hugely different planes of existence.

Well, Bernie’s one of these people who can say, Look, everybody should have shelter and medicine. And how do you disagree with that? As we get richer, the safety net should get more generous. F.D.R. raised the safety net. L.B.J. raised the safety net. It’s great that Obamacare raises the safety net. These are fantastic things. How far we can go . . . I would make taxes more progressive, but Bernie would go further than I would. He would essentially a hundred per cent tax wealth above a billion dollars. And you can say I’m biased since that would’ve affected me. But I think that goes too far in terms of the balance of encouraging innovation in new companies versus getting as much for the government to have—

He thinks that just the notion of being a billionaire is innately immoral. How do you answer that?

Therefore, we should a hundred per cent tax any wealth above that. And so there wouldn’t be any billionaires. No, I disagree with that.

Why?

Because the goose that lays the golden egg is, Hey, start a company, raise money, invest capital in making . . . an Alzheimer’s drug trial costs five hundred million dollars. You better create some big upside for somebody eventually succeeding at that. And building a new nuclear plant costs billions of dollars. I have a company that I do for climate reasons that’s trying to create a cheap and safe nuclear-fission reactor, called TerraPower. And, if the people involved in that didn’t have a great upside, it wouldn’t make as much sense.

I guess what he’s saying is something more than that. And you were quite patient with the whole conversation, as was Bernie Sanders, but he could not fathom—and I think it’s probably near-impossible for almost everybody to fathom—why being a billionaire, one billion, is not enough, especially when we are saturated with images in the media of immense indulgence: yachts, planes, all kinds of almost phantasmagorical displays of wealth that are, I have to say, a bad look.

If I was in charge of the tax system, I would’ve paid three times as much in taxes as I’ve had. I paid fourteen billion, which is probably a record.

You’ve paid fourteen billion dollars in your working life?

Yeah, to the U.S. government. And there are ways I could have done things to lower that number, but I didn’t choose to. I should have paid more. But I wouldn’t outlaw billionaires. I think that leads to all sorts of weird things. When we look at society, I think we should look at the safety net more than—yes, if some people are rich, they’re going to spend the money in crazy ways. That’s part of what freedom lets people do.

 

Yes, with progressive-taxation systems, at some level, you should pay a very high rate, including on investments, which is where the very, very, very big fortunes are made. And, weirdly, investments are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. Anyway, my dad and I were the two big proponents of the estate tax, which was a very lonely thing. We had a year where there was no estate tax. So, I’m closer to Bernie than I am to the current system, but I’m not out there where Bernie is—because why is the U.S. more innovative than other countries? I do think there’s something there.

When you were a kid, you’ve written, you told a therapist that you were at war with your parents. How old were you then? And, moreover, who were you at that time? What was that war all about?

I was about ten when they first sent me to see Dr. Cressey, and I decided I could kind of figure things out myself, and I was getting better at cards than these adults. And their rules seemed very arbitrary to me. I thought, Why that bedtime? Why those weird manners? And there were just some rigidities that I thought, No—I’m going to say no to this. I’m kind of embarrassed even to think back at it. But I was kind of showing my independence. And fortunately the therapist said, Hey, that’s really a waste of your energy. Fighting your parents—really, what’s to be gained there? They’re basically on your side.

When did the penny drop? When did you come across the idea that early computing would be your life’s mission, obsession, possession? Forget about fortune—that’s in a way a lot less interesting, and much later.

Well, at first, the computer was just a puzzle to figure out. And, because I was good at math, people drew me in, and there were four of us who just stayed and were kind of obsessed at figuring out that puzzle. The part that makes it part of my destiny is when Paul Allen reads that these computer chips are going to double in power every year or two, which is called Moore’s Law.

That’s Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with you.

Yes. And I said to Paul, That can’t be, because it just means computing will be free. And if computing was free then we’d have a computer, as we later said, on every desk and in every home. And Paul said, No, it’s true. And so Intel, the chip company—first, they have a chip that’s very limited, called the Intel 4004, and we do some things with that. And then in 1973 they have the 8080. I say to Paul, O.K., this one is so powerful, you can do personal computers. And he’s, like, O.K., let’s build personal computers. I’m, like, No, I don’t want to do hardware. I just want to do the thing we’re good at. I want to do software. Because the incredible exposure to software I had—through many lucky things, I’d had literally thousands of hours by the time I was eighteen—meant that we knew how to write software, we knew it would be important, and the chip caused that revolution. So, it was when I was about sixteen that that dialogue with Paul pushed in that direction. I still thought, Gosh, my dad’s a lawyer. I like politicians. I like professors. But my destiny was pretty set once Paul had that insight.

Nothing happens in a complete vacuum. Why did Microsoft emerge early on to a certain degree as a kind of singularity—and not somebody else, and not something else?

So, in the early days, there are a number of software companies. We’re the first, but, in the next three or four years, the numbers come along. Many of them were single-product companies. That is: VisiCalc; WordPerfect, a word processor. The Microsoft conception was to be a software factory: to hire smarter people than other people did, to have better software tools—compilers, debuggers—and to do all popular software categories, and to do it globally. I had an office in Japan when nobody did. I hired people in Europe. And so—

So it’s business acumen, and conquering-the-world acumen, as well as scientific and mathematical acumen.

