Bill Gates says he gave billions but has something to give

Towards the end of our interview, Bill Gates revealed new numbers about how much she spent his charity foundation in her efforts to combat preventive diseases and reduce poverty.

“I gave over 100 billion,” he says, “but I still have something to give.”

These are dollars, just to clarify, worth about £ 80 billion.

This is approximately equivalent to the size of the Bulgarian economy or the cost of building the entire HS2 line.

But in context, it is also about the same as only one year of Tesla sales. (The owner of Tesla Elon Musk is now the most rich man on the planet, gates for a position occupied for many years.)

The co -founder of Microsoft and his colleague Philanthropist Warren Buffett combine their billions through the Gates Foundation, which he originally created with his ex -wife Melinda.

Gates says philanthropy was planted in it early. His mother regularly told him, “The responsibility came with wealth to give him away.”

The 25th anniversary of his foundation is in May, and Gates has extremely revealed a number of $ 100 billion to the BBC.

He tells me that he is glad to distribute his money (and about $ 60 billion in his wealth has entered the foundation so far).

As for his daily lifestyle, he doesn’t really notice the difference: “I didn’t make a personal victim. I didn’t order less burgers or fewer movies.” It also, of course, can still afford a private jet and its various huge houses.

He plans to give out the “huge majority” out of his wealth, but tells me that he has spoken “a lot” with his three children about what may be the right amount to leave them.

Will they be poor after he is gone? I ask him. “They won’t,” he replies with a quick smile, adding “to absolutely, they will do well, in percentage this is not a giant number.”

Gates is a math person and shows. At the school in the Seattle Lake, in eighth grade, he competed in four state regional math exam and did so well that at the age of 13 he was one of the best mathematics students in the high school at any age in the region.

Mathematical terminology comes a second nature to him. But to translate, if you are worth $ 160 billion, which Bloomberg index for billionaires claims that it is, even leaving your children a small percentage of your wealth still makes them very rich.

I am with one of only 15 people on the planet who has an article (worth over $ 100 billion), according to Bloomberg. We are at his home in Seattle, a modern house with four bedrooms from the middle of the century, located in a hill, and we meet because he wrote a memoir, a starting code: my beginning, focusing on his early life.

I want to find out what it shapes a challenging, obsessive child who did not fit the norm in one of the technological pioneers of our era.

He brought his sisters Christie and Libby, and all three excited people go home where they grew up. They have not returned from some years and the current owners have repaired (fortunately, the brothers and sisters of the gates seem to approve of the changes).

But it returns memories, including as they enter the kitchen, of the already long intercom system between rooms loved by their mother. She uses it to “sing us in the morning,” Gates tells me to get them out of her bedrooms for breakfast.

Mary Gates also put her watches and watches eight minutes quickly so that the family works for her time. Her son was often rebelling for her efforts to improve it, but now she tells me “the crucible of my ambition was warmed through this connection.”

He puts his competitive spirit on his grandmother Gami, who was often with the family in this house and who taught him to outsmart the race at the beginning of card games.

I follow him on the wooden stairs as he leaves to find his old childhood bedroom in the basement. Now it’s a clean guest room, but the young man was spent hours, even days, here “thinking” as his sisters tell him.

At one point, his mother was so tired of the mess that she confiscated all the clothes she found on the floor and loaded her stubborn son 25 cents to buy it back. “I started wearing less clothes,” he says.

At that time, he was hooked for encoding and with some friends from the technology school schools gained access to a computer from a local company in exchange for reporting any problems. Obsessed with learning how to program in those emerging days of the Technological Revolution, he will sneak through the window at the window of his bedroom without knowing how to get more computer time.

“Do you think you could do it now?” I ask.

He begins to unwind the catch and opens the window. “It’s not so difficult,” he says with a smile as he climbs up and out. “It’s not difficult at all.”

There is a well -known Gates’ early clip in which a television presenter asks him if he is true that he can jump over a chair from a permanent position. He does it right there in the studio. I am in the Gates children’s bedroom about something that feels like a “moment”. The man is nearly 70. But he is still a game.

It looks calm – and it’s not just because we’re in a familiar environment. In the memoir, he discovered publicly for the first time when he thinks that if he grows up today, he will probably be diagnosed with the autistic spectrum.

The only time I met him before was in 2012. He barely looked me in the eye, as we made a quick interview to protect children from life -threatening diseases. There were certainly no small conversations before an interview. I was wondering after our interaction whether he was in the spectrum.

The book exposes her: his ability to hyperfocus on topics he is interested in; His obsessive nature; His lack of social awareness.

He says he has addressed a 177 -page report to Delaware in the elementary school, writing brochures for the state, even sending stamped addressed envelopes to local companies asking for their annual reports. He was 11.

His sisters tell me they know he is different. Christie, who is older, says she felt protective of him. “He was not a normal child … He would sit in his room and chew pencils to a leading role,” she said.

They are obviously close. Libby, the therapist, tells me that she was not surprised to hear that she believes she was in the spectrum. “The surprise was more his willingness to say,” This may be so, “she says.

Gates says he did not have a formal diagnosis and does not plan. “The positive features of my career were more useful than deficits were a problem for me,” he says.

He believes that neurjection is “certainly” too represented in the Silicon Valley because “learning something in great depth at a young age – this helps you in certain complex objects.”

Elon Musk also said he was in the spectrum, citing Asperger’s syndrome. Tesla, X and Spacex billionaire is known to court Donald Trump, as well as other technological brothers on modern day, Mark Zuckerberg by Meta and Jeff Bezos on Amazon among other Silicon Valley present when taking Trump’s office.

Gates tells me, although “you can be cynical” for their motives, he also turned to the president. They had a three -hour dinner on December 27, “because he makes decisions on global health and how we help poor countries, which is now a great focus.”

I ask Gates, he himself is the goal of some rather wild conspiracy theories, what he thinks about the decision made by Zuckerberg after Trump’s election Discard the facts in the US on its sitesS Gates tells me that it is not “so impressed” by how governments or private companies tour the boundaries between freedom of speech and truth.

“I personally do not know how you paint this line, but I worry that we are not doing it right,” he says.

He also believes that children should be protected from social media, telling me there is a “good chance” Prohibition of under the age of 16, as Australia doesis a “smart thing”.

Gates tells me “social networks, even more than video games, can learn your time and make you worry about other people who approve you” so we have to be “very careful how it is used”.

Bill Gates’ history is not a rag for wealth. His father was a lawyer, the money was not tight, although the decision to send their son to a private school to try to motivate him was “stretching, even on my father’s salary.”

If they didn’t have, we may have never heard of Bill Gates.

First, he gained access to an early computer with a mainframe through a school machine at the school after the mothers had a sale of Jumble to raise the money. The teachers could not understand it, but four students were on him day and night. “We have to use computers when almost no one else does it,” he says.

Much later, he will create Microsoft with one of those friends at school, Paul Allen. Another, Kent Evans, Gates’ best friend, would die tragically at the age of 17 in a climbing crash. As we stroll through the school in Laessyide, we pass through the chapel, where they held his funeral and where Gates remembers crying on the steps.

Together they had great plans. When they were not on computers, they read biographies to understand what factors made people successful.

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

Bill Gates’ creation is on BBC two at 7:00 pm on Monday, February 3rd and iPlayer

The source code: My beginnings are published on Tuesday 4 February