According to the end of our interview, Bill Gates reveals new numbers about how much his charity foundation has now spent in her efforts to fight diseases that can prevent and reduce poverty.
“I’ve given over 100 billion,” he says, “but I still have to give more.”
These are dollars, just to clarify, it’s worth around £ 80 billion.
It is about equivalent to the size of the Bulgarian economy or the cost of constructing the entire HS2 line.
But in order to put it in context, it’s about just as much as a year of selling Tesla. (Tesla’s owner Elon Musk is now the richest man on the planet, a positioned door that has been held for many years.)
Microsoft co -founder and his colleague Filantrop Warren Buffett combine their billions through the Gates Foundation, which he originally set up with his now ex -wife Melinda.
Gates says his philanthropy was implanted early. His mother regularly spoke “with a wealth came the responsibility to give it.”
The plan was to discover the number of $ 100 billion in May, for the 25th anniversary of the Foundation. But Gates discovered it exclusively by BBC.
He tells me, for his part, he enjoys giving his money (and about $ 60 billion in his wealth has entered the Foundation so far).
When it comes to his daily lifestyle, he does not really notice the difference: “I have not given personal victims. I have not ordered less burger or fewer films.” It can also afford your private jet and different huge houses.
He plans to give a “huge majority” of his wealth, but tells me that he has talked with his three children “a lot” about what could be the right amount to leave them.
Will he be poor after he’s gone? I ask him. “He won’t,” he replied with a quick smile, adding “in absolute, he will manage well, in percentage conditions it is not a giant number.”
Gates is a mathematical guy and shows it. At the Lakeside School in Seattle, in the eighth grade, he competed at the Mathematics Regional Exam in four countries and did so well that, at 13, he was one of the best mathematics students at any age in the region.
His mathematical terminology is his second nature. But translate, if you are worth $ 160 billion, which the Bloomberg index of billionaire claims to be, even leaving your children, a small percentage of your wealth still makes them very rich.
I am on the planet with one of only 15 people who are inches (worth more than $ 100 billion), Bloomberg states. In his childhood, we are in Seattle, a modern four -bedroom house from a middle -aged house, and we meet because he wrote a memoir, the original code: my beginnings, focused on his early life.
I want to find out what shaped a challenging, obsessive child who did not fit into the norm in one of the technological pioneers of our time.
He brought his sisters, Christ and Libby, and all three excitedly visited the home where they grew up. They did not return in a few years, and the current owners were renovated (luckily, the siblings seem to be approved by the changes).
But it brings memories, including, while entering the kitchen, now a long intercom system between the rooms that are loved by their mother. She used him to “sing us in the morning,” Gates tells me to get them out of their bedroom bedrooms.
Mary Gates also quickly posted watches and watches for eight minutes to make the family work for her time. Her son often rebelled to enhance him, but now she tells me “Crucible about my ambition has been heated through that relationship.”
He puts his competitive spirit with his grandmother “Gami”, who was often with his family in this house and who taught him to surpass the competition with the games of tickets early.
I follow him down the wooden stairs as he starts to find his old childhood bedroom in the basement. Now it is a neat guest room, but the young Bill spent hours, even days, here “thinking”, as their sisters said.
At one point, his mom was so bored with a mess that she seized any garment she found on the floor and charged her stubborn son 25 cents to buy him back. “I started wearing smaller clothes,” he says.
At the time, he was hooked on encoding and, with some friends at school, they were accessed to one computer of a local company in exchange for reporting any problems. Obsessed with programming learning in those initial days of the technological revolution, he would break through the window of his bedroom at night without his parents to get more computer time.
“Do you think you could do that now?” I ask.
He begins to take a break and opens the window. “It’s not that hard,” he says with a smile as he climbs up and out. “It’s not difficult at all.”
There is a well -known early clip of a door where the TV presenter asks him if it is true that he can skip the chair from a standing position. He does it right there in the studio. I’m in a childhood bedroom for something that feels like a “moment.” The guy is almost 70. But he still plays.
It seems easy – and it’s not just because we’re in a famous environment. In the memoir, he publicly discovered that he thought, if he grew up today, he would probably be diagnosed with an autism spectrum.
The only time I met him before he was in 2012. He barely looked me in the eye as we were doing a quick interview on his goal of protecting children from life -threatening diseases. There was certainly no conversation. I wondered after our interaction if he was on the spectrum.
The book sets it up: his ability to hyperphocy on topics that interested him; its obsessive nature; His lack of social consciousness.
He says that he turned in a 177 -page report at the elementary school on Delaware, he was written off for brochures about the state, and he even sent certified envelopes to local companies asking for their annual reports. He was 11 years old.
His sisters tell me they knew he was different. Christ, who is older, says she felt protective from him. “He was not a normal child … He would sit in his room and chew pens to the lead,” she said.
They are obviously close. Libby, therapist, tells me that she was not surprised to hear that he believed she was on the spectrum. “The surprise was more of his willingness to say” that could be the case, “she says.
Gates says he did not have a formal diagnosis and that he was not planning it. “The positive characteristics of my career were more useful than my disadvantages were a problem,” he says.
He believes that the neurodies “is certainly” excessively represented in the Silicon Valley, because “learning something in great depth at a young age – which helps you with certain complex items.”
Elon Musk also said he was on the spectrum, referring to Asperger’s syndrome. Tesla, X and Spacex billionaire famous Donald Trump, as well as other modern technological bros, Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon Jeff Bezos, among other Silicon Valley participants on Trump’s inauguration.
Gates tells me even though “you can be cynical” about their motives, and he reached for the president. On December 27, they had a three -hour dinner “because he makes decisions about global health and how we help poor countries, which is now a big focus.”
I ask Gates, the very goal of some rather wild conspiracy theories, what he thinks about the decision Zuckerberg made after Trump’s choice on throw out the fact of facts in the US on its web locations. Gates tells me that he is not “impressed” by the way governments or private companies are moving boundaries between free speech and truth.
“Personally, I don’t know how you are drawing that line, but I worry that we are not dealing with the team and how we should,” he says.
He also thinks children should be protected from social media, telling me that there is a “good chance” A ban on under the age of 16, as Australia does“Smart thing.”
Gates tells me that “social networking, even more than a video of playing, can absorb your time and take care of other people to approve of” so we have to be “very careful how to get used to it.”
The story of the origin of Bill Gates is not cloth for wealth. His father was a lawyer, the money was not tight, although the decision to send his son to a private school to try to motivate him to be “stretching, even on my father’s salary.”
If they hadn’t, we might never hear about Bill Gates.
He first approached the Mainframe early computer through the telewytic machine at school after the mothers held the sale of crane to raise money. The teachers could not understand this, but four students were on it day and night. “We have to use computers when almost no one else did,” he says.
Much later, he would set Microsoft with one of those friends at school, Paul Allen. Second, Kent Evans, Gates’ best friend, would die tragically at the age of 17 in a climbing accident. As we walk the Lake’s school, we pass the chapel where they held his funeral and where Gates remembers crying on the stairs.
They would have big plans together. When they were not on the computers, they read biographies to determine which factors made people successful.
Now Gates wrote his own. His philosophy? “Much of what you were there from the beginning.”
The making of Bill Gates is located on the BBC two at 7:00 pm on Monday, February 3rd, and on the iPlayer
Original code: My beginnings were announced on Tuesday, February 4
