In this video, you're going to see the future.
Not everyone is trying
to win a popularity contest.
Case in point, this guy.
I don't think that popularity
is something he's interested in.
He's interested in effectiveness.
I've gotta give it up.
His air time, so to speak, is only a tool
to achieve what his greatest aspiration is,
which is to have a positive impact on the world.
You should look at, you know, what was your goal,
how are you trying to uplift nutrition
and survival and literacy.
He is influential, A, because of his vast fortune
and the way he made it, by creating a new segment
of the computer market.
But also, that he's since then,
chosen to deploy the money he's made
to try to completely alter the landscape of world health.
This year his net worth reached
as high as $120 billion.
These two have donated more money
to charitable causes than anyone ever.
He's a multidimensional individual.
He has great depth in so many different areas,
I guess you'd call him a polymath.
William Henry Gates the third
was born in Seattle Washington in 1955.
He was a terrible child,
Bill senior gave a whole interview
to the Wall Street Journal about just how difficult he was,
how much trouble he gave his mother.
You know, yelling, screaming, tantrums, things like that.
At the ripe age of 13,
the problem child wrote his first software program.
A Tic Tac Toe game on the Teletype Model 33ASR teleprinter.
Eight years later, he dropped out of Harvard
to start a computer software company
with his best friend Paul Allen, called Microsoft.
In co-founding Microsoft, what Bill Gates
and Paul Allen did was,
essentially create the personal computer software market.
That's since then been worth
hundreds of billions of dollars.
This is Jeff Raikes,
he's known Bill for quite some time now.
I was at Microsoft from 1981 to 2008
and Bill was completely committed to the vision
that we could help put a computer on every desk
and in every home, running great software.
And that's the impact that he wanted to have
and he was completely focused in on that.
Now, such determination
does require a strong personality, and it's safe to say
that his subordinates could probably relate
to his parents at that point.
Well, he was a very tough manager, people were,
had these sort of terrifying Bill Gates reviews
of their products and features.
And if he didn't like what you said he would, you know,
he was known for responding with the words.
Well that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
But the good news is, you won't hold the record for long.
Seattle's Bill Gates, with $4.2 billion,
is the second richest person in the country.
What is this?
It's Microsoft Excel, now hold still,
I'm about to perform a miracle.
My spreadsheet doesn't do that.
Microsoft became such a juggernaut
that the following decade they were sued
for being a monopoly.
If you look at that point in the year 2000,
and Microsoft is in serious anti-trust trouble
and the view of Bill at that time was terrible.
And people viewed him
as a sharp elbowed, monopolist essentially.
Not that he cared
about what the world thought of him,
but it was around this time that Bill decided
to start listening to his parents.
I do remember in the early days of Microsoft,
his mother pressing young Bill to get involved
with the united way and philanthropy
and Bill's response was you know, Mom, I'm you know,
I'm trying to build this company,
I don't really have time for that.
And I think over time, what he learned is,
in the same way that he could leverage
his intellectual energy on behalf of Microsoft,
he could do it on behalf of philanthropy.
While in the midst of this anti-trust suit,
Bill and his wife Melinda donated $16 billion worth of stock
to charity in 1999.
The following year he poured $5.1 billion in cash
to create the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
At this point I think people, many people,
much more closely associate him with programs
that have saved lives and you know,
increased immunizations in the developing world.
That's much more the popular view of Bill at this point,
that sort of philanthropist
and not the monopolist so to speak.
So you can avoid lots of diseases
if you've been properly vaccinated.
Today, the Foundation
is the world's largest charity.
It's fingerprint is on almost every global health initiative
of the last 20 years.
And has spent over $40 billion on global development
and public health programs.
Yes, they deploy financial resources
but they also use their voice.
The networks of influence and support that they have.
So in many ways, it represents one of the key concepts
that we learned on software, it's about leverage.
What Bill wants, what Melinda wants, with the Foundation
is to be able to make those financial investments
and leverage them to have the greatest possible impact.
By using this approach to philanthropy,
the Foundation provided seed money to The Global Fund
to fight aids, tuberculosis and malaria.
Their implementation of immunizations
in the developing world has contributed to a dramatic drop
in the overall child mortality rate since 1990.
Bill also made it his personal mission
to eradicate polio from the planet,
something he has come very close to achieving.
Then of course there's Bill's noblest pursuit of all.
I wanna talk to you today about toilets.
Many people would say, well why get involved in toilets
and how does that matter.
But that, you know, actually kinda diving into that
explains a bit about how Bill thinks about things.
If you want to reduce the disease burden,
you're gonna have to improve sanitation.
If you're gonna improve sanitation,
you're gonna have to invent a new way to go about it,
one that doesn't require all of the water that we use today.
So it's a great example of how he thinks
in terms of the broader system
and looks for technological innovations
that can really make a difference.
This push to improve sanitation worldwide
has led to the invention of the Omniprocessor,
a low cost human waste treatment plant
with a beta version currently in use in Dakar, Senegal.
I am very impressed
with this solution we're seeing here.
And it generates electricity, it generates clean water.
In the area of climate change,
Gates has embraced the often unpopular solution
of nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels.
The energy has to come from somewhere.
You're giving up all coal, all natural gas, all oil.
It is a good example of both, in the fact
that he isn't concerned about public opinion or popularity,
but grounded in what he believes
to be the data and the facts.
A Gates company called Terrapower
was very close to building the world's first nuclear reactor
fueled by actual nuclear waste, in China.
But progress was stopped in its tracks
when Trump launched a trade war against China in 2018.
No sooner was this vision put on hold,
than did Gates have a more urgent calling.
This is going to be era defining.
And no one was in a better place
to say, I told you so.
The most urgent invention in the world right now
is a vaccine that prevents you from getting COVID-19.
The fact that he has such depth
across so many areas makes him unique
at being able to take on the current pandemic.
He has now spent 20 years learning about funding programs,
talking to leading researchers on things like viruses,
things like vaccines.
Some of the programs in the Seattle area,
including the Seattle flu study
that caught some of the first COVID cases here,
are things that have been funded out of the Foundation.
So far, Gates has chipped in
a total of $300 million and counting
in the fight against coronavirus.
They're focused on detection, isolation
and treatment of the virus and finding a vaccine.
This chapter in Bill's life
has yet to be written,
and could have the highest stakes he's had to face yet.
His intellectual intensity
sometimes carries over to big expectations.
But at the end of the day,
the person he's toughest on, is himself.
If he doesn't figure out something
that he thinks he should have figured out,
he'll be disappointed in himself.
It drives him, it motivates him,
it gives him a sense of urgency to really make a difference.
And I think that's one of his greatest attributes.