The New Yorker Radio Hour - Bill Gates on His New Memoir and Dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Bill Gates was the best known of a new breed: the tech mogul—a coder who had figured out how to run a business, and who then seemed to be running the world. Gates was ranked the richest person in the world for many years. In a new memoir, “Source Code,” he explains how he got there. The book focusses on Gates’s early life, and just through the founding of Microsoft. Since stepping away from the company, Gates has devoted himself to his foundation, which is one of the largest nonprofits working on public health around the globe. That has made him the target of conspiracy theories by anti-vaxxers, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has asserted that Gates and Anthony Fauci are together responsible for millions of deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gates views the rise of conspiracy thinking as symptomatic of larger trends in American society exacerbated by technology. “The fact that outrage is rewarded because it’s more engaging, that’s kind of a human weakness,” he tells David Remnick. “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.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Long before Mark Zuckerberg was toying with something called the Facebook as a Harvard student, and before Elon Musk ever dreamed of self-driving cars and conquering space, Bill Gates was running Microsoft. Windows established itself as the dominant operating system for most of the world's personal computers. Gates was the avatar. of a new breed, the tech mogul. And for a long time, he was rated the world's wealthiest person.

His new memoir, source code, explains just how he got there. Microsoft remains one of the world's most valuable companies. But for nearly 20 years since stepping back at Microsoft, Bill Gates has devoted himself almost entirely to philanthropy. The Gates Foundation is one of the largest non-profits funding public health around the globe. And that's made him, maybe to his surprise, a divisive figure, particularly where vaccines are concerned.

It's also put him in a tricky spot politically. The foundation needs to work closely with the federal government on public health. And yet, Gates did not join Musk, Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos at the inauguration. And I should note here that Bill Gates and I talked just before the funding freeze last week had thrown so many agencies, including public health programs, into a state of chaos. You know, at a certain point, it emerged that you donated tens of millions of dollars to the effort to elect Kamala Harris. Donald 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 Mara Lago and want to be as close to power as possible. You're smiling, Riley. but what is the emerging picture here? Well, you know, President Trump was elected and he, you know, 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, you know, sought out President Trump

and I, you know, right after Christmas, went down to Mar-a-Lago and actually had a really good, very long dinner, with him. What did you discuss? Well, we talked about the world broadly, but my first request was on HIV, where the question of, does the U.S. maintain the PEPFAR program that's over 20 years standing that keeps over 10 million people alive with HIV medicines? I explained to him why we should maintain that, and that I think we can innovate to eventually cure HIV and the need for that, but that'll take some time to do and, you know, encouraged him to look at the kind of things he'd done with warp speed.

You're talking about the COVID-19 vaccines. Right. And see if those could be applied to this HIV cure work. And how did he respond? He was quite enthused about that. You know, I talked about polio quite a bit and how we need to have governments like Pakistan prioritize these campaigns because we never gotten rid of polio. in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

And so, you know, 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. And, you know, so 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 HIV money should be caught. But, you know, 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 in history shows for him to favor his allies and punish what he sees as his enemies. No, you can definitely worry that, you know, there have been sort of broad attacks on foundations, you know, and, okay, some of them are. are a bit woke, but overall, I think they, you know, serve a valuable purpose. You know, there's been a broad attack on vaccines, which, of course, the Gates Foundation is the biggest funder vaccines in the world. 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? You know, I still think people will come to their census on this one. You know, the key reason why we went from 10 million children dying every year

at the turn of the century to less than 5 million today is because we got new, very inexpensive vaccines out to most of the world's children. And, you know, 5 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 when 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, you know, I said to him that he'd done a very good job on this Wharf Speed that

accelerated the availability of the COVID vaccine and, you know, encouraged him to be more public about that or said that was, you know, a worthy thing. And, you know, we talked about why the pandemic kind of drove people apart, and that we're less ready for a pandemic today, you would have thought the pandemic, at least for a while, we'd get serious about it. And yet, you know, understanding how we work with WHO and how we get CDC to engage in the right way. So I'm a bit surprised, but, you know, because millions of lives are involved, I do think the whole vaccine thing, you know, people will remember that, you know, this is a miraculous invention. There's a lot of talk now more than ever about oligarchic structures in the United States,

far more than before. Is there an oligarchy growing in Washington? I, you know, I can't relate to that term. I think of it more in terms of Russia, actually. And weirdly, you know, the- Why is that, though? But 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. Talking about the influence on media barons, like, well, it's one of his interests. is Jeff Bezos and his kind of reversals when it comes to the Washington Post. Does that not concern you? The balance between, you know, following the new theme that the voters have chosen

versus sticking up for enduring principles, I do think we can look at this behavior and say, okay, which is this? And, you know, maybe have they gone too far? You know, Trump will be making a lot of very key decisions. and the idea that people, you know, that 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 theory.

