Billionaire Bill Gates shared some insights gained from a three-hour dinner with the President-elect Donald Trump after winning his election in 2024. He reportedly said that the meeting was engaging and told the gathering that he was “impressed” by Trump in their conversation.
“I had the opportunity to go out and have dinner, a long and actually very interesting dinner with him. We covered a lot of things. It was over three hours,” Gates, the founder and philanthropist of Microsoft, The Wall Street Journal reported Gates saying. The dinner attended by Trump, chief of staff Susie Wiles, Gates, and his manager Larry Cohen covered a range of topics but was especially about global healthcare.
Gates highlighted global health, citing his foundation’s efforts toward a cure for HIV. The “global health space is the area that I work in, and such amazing things have happened and can happen there. I spoke a lot about HIV that the foundation is literally working on a cure for that. We are at an early stage, and so you know, he, in the COVID days, accelerated the vaccine innovation. 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, said Gates in a conversation with WSJ’s Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker.
The discussion also covered polio, as Gates said that the efforts made so far could be reversed if the efforts stop. “We talked about polio where we’re very close to getting that done, but if you stop, it’ll spread back,” Gates said. “And 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 appreciated Trump’s engagement, noting, “I felt like he was, you know, energized and, you know, looking forward to helping to drive innovation. I was frankly impressed with how well he showed a lot of interest in the issues I brought up.”
This is the second time that Gates has met with Trump. Earlier, they had dined before the first term of Trump, which was in 2016. The latest in a long line of high-profile business figures to have met with Trump since his election victory in 2024, this is not the first time that Gates has gone to visit Trump.
