Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was a guest on David Remnick’s New Yorker Radio Hour on WNYC on Sunday.
The former richest man in the world was asked his opinion about his fellow tech billionaires (Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos) supporting President Donald Trump — both donated $1 million each to the inauguration and sat “front row” with X owner Elon Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Gates responded by revealing that after Christmas he flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and had dinner with Trump.
Saying he “sought out” Trump, Gates said he encouraged the President to keep America’s aid and relief programs for HIV including the PEPFAR program which “keeps over ten million people alive with HIV medicines.”
[PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, is a foreign aid program that was started by then-President George W. Bush in 2003. According to the State Department, the US has given over $110 billion in funding to PEPFAR.]
Gates said of his time with the President: “I got his ear for three hours. He couldn’t have been nicer. Doesn’t mean that other people won’t come in and say the HIV money should be cut, but I did my best.”
Gates reported that he encouraged Trump to “look at the kind of things he’s done” including Operation Warp Speed — the all-hands-on-deck push for a COVID-19 vaccine during Trump’s first term in the White House.
Gates suggested some of the things done during the pandemic to accelerate the production of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines (“warp speed”) could be applied to HIV cure work. Gates said the president was “quite enthused about that.”
Note: On January 20, Trump signed an executive order freezing all foreign aid programs until they are reviewed. On January 29, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a waiver “for life-saving humanitarian assistance” to Trump’s executive order on foreign aid and said, “This resumption is temporary in nature, and with limited exceptions as needed to continue life-saving humanitarian assistance programs, no new contracts shall be entered into.”
Note: Gates is promoting his new memoir, Source Code, which focusses on his early life through the founding of Microsoft in the 1970s.