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, you know, to start with the idea of sticking metal needles in children, and they scream and get a fever, you know, 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 die.

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. So, you know, we have good sanitation, good nutrition. We're very lucky. I couldn't believe, you know, the craziness. And, you know, Robert Kennedy was part of promoting some of these things.

He wrote a book about how Fauci and I, you know, he said, you know, kill millions to make money, which is exactly correct if you invert the sign, yes, I give billions to save millions, not the other way around. And so yet a little bit you have to have a sense of humor about. what the heck? You know, why were people under so much pressure for oversimplistic explanations? And, you know, the vaccine came in and saved millions and millions of lives. And, you know, next time, the next pandemic could be ten times as fatal as this one was. 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 DEI initiatives at the Foundation or at Microsoft? Oh, sure. To your distress or do you think it was a good thing? I think all those things had a core of excellence. You know, I've given, I have a scholarship that's been given to tens of thousands of kids. It's only for minorities. That's it.

And, you know, that was attacked. I think that was legitimate. I'll stand up for that. but, you know, we did a thing about mathematics, and somebody who got a little bit of money for us said that, you know, the idea that there's one answer in math is a racist, you know, sort of white thing that there's just one answer in math. And so, you know, when you let something run, it can get pretty extreme. You know, so both sides.

Look, you know, 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, you know, I was sorry to see the left go so far that, you know, some of it deserved a backlash. And particularly on, 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? I don't see a thrown on your head, right?

You're not King Bill. All right, Nate, you got me on that one. It wasn't unfriendly exactly. It wasn't rude. But I was watching two people on a hugely different plane of existence somehow. Well, Bernie's one of these people who can say, look, everybody should have shelter and medicine. And, you know, how do you disagree with that? You know, as we get richer, the safety net should get more generous, you know, after you.

raised the safety net, LBJ raised the safety net. You know, it's great that Obamacare raises the safety net. These are fantastic things. How far we can go, Bernie's, you know, would make tax, I would make taxes more progressive, but he would go further than I would. He would essentially 100% tax wealth above a billion dollars. And, you know, you can say I'm biased since that would have 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 just the notion of being a billionaire

is innately immoral. Right. And therefore, we should 100% 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, you know, an Alzheimer's drug trial costs $500 million. You better create some big upside for, you know, eventually somebody succeeding at that. And, you know, building a new nuclear plant costs billions of dollars. And so 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 sort of, you know, 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 means. media of immense indulgence, yachts, planes, all kinds of almost phantasmagorical displays of wealth that are, I have to say, a bad look. You know, if I was in charge of the tax system, I would have paid three times as much in taxes as I've had. I've paid $14 billion, you know, which is probably a record. You paid $14 billion 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. But I should have paid more. But I wouldn't outlaw billionaires. I think that really, you know, makes you divide. It leads to all sorts of weird things. And I don't think 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.

And, yes, progressive taxation systems at some level, you should pay very high rate, including on investments, which is where the very, very, very big fortunes are made. And, you know, weirdly, investments are tax at a lower rate than ordinary income. Anyway, you know, my dad and I were the two big proponents of the estate tax, which was a very lonely thing. You know, we had a year there was no state tax. So, you know, 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. I'm speaking with Bill Gates. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and we'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is the New Yorker

Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking today with Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft. Gates was 30 when Microsoft went public in 1986, and the IPO made him a billionaire. His business practices at Microsoft were often criticized as monopolistic, even ruthless, and make no mistake, it's still an immense conglomerate invested in cloud servers, and AI, and much more. But today, Gates seems generationally and dispositionally distinct from people like Elon Musk. A new memoir called Source Code talks about source code, talks about it. about how he fell in love with computing, and it stays on Gates' early life covering just through

the founding of Microsoft. I'll continue my conversation now with Bill Gates. Now, when you were a kid you've written, you told a therapist when you were very young 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? Well, I was about 10 when they first sent me to see Dr. Cressy, and I decided, you know, 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. And I thought, you know, why that bedtime, why those weird manners? And there was 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, you know, I was kind of showing my independence. And fortunately, the therapist said, hey, that's really a waste of your energy.

You know, 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 empower every year or two. which is called Moore's Law.

That's Paul Island, 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, you know, first they have a chip that's very limited. And we're able to call the Aids or say, we'd do something. things with that. And then in 1973, they have the 8080. And I say to Paul, okay, this one is so powerful

you can do personal computers. And he's like, okay, 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, you know, through many lucky things where I'd had literally thousands of hours by the time I'm 18, it meant that we knew how to write software. We knew it would be important. And that the chip causes that revolution. So it was in, you know, it's when I was about 16 that that dialogue with Paul pushed in that direction.

