There is no getting round the fact, however, that Gates often sounds at odds with the new generation of billionaire technocrats. After the interview, his minders call to try and persuade me to not report his comments on Zuckerberg: as a senior statesman of the tech and philanthropic worlds, it doesn’t help these days to pick fights. But, with the relentless intellectual energy he has always brought to bear on whatever issue is before him, he still can’t resist the jibes at ideas he thinks are wrong-headed. He has a better haircut and the more pronounced air of self-deprecation that comes with being married and having children who have reached adolescence. Sitting in his office on the shore of Seattle’s Lake Washington, the man who dropped out of Harvard University nearly four decades ago and went on to build the world’s first software fortune is more relaxed than he was. I don’t.”Īt 58, Bill Gates has lost none of the impatience or intellectual passion he was known for in his youth.
Hmm, which is more important, connectivity or malaria vaccine? If you think connectivity is the key thing, that’s great. Then, slipping back into the sarcasm that often breaks through when he is at his most engaged, he adds: “Take this malaria vaccine, weird thing that I’m thinking of. But asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria, the co-founder of Microsoft and world’s second-richest man does not hide his irritation: “As a priority? It’s a joke.” It was a view that recently led Mark Zuckerberg to outline a plan for getting the world’s unconnected 5 billion people online, an effort the Facebook boss called “one of the greatest challenges of our generation”. A central part of this new consensus is that the internet is an inevitable force for social and economic improvement that connectivity is a social good in itself. These days, it seems that every West Coast billionaire has a vision for how technology can make the world a better place. “But when we want to improve lives, you’ve got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.” “I certainly love the IT thing,” he says. Or, to be more precise, he does not believe it can solve a tangle of entrenched and interrelated problems that afflict humanity’s most vulnerable: the spread of diseases in the developing world and the poverty, lack of opportunity and despair they engender. But he does not believe that technology will save the world. Gates photographed at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle in September © Amanda Friedmanīill Gates describes himself as a technocrat.
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