Bill Gates would start this kind of company today

The largest companies in the world, in the United States today, are technology companies. Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and so forth. You worry that there's too much power and too much data in the hands of these technology companies, and are you surprised that government hasn't done something more than they've done to date about this? Well, technology's become so central that government has to think, okay, what does that mean about elections? What does it mean about bullying? What does it mean about wiretapping authorities that let you find out what's going on financially or drug money laundering, things like that. So yes, the government needs to get involved. I, for the early years of Microsoft, bragged to people that I didn't have an office in Washington D.C., and eventually I came to regret that statement, because it was kind of almost like taunting Washington D.C. So now the technology companies, partly because of the lesson of Microsoft, of course they could have seen that lesson through AT&T or IBM or Kodak or a lot of innovators as well, they're very engaged. There will be more regulation of the tech sector. Things like privacy, I'm sure they'll, and there should be at some point federal regulation that relates to that. The fact that now this is the way people consume media, you know, has really brought it into a realm that, you know, we need to shape it so that the benefits outweigh the negatives. All right. So it's said that when Facebook was coming along, you tried to buy Facebook. Did you regret not paying a higher price to buy it then, because you could have bought it maybe for a billion or two billion? No. We bought a small part of Facebook, and that was a super successful investment. What Mark did wasn't within our ambit, you know, unlike mobile operating system that absolutely was because of our engineering culture. Doing this social networking thing, we weren't destined to be the leader in that. Now we, through an acquisition, we have LinkedIn, which for professional communication and networking is in a very strong position and has lots of growth opportunity. Now there was a company that was started in Seattle near you, a company called Amazon, and they were supposed to be selling books over the internet and then later other things, but then they started a web services cloud business. How did Microsoft miss that business of cloud, and you're now number two in it, but were you surprised that you were kind of beaten to that game by a company that wasn't really a software company? Well, the natural companies to do the cloud would have been your classic enterprise vendors, IBM, Oracle, SAP, who really in terms of the true horizontal cloud aren't there at all. It is a surprise, and it's a huge credit to Jeff Bezos and his team that they got out in front and with AWS did the best cloud product. Today, Microsoft is a strong number two and a huge distance to number three, and so it is a source of strength for Microsoft, but yes, there are many companies, including Microsoft, who should feel bad that they didn't get ahead of Amazon in doing that work. So if you were 20 years old today and you wanted to start a new company, drop out of Harvard, what company or what area would you want to start it in? Well, this is a great time to be doing innovation because the tools of innovation are so much better. There are lots of things in biology that are very interesting. There are lots of things in energy that are interesting. Given my background, I would start an AI company whose goal would be to teach computers how to read so that they can absorb and understand all the written knowledge of the world. That's an area where AI has yet to make progress, and it will be quite profound when we achieve that goal. So are you worried about the power of AI to disrupt our civilization and put people out of work, those kind of things? The increased productivity that will come from AI will create dilemmas about what should people do with that extra time. You've got to consider that a good thing, even though it will be an interesting set of adjustments that have to take place. So most people over the last 200 years or so, whoever the wealthiest person in the world was, didn't usually work that hard when they got to be 60 or so. They kind of took life easy. You seem to be working pretty hard. What motivates you to still work so hard? Well, I love my work. The work of the Foundation is super interesting. I get to meet with the scientists. I get to go out in the field. I do think your habits are sort of set in your 20s and 30s. And by my standards of the 20s, I didn't believe in weekends back then, not to mention vacations. So I'm fairly lazy compared to myself in my 20s, where I was a true fanatic. All I believed in was working on software night and day. And for my 20s, that was perfect. I didn't have a wife or family at all. And my role was a very hands-on role. I'm very lucky that my Foundation work, the part-time work I do for Microsoft, I see that extending for decades into the future. And having an understanding of innovation, I think shaping innovation in many of these areas, there is a unique role that I can help play. But being Bill Gates and pretty famous over the last quarter century or so, can you go to a restaurant and people don't bother you? People are pretty nice about that. Particularly if I'm with my family, people are reasonably discreet. So it's not a problem. You're driving a car, people ever stare at you saying, what