Bill Gates has given away billions, but 'still has more to give'

Near the end of the interview, Bill Gates revealed new spending figures from his charitable foundation in the fight against preventable diseases and poverty. “I’ve given away over $100 billion,” he said, “but I have more to give.” He clarified specifically that this was in US dollars, worth approximately £80 billion.

This sum is roughly equivalent to the size of Bulgaria’s economy, or the cost of building the entire HS2 high-speed rail line in the UK. But to put it in a larger context, it's also only about the same as a year’s worth of sales for Tesla. (Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, is now the world’s richest person, a position Gates held for many years.) Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, and his philanthropic partner Warren Buffett, are jointly pouring billions of dollars through the Gates Foundation, which was initially established by Gates and his now ex-wife, Melinda.

Gates stated that the concept of philanthropy was ingrained in him from a young age. His mother often told him, “wealth means having a responsibility to give back.” The $100 billion donation figure was originally planned to be announced in May, on the 25th anniversary of the foundation’s founding, but Gates chose to reveal it exclusively to the BBC. He said he enjoys the process of giving (he has already put around $60 billion of his wealth into the foundation so far).

When asked about his day-to-day lifestyle, Gates said he doesn’t feel any different: “I’m not making any personal sacrifices. I’m not having fewer burgers or seeing fewer movies.” Of course, he can still afford his private jet and multiple mansions. He plans to donate “the vast majority” of his wealth, but also said he has had “many” discussions with his three children about how much of an inheritance it is appropriate for them to receive.

When asked if his children would be poor after he dies, he laughed and replied, “They won’t be. Absolutely they will be very well off, but as a percentage, it’s not a huge number.” Gates is a math enthusiast, and it shows. At Lakeside School in Seattle, he took a regional math test across four states in eighth grade, performed exceptionally well, and by the age of 13, he was one of the best math high schoolers in the region.

Mathematical terms come easily to him. But to translate, if you have a net worth of $160 billion (as the Bloomberg Billionaires Index claims), even a small portion of that left to your children would still make them exceptionally wealthy. I am talking to one of only 15 centi-billionaires (with a net worth of over $100 billion) on the planet, according to Bloomberg. We are in his childhood home in Seattle, a mid-century modern four-bedroom house on a hillside. We are meeting because he has written a memoir, “Source Code: My Beginnings,” which focuses on his early life.

I want to understand what shaped an unconventional, challenging, and driven child into one of the tech pioneers of our time. He has brought his sisters, Kristi and Libby, and the three of them are enthusiastically touring the house where they grew up. They haven't been back in years, and the current owners have renovated it (fortunately, the Gates siblings seem to like the changes).

It evokes many memories, including when they walk into the kitchen and recall their mother’s much-loved internal intercom system between rooms. Gates tells me she used to use it to “sing to us in the morning” to get them up for breakfast. Mary Gates also used to set their watches and clocks eight minutes fast, so the whole family would operate on her time. Her son often rebelled against her attempts to improve his efforts, but now he tells me, “the crucible of my ambition was warmed by that relationship.”

He credits his competitive spirit to his grandmother “Gami,” who often lived at the house with the family and taught him how to outwit opponents early on through card games. I follow him down the wooden stairs as he goes to find his old bedroom in the basement. It’s a tidy guest room now, but the young Bill spent hours, even days, there “thinking,” as his sisters put it.

On one occasion, his mother got so fed up with his habit of leaving things lying around that she confiscated all the clothes she found on the floor and charged her stubborn son 25 cents to buy them back. “I started wearing fewer clothes,” he says. By that time, he was already hooked on programming and, with some tech-savvy classmates, had gained access to a local company’s computer in exchange for reporting any problems. In the early days of the tech revolution, he became obsessed with learning to code, often sneaking out of his bedroom window at night to get more computer time without his parents knowing.

