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Bill Gates says he has given away billions, but has more to give

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It’s towards the end of our interview that Bill Gates reveals new numbers on how much his charitable Foundation has now spent in its efforts to combat preventable diseases and reduce poverty. “I’ve given over 100 billion,” he says, “but I still have more to give.”

That’s dollars, just to clarify, worth about £80bn. It’s roughly equivalent to the size of the Bulgarian economy or the cost of building the whole HS2 line.

But to put it in context, it’s also around the same as just one year of Tesla sales.

The co-founder of Microsoft and his fellow philanthropist Warren Buffett are combining their billions through the Gates Foundation he originally set up with his now ex-wife Melinda.

Gates says philanthropy was instilled in him early on. His mother regularly told him “with wealth came the responsibility to give it away”.

The plan had been to unveil the $100bn figure in May, for the Foundation’s 25th anniversary. But Gates revealed it exclusively to the BBC.

He tells me, for his part, he enjoys giving his money away (and around $60 billion of his fortune has gone into the Foundation so far).

When it comes to his day-to-day lifestyle, he doesn’t actually notice the difference: “I made no personal sacrifice. I didn’t order less hamburgers or less movies.” He can also, of course, still afford his private jet and his various huge houses.

He plans to give away “the vast majority” of his fortune, but tells me he has talked “a lot” with his three children about what might be the right amount to leave them.

Will they be poor after he’s gone? I ask him. “They will not,” he replies with a quick smile, adding “in absolute, they’ll do well, in percentage terms it’s not a gigantic number”.

Gates is a maths guy and it shows. At Lakeside School in Seattle, in eighth grade, he competed in a four-state regional maths exam and did so well that, at 13, he was one of the best high school maths students of any age in the region.

Maths terminology comes second nature to him. But to translate, if you’re worth $160bn, which Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index claims he is, even leaving your children a tiny percentage of your fortune still makes them very rich.

He thinks neurodiversity is “certainly” over-represented in Silicon Valley because “learning something in great depth at a young age – that helps you in certain complex subjects”.

Elon Musk has also said he is on the spectrum, referencing Asperger’s syndrome. The Tesla, X and SpaceX billionaire is famously courting Donald Trump, as are the other modern-day tech bros, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos among other Silicon Valley attendees at Trump’s inauguration.

Gates tells me although “you can be cynical” about their motives, he too reached out to the president. They had a three-hour dinner on 27 December “because he’s making decisions about global health and how we help poor countries, which is a big focus of mine now”.

I ask Gates, himself a target of some pretty wild conspiracy theories, what he thinks of the decision taken by Zuckerberg after Trump’s election to dump fact-checking in the US on his sites. Gates tells me he’s not “that impressed” by how governments or private companies are navigating the boundaries between free speech and truth.

He also thinks children should be protected from social media, telling me there’s a “good chance” that banning under-16s, as Australia is doing, is “a smart thing”.

Gates tells me “social networking, even more than video gaming, can absorb your time and make you worry about other people approving you” so we have to be “very careful how it gets used”.

The Bill Gates origin story isn’t rags to riches. His dad was a lawyer, money wasn’t tight, although the decision to send their son to private school to try to motivate him was “a stretch, even on my father’s salary”.

If they hadn’t, we might never have heard of Bill Gates. He first got access to an early mainframe computer via a teletype machine at the school, after the mothers held a jumble sale to raise the money. The teachers couldn’t figure it out, but four students were on it day and night. “We got to use computers when almost nobody else did,” he says.

Much later, he would set up Microsoft with one of those school friends, Paul Allen. Another, Kent Evans, Gates’ best friend, would die tragically age 17 in a climbing accident. As we walk around Lakeside School, we pass the chapel where they held his funeral and where Gates remembers crying on the steps.

Together, they’d had big plans. When they weren’t on computers, they were reading biographies to work out what factors made people successful.

Now Gates has written his own. His philosophy? “Much of who you are was there from the start”.

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