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. 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. 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 nonprofits funding public health around the globe. 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. Yet, Gates did not join Musk, Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos at the inauguration.

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. 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 Mar-a-Lago and want to be as close to power as possible. You're smiling wryly, but what is the emerging picture here?

Bill Gates: 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 talk.

David Remnick: What did you discuss?

Bill Gates: We talked about the world broadly, but my first request was on HIV, where the question of does the US 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 that'll take some time to do, and encouraged him to look at the kind of things he'd done with warp speed-

David Remnick: You're talking about the COVID-19 vaccines, right?

Bill Gates: -and see if those could be applied to this HIV cure work.

David Remnick: How did he respond?

Bill Gates: 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 never gotten rid of polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan. My foundation has the US Government both for research and delivery in health as a key partner. 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 HIV money should be cut, but I did my best.

David Remnick: 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.

Bill Gates: No, you can definitely worry that there have been broad attacks on foundations, and okay, some of them are a bit woke, but overall, I think they serve a valuable purpose. There's been a broad attack on vaccines, which of course, the Gates Foundation is the biggest funder of vaccines in the world.

David Remnick: 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?

Bill Gates: I still think people will come to their senses on this one. 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 more new, very inexpensive vaccines out to most of the world's children. 5 million deaths a year, that's a big thing. In fact, if we stay serious about global health, we could cut those deaths in half again.

David Remnick: 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?

Bill Gates: I said to him that he'd done a very good job on this warp speed that accelerated the availability of the COVID vaccine and encouraged him to be more public about that or said that was a worthy thing. 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, understanding how we work with WHO and how we get CDC to engage in the right way. 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.

David Remnick: 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?

Bill Gates: I can't relate to that term. I think of it more in terms of Russia, actually, and weirdly--

David Remnick: Why is that, though?

Bill Gates: We can't say that money was the key to this election. I think it's widely accepted the party who spent less money won the election.

David Remnick: 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 baronslike-- 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?

Bill Gates: The balance between 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 maybe have they gone too far?'' Trump will be making a lot of very key decisions. The idea that people and 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.

David Remnick: Vaccine development has been a gigantic focus of the foundation's work. 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? Where do you lay the blame for the way these theories and attacks come at you and whoever else believes in that vaccine?

Bill Gates: 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. 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. There's a correcting factor that, wait a minute, these kids died.

In the US 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. 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 Fauci and I-- he said 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. A little bit you have to have a sense of humor about what the heck, why were people under so much pressure for over-simplistic explanations? The vaccine came in and saved millions and millions of lives. Next time, the next pandemic could be 10 times as fatal as this one was.

David Remnick: It's been pretty clear for a while now that there's been a 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?

Bill Gates: Oh, sure.

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

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

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.

David Remnick: Particularly you're talking about cultural issues mainly?

Bill Gates: Mainly, yes.

David Remnick: Tell me about your encounter with Bernie Sanders. I watched that conversation between the two of you on your Netflix series What's Next.

Bernie Sanders: I don't see a throne on your head, right? You're not King Bill.

Bill Gates: All right, Nate, you got me on that one.

David Remnick: It wasn't unfriendly exactly. It wasn't rude. I was watching two people on a hugely different plane of existence somehow.

Bill Gates: Bernie's one of these people who can say, ''Look, everybody should have shelter and medicine. How do you disagree with that? As we get richer, the safety net should get more generous. FDR raised the safety net. LBJ raised the safety net. It's great that Obamacare raises the safety net. These are fantastic things. How far we can go, Bernie's 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.

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--

David Remnick: He thinks that just the notion of being a billionaire is innately immoral. How do you say that?

Bill Gates: Therefore we should 100% tax any wealth above that, and so there wouldn't be any billionaires. No, I disagree with that.

David Remnick: Why?

Bill Gates: 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 $500 million. You better create some big upside for eventually somebody succeeding at that. 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. If the people involved in that didn't have great upside, it wouldn't make as much sense.

David Remnick: I guess what he's saying is something more than that. 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.

Bill Gates: 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, which is probably a record.

David Remnick: You did $14 billion in your working life?

Bill Gates: Yes, to the U.S. government. 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 really makes you divide-- It leads to all sorts of weird things. 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. 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.