I still thought, gosh, you know, my dad's a lawyer. I like politician. 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,

vis-a-calc, you know, word-perfect, a word processor. But they are only a single product. The Microsoft conception was to be a software factory, to hire smarter people than other people did, to have better software tools, compilers, and to do all popular software categories. And to do it globally that, you know, I had an office in Japan, when nobody did, you know, 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 WordPress or a spreadsheet. Until Google comes along, which is a decade later, we don't have any competitors that are hiring the way we are. You know, 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 conji, how do you do Hongul. You know, they're just nobody.

And it was interesting. The journal did an article about software companies, where, you know, where one time they say, ah, they're all kind of interesting. One is Microsoft, and there's these others. Then two years later, they actually wrote a piece that said, wait a minute, one of these companies is a software factory. And by that time with Windows 95, we were, you know,

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 was also pitfalls to this.

There are dangers to it, and that to this day we have on our minds when it comes to AI. 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 did a word processor, you know, somebody wrote a kidnapping note. You know, they just didn't see it that way. In fact, the virtuous thing

was to make sure that the so-called digital divide where most people weren't getting access. That was our thing we needed to do was to make sure everybody, kids in the inner city, poor countries, keep driving the prices down, make it easier to use. And so I do look back on the naivete that first social networking and now AI.

And there's a lot of people who are very articulate about this. I just finished Harare's Nexus. I love the thing where when they did the printing press, it was books about witches and how you find witches that were on the bestseller list, not Copernicus's laws of science. What goes around comes around. Yes. So as AI is still, I don't know if you consider it in its infancy, people have been thinking about AI with the New Yorker has been writing about AI in one form or another for decades in a way. but it does feel like we're on this, 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 AI enterprises. Yeah, so AI 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. So the opportunity to have personal tutors and great medical advice is incredibly positive. But it's so dramatic 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, G-Wizzness, where AI is concerned, and not a close enough attention on what could go terribly wrong, not to be a catastrophist, but to be realistic. When you look at AI now, what are your biggest concerns in their specificity? Yeah, I wouldn't say that we're not talking about the problems, you know, my concern is we don't really have good answers to the problems. You know,

even take social networking when people are like, oh, you know, why didn't we do more? Well, why didn't we do what? You know, people are still like, you know, firing their fact checkers now. I mean, is that going to make it better? You're talking about what happened at Metta under Mark Zuckerberg. Right. So the— 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. Political pressure. Yeah, and the sort of societal way, including politics.

But, you know, 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, you know, deep analysis of facts, you know, and seeking out the actual studies on vaccine safety, you know, that, boy, was that naive, you know. When the pandemic came, people wanted, you know, some evil genius to be behind it, not some bat biology. You know, so we haven't solved even the challenges of social networking. AI is much broader in terms of what it brings, and it's going to reshape the job market in a pretty dramatic way. And 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 reduction in shortage, shortage of doctors, teachers, and yet what do we replace that with? I think that debate is still pretty simplistic and, you know, not many good solutions that I Microsoft's a partner of OpenAI. And I had an interview with Sam Altman, who's the CEO there a couple of years ago. And when I, Microsoft's a partner. I, you know, 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, 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 AI and get involved and, you know, 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 AI got

discussed. I expect that the primary topic of the 2028 election will be policies around AI. You know, how do you change taxes, job markets, how does the government take advantage of it, what does it mean about 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.

Yes, 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. And, you know, 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, you know, my regrets, there's a lot of things that took me a lot longer to learn than it should have. You know, drawing in people with different skill sets and not just being oriented towards kind of scientific IQ, you know, that took me decades longer than it should have. You know, I, without going into any specifics,

you know, I was sad that I divorced. Melinda, you know, overall my life I'd been so lucky that, you know, saying, oh, there's something that had been better or that, you know, that I'm, I'd, you know, gotten more problems right on some math quiz. You know, that seems a bit churlish, sitting where I am today. You know, right now, you know, I do wish I had better answers about making social networking better. I know it's a problem, but unlike, you know, 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. Bill Gates, thank you very much.

Thank you. I really appreciate your time. No, it's great talking with you. Good to talk to you. Bill Gates was the co-founder of Microsoft, and he's chairman today of the Gates Foundation, the largest nonprofit in the world. His new book is called SourceCode.

I'm David Remnick. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us and see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Summer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccat.

And we had additional help this week from Jake Loomis. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Tchereux. Endowment Fund.