Yes. The vision was about software, not about a word processor or a spreadsheet. Until Google comes along, we don’t have any competitors that are hiring the way we are: find very smart scientists and teach them how to program. We don’t have anyone who’s going all over the world and figuring out, How do you do Kanji? How do you do Hangul? And, by the time of Windows 95, we were taking the word-processing category, the spreadsheet category, the presentation category, the database category, and just totally gaining share in everything, because of this factory excellence that nobody else had.

At what point in your career and in your thinking did you not only take on board that you were changing the world in a profound way—in an incredibly positive way—but that there were also pitfalls to this? There are dangers to it that, to this day, we have on our minds when it comes to A.I.

I have to admit, I thought of digital empowerment as an unadulterated good until social networking came along. I mean, I’ll admit criminals could use PCs, but the idea that some digital products could play on human weaknesses—it wasn’t until social networking that I saw that. Nobody ever said, Hey, because Microsoft made a word processor, somebody wrote a kidnapping note. They just didn’t see it that way. In fact, the virtuous thing was to make sure everybody—kids in the inner city, in poor countries—had access, and to keep driving the prices down, make it easier to use. And so I do look back on that naïveté, first with social networking and now with A.I.

 

I don’t know if you consider A.I. to be in its infancy. The New Yorker has been writing about A.I. in one form or another for decades in a way. But it does feel like we’re at this hinge point in history. Tell me about Microsoft’s role in this ecology, and how you want to differentiate from all the other A.I. enterprises.

A.I. is the most profound technology of my lifetime. You can see that it’s just a culmination of all the things I had a chance to be involved with, but it’s more profound because it’s about exceeding human capabilities in many areas, and it’s happening very quickly. The opportunity to have personal tutors and great medical advice is incredibly positive, but it’s so dramatic in how it changes the job market and how we think of how humans spend time and what’s valuable that, yeah, this one really is scary.

Look, I’m concerned about euphoria, gee-whiz-ness where A.I. is concerned, and not paying close enough attention to what could go terribly wrong—not to be a catastrophist, but to be realistic. When you look at A.I. now, what are your biggest concerns in their specificity?

I wouldn’t say that we’re not talking about the problems. My concern is we don’t really have good answers to the problems. Even take social networking: when people are, like, Oh, why didn’t we do more? Well, why didn’t we do what? People are still firing their fact checkers now. I mean, is that going to make it better?

You’re talking about what happened at Meta under Mark Zuckerberg.

Right.

I’m assuming you don’t approve of that firing.

I don’t think that’s going in the right direction. I can understand the pressures that he’s under on that—

Political pressures?

Yeah, and the sort of societal wave, including politics. But the fact that outrage is rewarded because it’s more engaging—that’s kind of a human weakness. And the fact that I thought everybody would be doing deep analysis of facts and seeking out the actual studies on vaccine safety—boy, was that naïve. When the pandemic came, people wanted some evil genius to be behind it, not some bat biology. So, we haven’t solved even the challenges of social networking. A.I. is much broader in terms of what it brings, and it’s going to reshape the job market in a pretty dramatic way. Of course, leisure time is supposed to be good, as long as people have a sense of meaning and purpose and all of that. And the debate about how we deal with the shortage of doctors, teachers—and yet what do we replace that with? I think that debate is still pretty simplistic and not one with many good solutions that I’ve seen.

Microsoft’s a partner of OpenAI. I had an interview with Sam Altman, who’s the C.E.O. there, a couple of years ago, and when I asked him about the implications for the labor market, how people would make a living, who would be made redundant, his answer was kind of, uh . . . it certainly didn’t put my mind at ease.

Well, Sam does not pretend to have all the answers, and I will give him credit for saying that the politicians need to learn about A.I. and get involved and figure out what those regulations should look like.

But do you have faith in politicians to be the arbiters of that kind of future in that kind of situation? You’re smiling.

No, the politicians are in charge, and democracy is better than any alternative. I was surprised, in the 2024 election, how little A.I. got discussed. I expect that the primary topic of the 2028 election will be policies around A.I. How do you change taxes, job markets? How does the government take advantage of it? What does it mean for war? I can’t imagine anything that would be nearly as important or as discussed. And so the political class is just slightly paying attention to this now, and that has to change.

Maybe it’s a sensitive question, but your book is largely about how you became you, and a story of development in many ways. You’re now—I think we’re about the same age, we both recognize we’re not on the front nine of the golf course of life. When you think through your life and when you’ve made a contribution, when you’ve behaved well, when you’ve behaved badly—what are your deepest regrets?

Well, my regrets: there are a lot of things that took me a lot longer to learn than they should have. Drawing in people with different skill sets and not just being oriented toward scientific I.Q.—that took me decades longer than it should have. Without going into any specifics, I was sad that I divorced Melinda. Over all, in my life, I’ve been so lucky that saying, Oh, I wish something had been better or that I’d gotten more problems right on some math quiz . . . that seems a bit churlish sitting where I am today. Right now, I do wish I had better answers about making social networking better. I know it’s a problem—but unlike things like polio and malaria, where I really do know what we need to do, that one, we’ve kind of left it to the younger generation to figure out. 

 

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David Remnick has been the editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He is the author of seven books; the most recent is “Holding the Note,” a collection of his profiles of musicians.
 
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