Billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates reflected on a recent dinner he had with President-elect Trump in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, saying he was “impressed” by the former president.
“I had a chance, about two weeks ago, to go have a long and actually quite intriguing dinner with him,” Gates told WSJ editor-in-chief Emma Tucker.
Gates said the discussion during the dinner, which Susie Wiles, the incoming White House chief of staff, also attended, focused on innovation in the global health sphere. Trump reportedly got “pretty excited” as they discussed the potential development of a cure for HIV and polio mitigation efforts.
“He, in the Covid days, accelerated the vaccine innovation,” Gates said, according to WSJ. “So I was asking him if maybe the same kind of thing could be done here, and we both got, I think, pretty excited about that.”
Gates’s foundation, the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation, notably has initiatives targeting both issues.
“He was fascinated to hear what he could do to maximize the chance that during the next four years that incredible milestone will be achieved,” Gates said of possibly eradicating polio.
“I felt like he was energized and looking forward to helping to drive innovation,” Gates said about the conversation during the nearly three-hour dinner. “I was frankly impressed with how well he showed a lot of interest in the issues I brought up.”
The meeting comes shortly after Trump posted on X that Gates requested to join him at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. The billionaire and former president have met several times in the past despite Gates occasionally being critical of the president-elect.
Gates is one of several billionaires who have taken steps to reach out to Trump following his election victory. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago last month. Amazon donated $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund along, as did OpenAI’s Sam Altman and several major companies including Ford, Google, Meta and more.
