‘My biggest fears about what’s coming next for this world’
BILL GATES INTERVIEW
The seat of power in Bill Gates’s empire occupies the top floor of an anonymous office block, overlooking Seattle’s Lake Washington. Here, in the inner orbit of the second richest man on earth, everything – from the modern artwork to the gleaming staff canteen replete with a faux wood-burning stove – is curated with the utmost precision.
And none more so than the man himself, whose daily schedule is managed by assistants into fiveminute chunks. When Gates arrives for our interview in his glass office, nicknamed The Fishbowl, he cuts an elegant presence. The only blot is a marker pen smudge on his left palm, presumably from scrubbing at some white board earlier that day. Even in the 62-year-old Microsoft founder’s second life as the world’s philanthropist-in-chief, the old number-cruncher dies hard.
So, too, the ability to always keep one eye on the future. When I ask which challenges to global health security he fears the most, Gates outlines three: antibiotic resistance, cuts to government funding to improve health in the world’s poorest countries, and the next unknown disease, referred to by the World Health Organisation as “Disease X”.
“We are not fully prepared for the next global pandemic,” he says. “The threat of the unknown pathogen – highly contagious, lethal, fast-moving – is real. It could be a mutated flu strain or something else entirely. The swine flu and 2014 Ebola outbreaks underscored the threat.”
There is another threat on his mind, one that has often been treated as the “elephant in the room” in the world of international development. Namely, the population explosion in Africa’s poorest countries and its future impact – either fuelling poverty, political instability, conflict and refugees, or sparking a new boom in world growth as happened in India and China.
This concern – and how to manage it – dominates the second annual publication of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Goalkeepers data report, which is released today and tracks the greatest challenges faced across the world.
True to form for a man who, early on at Microsoft, memorised the number plates of employees so he could monitor who was putting in the hours, the report contains a
‘Progress in the fight against poverty and disease may be stalling’
startling level of detail. But above all is one simple fact that even the eternally optimistic Gates warns could mean “decades of progress in the fight against poverty and disease may be stalling”. In short, while birth rates are faltering in the developed world, in the poorest parts of Africa they are booming. By 2050, the 10 poorest countries on the continent are projected to more than double in population.
“The thing that is mind-blowing is if the demographers, who have been very accurate on these things, are right about Africa, then you are going from one billion today to two billion at the middle of the century, to four billion at the end,” he says.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started in 2000, an amalgamation of the various philanthropic wings of the couple who married in 1994. It is now 10 years since Gates left Microsoft to work full time at the foundation. Even in that short time, the world has been transformed by the technology that he created.
The man who once famously dreamt of a “computer in every home” still clearly possesses an unstinting faith in the power of tech. He posts regular updates on Facebook and on Twitter, where he counts 45.8million followers. His waterfront mansion in the nearby Seattle suburb of Medina is reportedly equipped with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of screens and sensors. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who this year overtook Gates on the Forbes rich list, with a fortune of $112billion (£85 billion) compared with his $90billion, is a neighbour.
But the “honeymoon period of tech”, he admits, has now come to an end. Gates says he believes technology companies should be better regulated and its effects (particularly on young people) better understood; through its Duty of Care campaign, The Telegraph has been calling for digital companies to have a legal obligation to protect children using their services.
“Governments will decide,” he says. “Just like families decide what are the rules for your kids, governments have to really get educated on these things. Yes, these companies are trying to be benign and the individuals involved are not malign, but at the end of the day it is up to governments to understand what things should be regulated.”
We are talking now, it is clear, about the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is three behind Gates on the rich list and whose social media company has been hit by a number of scandals over the spread of disinformation, disruption of elections and misuse of private data.
“Even he [Zuckerberg] didn’t predict everything that would go on, in terms of it being used as a platform for political influence,” says Gates, who is something of a mentor to the 34-yearold, not least in pursuing his own philanthropic ventures.
“People who are supersuccessful need to be held to a very high standard. Some of that will lead to a very unfair personalisation, as though these mistakes are somehow down to flaws in Mark’s character, or something like that. Mark knows he is in a position of responsibility and is trying to learn about this stuff.”
On Elon Musk, another tech billionaire who recently provoked negative headlines for bizarre behaviour, Gates is rather more circumspect. “I don’t know Elon as well,” he says. “I’m not sure he is someone anybody needs to feel sorry for.”
The technological age has also engendered a crisis in Western democracy, with society appearing increasingly polarised. Gates admits he finds the current lack of trust in the press, academia and politicians “a little scary”. So, too, the trend to be “more nationalistic and inward looking and less global”.
Gates commends Theresa May’s recent Africa tour, where she recommitted to Britain’s aid spending target of 0.7per cent of gross national income.
“Philanthropy”, Bill and Melinda Gates wrote in an open letter published earlier this year marking the 10th anniversary of the foundation, “is a basic responsibility of anyone with a lot of money.” In the letter, Melinda also criticised the increasing amassing of wealth in the hands of the few: “It’s not fair that we have so much wealth when billions of others have so little.”
Prior to getting married, the couple (who met at a trade fair dinner in 1987) say they often talked about giving it all away. They have already publicly pledged to leave their fortune to charity, rather than pass it on to their three children, aged 16 to 22.
Such zeal was inherited, in part, from his father, William Gates Snr, a lawyer and philanthropist who, intriguingly, was an advocate and campaigner for birth control in the US. But the decision to focus so heavily on women’s rights in the developing world also stems from Melinda.
“With my family, by the time you got to my generation, the idea that my two sisters and me would go to college [was accepted]. There were no professions not open to them, that was pretty clear,” Gates says.
In terms of having a meaningful effect on population rise in Africa, Gates stresses the obvious perils of attempting any draconian, top-down policy in the manner of China and India. Instead, he hopes, meaningful change can be realised through improving access to birth control and educating and empowering women, as well as improving economies.
“You don’t want to live in a poor household,” he says. “But being a woman in a poor household is particularly bad. That is true globally.”
Being a rich man in a divided world is, of course, the best lot of all to draw. But this billionaire will keep working to change that.