is he doing driving a car? Sure. But that's okay. And your sport now is tennis, right? That's right. So you've played with some of the best players, Roger Federer and others. You get a lot of points off of those players? Not if they're playing full out. No, not a chance. And you've given up golf. That was one of your other sports, so you don't play that sport? Largely given it up. I still play a little bit. And what about bridge? Are you still a big bridge player? I love playing bridge. It's a game that the players are aging quite a bit. It hasn't caught on with young people. Is that good or bad? No, it's unfortunate because it's a great game. So when you want to go buy something, can you go in a department store and buy anything? Or how do you shop? Do you shop online or you just go buy anything and you have to use a credit card or cash? Or what do you do? For a while, I didn't do that much. But it's something one of my daughters enjoys doing is helping pick clothes for me. So we go out and go shopping together. And she's got good taste. So it's a neat father-daughter activity. One time, your wife told me that when you drop your daughter off in college, the first day at Stanford, she's graduated now. The roommate didn't know that she was going to be the roommate. And then you needed things to fix up the room. And you went to Lowe's to buy things in Lowe's. Was it unusual for you to go into Lowe's? Do people stare at you? Do you go into Lowe's or Walmart very much or things like that? No, it was actually kind of hard to assemble some of that stuff. I wanted augmented reality to help show me how to put the pieces together properly. But people are very nice. Overall, super nice. When you're relaxing today, is it to go on a trip with your family, go someplace you've never been before, go on a boat, play tennis? What is the best way that you relax? Traveling. And then I get to do quite a bit of reading in that case. You read how many books a year? You try to read- 50. 50 books a year, okay. And do you comment on those books? Do you recommend those books? Probably 15 a year, I do serious reviews of. I mentioned at lunch, I'm reading this Jill Lepore of These Truths, which is this great history of the United States. But there's so many fantastic books. Well, I have one coming out. Could you review that? I will. All right, it's a history book. Okay, let's go back to your foundation. Okay. I ask people all the time, I say to them, suppose you had the problem of Bill Gates and Melinda Gates. You have 100 billion or whatever it might be. And then you say, okay, I give you 100 billion dollars. And then you go buy a yacht or a plane or a house. Then you've got 99.5 billion left. What do you do with that? And so the problem, you had that problem. And you would assess the two most urgent issues were K-12 in the United States and health in the less developed areas. How did you pick those two? Any regrets about picking those two? And have you made progress on either of those two? Well, global health is our biggest area. And there, the progress has been really unbelievable. Not just because of our work, but our partners that include the US government spending on PEPFAR, the European donors who've really stepped up on these health issues. One of the metrics of importance is the number of children in the world who died before the age of five. When we got started in the year 2000, that was over 10 million a year. Now it's about 5 million a year. And so it's just mind-blowing. And people aren't that as aware of it as you'd like them to be. Those deaths, because of getting out vaccines and understanding a bit more about nutrition, those deaths have been cut in half. Now the goal is to cut them in half again by 2030. And we do have a pipeline of new vaccines and new tools, particularly in nutrition, that give us an opportunity to do that. So our global health work, because of the partnerships we've had, because of the innovation, has been more successful than we expected. Our US education work, that is not just K-12, but includes higher ed as well, they're the key metrics. Dropout rates, math, and verbal achievement. Those metrics have moved essentially not at all. And even as the US is spending more resources on education, we spend by far more than any country in the world. And yet our results are quite a bit worse than almost all the other rich countries, and even some middle-income countries. Even Vietnam now is passing us in terms of their math results. So there, the field as a whole in our work has not had the impact we hoped for. Part of what you try to do in the education area is have something called Common Core. And that was very controversial, but now it's largely been adopted. Yeah. So in the United States, there were some very strange things. That is, our math textbooks were twice the size of the other countries. In fact, three times the size of Singapore, which has the best math education in the world. And that had come about because of this process where the textbook companies always wanted adoption of new textbooks so they didn't have to compete with the used textbooks. Anyway, they just got thicker and thicker. And so the US would tend to try to teach too much in a year instead of really cementing the basic knowledge. And so the idea of the Common Core was to say, what math should you learn in various grades, make sure that by high school graduation, you have reasonable math skills. And so it became more rigorous. It matched what the best standards in the US were, which were in