“Do you think you could still do that now?” I ask. He starts to unlatch the window and opens it. “It’s not hard,” he says, laughing, before climbing out. “Not hard at all.” There’s an early famous clip of a TV host asking Gates if he could really jump over a chair from a standing position. He did it right there in the studio. I am in Gates’s childhood bedroom, and it feels like “a moment.” This guy is nearly 70. But he’s still happy to give it a go.

He seems relaxed – and it’s not just because we are in familiar surroundings. In the memoir, he reveals for the first time that he thinks if he were growing up today, he would most likely be diagnosed with being on the autistic spectrum. The only other time I’d met him was in 2012. During a brief interview about his goals to protect children from life-threatening diseases, he barely made eye contact with me. And there was certainly no pre-interview small talk. After our interaction, I had wondered if he had autism.

The book elaborates on his case: his ability to hyper-focus on subjects that interest him; his obsessive nature; his lack of social awareness. He says that in elementary school, he submitted a 177-page report on the state of Delaware, for which he solicited brochures from the state and even sent stamped, addressed return envelopes to local companies asking them for their annual reports. He was 11 years old at the time.

His sisters tell me they knew he was different. Kristi, the older one, says she felt a responsibility to protect him. “He wasn’t a normal kid… he would sit in a room and bite the ends of his pencils down to the lead,” she says. They are clearly close. Libby, a therapist, tells me she wasn’t surprised to hear he thought he might be autistic. “It’s more surprising that he’s willing to say ‘that could be true’,” she says.

Gates says he has not been formally diagnosed, and doesn’t intend to be. “The positive characteristics have been more beneficial for my career than any problems the deficits have caused,” he says. He thinks neurodiversity is “certainly” over-represented in Silicon Valley because “going deep on something at a young age – that helps you learn certain complex subjects.” Elon Musk has also said he is on the autistic spectrum, referring to Asperger’s syndrome. The Tesla, X, and SpaceX billionaire, like other big figures in modern tech, such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, made appearances at Trump’s inauguration and has maintained close ties with him.

Gates tells me that while “you might be cynical about their motives,” he too has had contact with the president. They had a three-hour dinner together on December 27, “because he was making decisions on global health and how we help poor countries, which is what I’m focused on now.” I ask Gates, who himself has been the target of some pretty wild conspiracy theories, what he makes of Zuckerberg’s decision to [remove US fact-checking](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly74mpy8klo) from his site after Trump’s election. Gates tells me he’s “not that comfortable” with how governments or private companies are handling the lines between freedom of speech and the truth.

“I personally don’t know how to draw that line, but I’m worried we’re not handling it as well as we should,” he says. He also thinks children should be protected from social media, and tells me that [banning under-16s from social media, as Australia is doing](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c89vjj0lxx9o), is “quite possibly” a “sensible thing to do.” Gates tells me that “social networks, even more than video games, take up your time, make you worry about whether people approve of you,” so we must “be very careful with it.”

Bill Gates’s origin story is not one of rags to riches. His father was a lawyer, and the family was not poor, though sending their son to private school to try to motivate him was “a stretch even for my father’s salary.” If they hadn’t done so, we might never have heard of Bill Gates. He first encountered an early mainframe computer via the school’s teletype, which the mothers had raised money to buy through a bake sale. The teachers couldn’t figure it out, but four students were using it day and night. “We had access to computers when hardly anyone did,” he says.

Much later, he would co-found Microsoft with one of those students, Paul Allen. Another of the students, Gates’s best friend, Kent Evans, died tragically in a climbing accident at 17. As we walk around Lakeside School, we pass the chapel where his funeral was held, and Gates recalls crying on the steps. They had made big plans together. When they weren’t on the computer, they would read biographies to try to figure out what made people successful.

Now, Gates has written his own biography. What’s his philosophy? “Who you are is largely there from the beginning.” “Growing Up Gates” is on BBC Two on Monday, February 3, at 7 pm, and available on iPlayer. “Source Code: My Beginnings” is published on Tuesday, February 4.