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 there was no estate tax. 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 US more innovative than other countries? I do think there's something there.

David Remnick: I'm speaking with Bill Gates. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and we'll continue our conversation in just a moment.

[music]

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. Make no mistake, it's still an immense conglomerate invested in cloud servers, and AI, and much more. Today, Gates seems generationally and dispositionally distinct from people like Elon Musk. A new memoir called Source Code talks about how he fell in love with computing, and it stays on Gates's 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? Moreover, who were you at that time? What was that war all about?

Bill Gates: I was about 10 when they first sent me to see Dr. Cressey. I decided I could figure things out myself. 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? There was just some rigidities that I thought, no, I'm going to say no to this. I'm embarrassed even to think back at it. I was showing my independence. 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.

David Remnick: 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.

Bill Gates: At first, the computer was just a puzzle to figure out. Because I was good at math, people drew me in, and there were four of us who just stayed and were 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.

David Remnick: That's Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with you?

Bill Gates: Yes. I said to Paul, ''That can't be, because it just means computing will be free.'' If computing was free, then we'd have a computer, as we later said, on every desk and in every home. Paul said, ''No, it's true.'' Intel, the chip company, first, they have a chip that's very limited, and we are able to call it the 8008. We do some things with that. Then in 1973, they have the 8080. I say to Paul, ''Okay, this one is so powerful you can do personal computers.'' 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, 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. It's when I was about 16 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.

David Remnick: 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?

Bill Gates: 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, but they're 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, debuggers, and to do all popular software categories and to do it globally that-- I had an office in Japan when nobody did, hired people in Europe.

David Remnick: It's business acumen and conquering the world acumen as well as scientific and mathematical acumen?

Bill Gates: Yes, the vision was about software, not about a word processor or spreadsheet. Until Google comes along, which is a decade later, 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? They're just nobody. It was interesting. The Journal did an article about software companies where one time they say, ''Ah, they're all 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.'' By that time with 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.

David Remnick: At what point in your career and in your thinking did you not only take on board that you were changing the world 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.

Bill Gates: I have to admit I thought of digital empowerment as an unadulterated good until social networking came along. 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, somebody wrote a kidnapping note.'' 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, and keep driving the prices down, make it easier to use.

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 Harari'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.

David Remnick: What goes around comes around.

Bill Gates. Yes.

David Remnick: As AI is still, I don't know if you consider it in its infancy. People have been thinking about AI. 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 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.

Bill Gates: AI is the most profound technology of my lifetime. You can say 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 how it changes the job market and how we think of how humans spend time and what's valuable that, yes, this one really is scary.

David Remnick: Look, I'm concerned about euphoria, gee-whizness, 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?

Bill Gates: 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. Is that going to make it better?

David Remnick: You're talking about what happened at Meta under Mark Zuckerberg?

Bill Gates: Right.

David Remnick: I'm assuming you don't approve of that firing.

Bill Gates: I don't think that's going in the right direction. I can understand the pressures that he's under-

David Remnick: Political pressure.

Bill Gates: -on that. Yes, societal wave, including politics. The fact that outrage is rewarded because it's more engaging, that's a human weakness. 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 naive. When the pandemic came, people wanted some evil genius to be behind it, not some bat biology. 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.

Of course, leisure time is supposed to be good as long as people have a sense of meaning and purpose and all of that. 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 not many good solutions that I've seen.

David Remnick: Microsoft's a partner of OpenAI, and I had an interview with Sam Altman, who's the CEO there, a couple of years ago. 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.

Bill Gates: 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 figure out what those regulations should look like.

David Remnick: Do you have faith in politicians to be the arbiters of that kind of future in that kind of situation? You're smiling.

Bill Gates: 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. 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.

David Remnick: Let me ask you a, 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. 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?

Bill Gates: My regrets, there's a lot of things that took me a lot longer to learn than it should have. Drawing in people with different skill sets and not just being oriented towards scientific IQ, that took me decades longer than it should have. Without going into any specifics, I was sad that I divorced Melinda. Overall 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 left it to the younger generation to figure out.

David Remnick: Bill Gates, thank you very much.

Bill Gates: Thank you.

David Remnick: I really appreciate your time.

Bill Gates: No, it's great talking with you.

David Remnick: 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 Source Code.

 

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