Massachusetts. And it meant that all the online material and kids who moved between different school systems, you'd have this alignment. And it's the world's most logical thing. And yet it was super attacked, as though math in one state is different than math in another state. But anyway, it's largely succeeded almost as a subtle thing. So Warren Buffett, can you describe your relationship with him? He is a little bit older than you. And you developed this close relationship. And then ultimately, he gave you a large part of his fortune for your foundation. How did that come about? And were you surprised that he did that? Yes. Warren's 25 years older than I am. You know, he's absolutely an amazing person. And I was lucky enough to meet him in 1991. I didn't... Reluctantly. Yeah, I didn't think I wanted to meet him because I don't think of buying and selling of stocks as a value added part of society. Except for private equity. I'm more involved in the innovation part. But when I met Warren, the fact that he had this model of how the world worked, you know, he asked me, why can't IBM put you out of business? Which is a very smart question. You know, because at the time IBM was 10,000 times our size. And yet, you know, we would go on in terms of software innovation and even value the company to surpass IBM, who was the dominant computer company when I was growing up by huge amounts. Their mistake was when you developed the software for their IBM PC, they should have bought it from you as opposed to license it. Is that right? That would have helped them. But it wouldn't have really changed things. What's happened in computing required really thinking about the microprocessor and software in a very different way than they did with the mainframe. And it really is kind of an innovator's dilemma thing that this very low end way of looking at personal computing, the technologies that came out of that now dominate everything, corporate computing, cloud computing. Warren Buffett, so he developed a relationship with him and he became a bridge player with him and offer and so forth. And one day he calls you and says, guess what, I've got an extra hundred billion dollars I don't know what to do with, I'm going to give it to you. What did you say? Well, it was unbelievable that he chose a substantial part. He created five foundations that he's giving substantial money to. A high percentage of that went to our foundation that basically doubled our ambition. And so going after malaria eradication, going after new seeds, we added an agricultural thing, we added sanitation because of the incredible resources. He didn't want his name on it. We asked him and he said no. So anyway, Warren is an unbelievable person. I've learned immense amounts from Warren. So today people come to you all the time for money. I assume everywhere you go, people say, by the way, I have this thing you should invest in. I have a couple of myself I'll mention later. No, I'm just kidding. No, a couple of things you should invest in or things you should give money to. So how do you resist it? Do you have some person who says no for you? Or how do you do that? Many people. Many people say no. Well, once you pick what you care about, if somebody has something that can make a difference in global health, we're super interested. And we have staff of 1500 people. And if it's to do with global health, some of those people come out and talk through with you whatever your innovation is and how we can partner with you on that. So that's clearly in our area. If it is something that can substantially improve K-12 education, then we're going to be very interested in it. If people are asking outside of those things, then fortunately, you can say no because focus is key to philanthropy. So people have recognized over the years that raising children is difficult. Jackie Kennedy famously said, if you mess up raising your children, nothing else matters. You have three children seem to be well adjusted and you've kept them out of the newspapers and so forth. How did you do that? And has that been more of a challenge raising healthy kids with a wealthy background that you have? How do you avoid spoiling kids like that? I think that's a huge problem. Obviously, our kids have benefited from having a great education and an opportunity to travel. So they're very lucky in that sense. Making sure that the visibility or the way people treat them is not unnatural. There are some challenges that come with that. So far, they've handled it well. Melinda is the one who deserves any or certainly almost all the credit for the kids so far doing very well. Our kids, we've said to them that the money is going to the foundation and so they don't think of themselves as sort of aristocratic. But what do they say when you tell them that? They say, can you give me a little bit or something? They don't ask for some? They'll get a little bit. But are they going to be involved in the foundation? No. And the foundation, you have a finite length of the foundation. I think it's 20 years or... After the last of us to go. Yep. So why not have a perpetual foundation? Well, Warren has influenced my thinking on this quite a bit. Our foundation is aimed at eliminating the diseases that disproportionately affect the poor, to try and make it so no matter where you're born, your chance of survival and living a long, healthy life are equal throughout the world. That should be achievable. Assume Melinda's going to live another, say, 40 years. That gives us 60 years to solve those problems. That's