US Edition Bill Gates is an economical man. He does not waste money, although he is as rich as Croesus, and nor does he waste words. After a muttered hello, he sits in silence, waiting for the questioning to begin. If this is unnerving, then so is the ceremonial that surrounds the arrival of the world’s second richest citizen.
In a tour timed with the precision of a state visit, he is whisked from hotel suite to television studio to an audience with the Prime Minister. What will he say to David Cameron? “The fact that he’s made it a priority to deliver aid to the poorest is a fantastic thing.”
Not all Conservative voters may feel so buoyant about the ring-fencing of the aid budget, but let that pass. Leave aside, too, the fanfares of others and his own evangelism, and Mr Gates, at 54, is the kind of prophet whose spectacles and nondescript suit brand him an off-the-peg geek.
Does he mind that label? “Well, when geek means that you’re willing to study things, and if you think science and engineering matter, then I plead guilty, gladly. Also, I kinda hang around with people who are like that. In our work, numbers give you the sense of scale, and then you meet the individual mothers and children and farmers. So yes, it’s good. If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.”
Most people admire Bill Gates. What is there not to like? A Harvard drop-out, he founded the Microsoft empire before setting up the largest charitable foundation on earth. In addition to the £21 billion held in The Gates Foundation, which he runs with his wife, Melinda, he has persuaded the affluent of America, Warren Buffett and Oprah Winfrey included, to give a slice of their fortunes to the world’s poorest.
Already the foundation’s endowment is greater than the GDP of half of all nations, and it may expand to $100 billion. So when Mr Gates hits town, the great and the good queue to hear him expound a message that he calls Living Proof. Aid is working, he says, and his crusade to stamp out polio, attack malaria and find a vaccine for Aids provides the proof. He alone can claim to have saved five million lives.
Naturally he is delighted that Britain won’t be cutting its aid budget. But is he happy, I ask, that the government is planning to focus on the UK national interest when allocating money? “Lifting up very poor societies can be justified on two grounds. The strongest is on the moral grounds that lives do have equal value.”
While this may be a veiled warning to Mr Cameron not to lose his moral compass, he adds that a second set of reasons, such as avoiding pandemics and focusing on areas where terrorism might thrive “are pretty complementary.” Mr Gates has also warned of the lives that will be lost if rich countries use their aid budgets to fight the effects of climate change.
But that, I say, is exactly what the government plans to do. “The only part that development budgets get into is the mitigation,” he says. Rectifying the damage inflicted by the rich world “is fundamentally an innovation problem, and there you’re talking about the Department of Energy.”
Any spending suggestions from Mr Gates may fall on deaf ears, as the extent of the cuts is revealed. Today’s financial constraints contrast sharply with the almost limitless wealth which he describes as “not enormous. If you focus on the poorest two billion, our foundation has less than two dollars per poor person. We’re very small compared to governments’ aid budgets.”
Mr Gates’s own career started relatively modestly. The child of a lawyer father and a philanthropic mother, he left Harvard to pursue his “sense of vision and risk-taking. I knew I wanted a personal computer for myself, and I knew what it needed to have.”
He has never, he says, longed for endless new cars or any of the trappings of materialism. “Well, I buy a lot of books, which is nice. I just buy them.” Has he, an admirer of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, read Mr Blair’s memoir, in which he confesses to asking the world’s greatest computer maestro how his mainframe was, thus eliciting 'a curious gulping sound from Bill’? “Not yet, but I’m going to.”
There is one other luxury. “I travel.” First-class, I ask, and then realise that this is like wondering if the Queen takes the bus. “No, even better than than that. I happen to have a plane. But beyond that extravagance, how much food can you eat, how many clothes can you wear?
“My kids go to a nice school, and I have an exercise machine that I should use more. Beyond a reasonably limited amount, it all goes to charity, but in no sense have I denied myself anything I wanted. I just didn’t happen to want to build a pyramid and own many things. The really worthy people give up something, or take less of a vacation. I haven’t made any sacrifice, so their philanthropy is more impressive.”
He would have hated, he says, to grow up expecting to inherit a lot of money. “People would have treated me in a strange way. It would have been very weird and demotivating.” He has already said his own children, aged 14, 11 and 8, will be left “some money but not a meaningful percentage”. How much, exactly?
“We’re still figuring it out. But well over 95 per cent of the fortune goes to the foundation, so it will be quite a modest amount.” He is also an unequivocal fan of the inheritance tax. “Me and my dad are the biggest promoters of an estate tax in the US. It’s not a popular position.”
Now he discloses that he also expects his children to fend for themselves during his lifetime. “Once they graduate from college, then they’re largely on their own. They’re very lucky in that they’ll get a great education and, compared to most children on the planet, they have a very good deal.”
For a higher education drop-out, Mr Gates is very keen on academe. The biggest ever donor to a British university, he funded scholarships worth £136 million at Cambridge. On the day that universities face savage cuts, he urges the government not to let Britain’s top universities decline.
“They are one of the great strengths of the UK – Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, the London School of Tropical Medicine, Liverpool. On pure merit, we give a lot of our scientific research grants to UK universities. Doing world class research is a real strength, and Britain is way better at that than the Continent. You want to preserve and strengthen that.”
Private money, he thinks, could play a bigger role. “Getting philanthropy to top universities is a great thing, and there’s some of that here in the UK.” But there is also a suspicion of philanthrocapitalism by those who argue that the wealthiest, like him, have acquired unreasonable riches and undue power.
“People are welcome to any view they want. Some people, through luck and skill, end up with a lot of assets. If you’re good at kicking a ball, writing software, investing in stocks, it pays extremely well. Capitalism has worked very well. Anyone who wants to move to North Korea is welcome.”
Even so, he is a frugal capitalist. “I love sitting with my son and watching videos about things he’s curious about. What are steel alloys? What is fertiliser? “His marriage to Melinda, who used to work for him, has been an unqualified success. “I’m very lucky in everything, particularly in that.” Charity work, he says, has given him more freedom. “I play tennis, I play bridge, we take vacations, we ski – we get to do a lot of fun things.”
While fun might not be Mr Gates’s top priority, he is an A-list celebrity with a cameo role in The Social Network, the blockbuster film about the foundation of Facebook. Although rumours that he played himself in the movie are false, he concedes it is “correct that Mark [Zuckerberg, the hero] went to a lecture I gave at Harvard about starting Microsoft.” Which parts of the film aren’t correct? “I’m not going through all that. Mark is a great guy, and this film doesn’t really give you a sense of Mark.”
Mr Gates, far from being a pious plutocrat, also qualifies as a bona fides great guy. As he leaves to meet the PM, many hundreds of fans are converging on the Science Museum to hear him speak. Arriving later, I am directed to an overspill theatre. As a temple of technology hosts the world’s leading innovator, the sound feed fails, leaving the audience listening to silence. If there is a moral, it may be that even Bill Gates is not invulnerable.
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