doable. And we should take all our money and put it against US education and global health. And there will be problems in the future that, at least from my grave, I won't understand very well. And there will be rich people in the future. In fact, more rich people in the future than there are today. So they should use their intelligence and understanding to go after those problems. Having a pile of my money left over to go after those problems just doesn't make any sense. How much money has your foundation given away to date? About $40 billion. $40 billion? Yeah, we're now up to giving $6 billion a year. Okay, that's pretty good. So do you have any regrets about not having started philanthropy earlier? Because I think you didn't retire from Microsoft full-time until you were about 50 or so. Is that right? Yeah, so until the year 2000, I had not done significant philanthropy as a percentage of my wealth. I'd given a few hundred million dollars. In the year 2000, I put $20 billion into the foundation. And so that's when we got serious. I'd say so. I was part-time on the foundation work from 2000 to 2008, when I retired from Microsoft. And then I flipped so that I was full-time at the foundation and part-time at Microsoft. And that's worked out well for me. Some of these issues, yes, I wish for an HIV vaccine, we had started sooner because we'd be further along. But anyway, the timing has worked out well. Do you have any regrets in your life? You seem to have a life that most people would love to live. You've got a happy family, great marriage, foundation, business success. Is there anything... Can you make us feel good by saying you've done something that didn't work out? Or just make us... Because all of us feel bad because we look at you and we can't do what you've done. So tell us something that's bad that you've done or you'd feel inadequate about. Something, it must be something. I am super lucky. Marrying Melinda, the experience at Microsoft, that although it had its ups and downs, was phenomenal. The work of the foundation. And... No regrets about anything? I wouldn't try and go back and change anything. I mean, for example, the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft was bad for the company. It created a lot of distraction. We would have done a lot of things, including the mobile operating system, better if it hadn't been for that. But in a way, it was a lesson for me. And it probably accelerated my retirement by five or six years, which overall, for me, probably was a good thing. I don't think it was a principled set of activities, but that's another story. So today, the greatest pleasure of your life is when you're doing what? Is it other than being interviewed by me or something like that? What is the greatest pleasure of your life? Time with kids, time with scientists, time when I'm reading and things are making sense. Going out and seeing the impact of the foundation's work. Meeting with scientists who think we can make breakthroughs to help solve climate. These are super interesting problems. And having a broad set of system thinking applied to these problems is going to be necessary to orchestrate the resources and policies behind them. So I love my work. So your children are not married, I think. Is that right? Not yet, no. So when they are, do you look forward to having grandchildren? Absolutely. And you're going to try to teach them software? No, I don't think of Microsoft as a dynastic organization. So finally, if people are watching now and they say, all right, I want to do something about climate change, but I'm just one person, I don't have the resources Bill Gates has. What can any average person do to have some impact on climate change in your view? Well, certainly, they as a consumer can take things like these new meat products or how they buy electricity, and they can help drive up the scale of the green solutions. The most important thing at this stage is their political voice. There's going to be a need to put substantial resources into this effort. And we will need a bipartisan solution. And to send the right signal to the market, if you just win one year and then it gets repealed, that doesn't help at all. The key is what people see the policies will be over the next 30 years on a consistent basis. And that means it's a much higher bar than just a one-time victory. I should have asked you, you started the Giving Pledge with Melinda and Warren Buffett, and we won't have time to go through that. But right now, if you were to convey one message to people about philanthropy, what you would like the average person who's not of your wealth to do on philanthropy, what would you ask the average person to do? Well, the best thing is to pick a couple of causes that you believe in deeply and find organizations that you can get involved in. The social services and local communities, the charter schools and local communities, there's a host of very high-impact, important local things. The dollars you give to global needs actually will have substantially more impact per dollar, because you can save a life for $1,000 if you just fund measles vaccination or polio eradication. Those things are pretty mind-blowing in terms of the difference they can make. Philanthropy is not based on comparing every single cause and picking the most impactful. It has to be something that connects with you personally. Even the climate area, whether it's advocacy or high-risk investing or behavior as a consumer, there's lots that people can do that will increase our chance of success.