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Davos 2026: Bill Gates 1/22/26
00:15:30
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates sits down for an extended interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He discusses The Gates Foundation’s new $50m partnership with OpenAI to bring AI tools to 1000 health clinics in Africa. Plus, Gates offers his perspective on geopolitics and AI’s impact on the workforce. In this episode: Andrew Ross Sorkin, @andrewrsorkin Cameron Costa, @CameronCostaNY
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Bill Gates
Can I get a second opinion on stocks in the Fidelity app?
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Cameron Costa
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Bill Gates
That's right.
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Cameron Costa
I am always right.
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Bill Gates
Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Online US equity trades and ETFs and retail fidelity account, sell order, assessment fee are not included. Some account types and securities excluded.
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Fidelity Representative
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Bill Gates
Productivity will go up and we get to decide do we do new things? Do we reduce work week? Do we let people retire earlier? Eventually, society is better off.
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Cameron Costa
Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland How AI will change the world and the workforce Even at.
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Bill Gates
The Gates foundation, we're asking everybody to be creative about, okay, you know, could we have used third parties to do this or could we use AI to do it? And I'd say every organization should probably be asking those questions and what tech.
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Cameron Costa
Advances and competition might mean for geopolitics.
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Bill Gates
All this innovation should improve things, but it'll always be somewhat determined by how well we get along with each other. A little bit. I worry that we may not be as peaceful as we have been.
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Cameron Costa
Plus, the Gates Foundation's newest initiative with OpenAI to optimize health clinic care in Africa.
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Bill Gates
You'll see the Gates foundation working with Anthropic and Google and Microsoft and OpenAI. We have major things that we'll do with each of them.
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Cameron Costa
I'm CNBC producer Cameron Costa. SquawkPod reports from Davos 2026 Bill Gates begins right now, While Joe Kernan, Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin are at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. They meet up and interview the greatest minds in technology, politics and finance. And mostly they're roughing it. Bundled, but very much outside in the mountains.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
It's peaceful and warm. Actually not so terrible.
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Cameron Costa
One of Andrew's interviews year was with Bill Gates.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
Bill's like It's a little cold.
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Cameron Costa
Now, some of it you may have caught on Squawkbox on tv, but parts of the following interview you will only hear right here on Squawkpod. The morning of this interview, OpenAI and the Gates foundation announced a $50 million funding and tech commitment to a thousand health clinics on the African continent. Here's Andrew kicking off his conversation with Microsoft co founder Bill Gates.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
So, Bill, you made a big announcement this morning. Gates foundation partnering with OpenAI. How did this happen?
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Bill Gates
Well, there's a great ongoing conversation with Sam and the whole team at OpenAI about the way they want to improve the world and how their AI can be used even in poor countries for issues like health and education. And so we decided, you know, to provide all the computer time and to support a pilot in a thousand health clinics in Africa, starting with Rwanda.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
So what does it actually look like in practice?
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Bill Gates
Well, you as a patient will talk in your native language to the AI about your symptoms. You'll schedule your appointment through the AI. When you come in, instead of doing paperwork, the doctor or the clinician, usually it's not a doctor will see that summary. They won't have to fill out paperwork like they had in the past. So the idea is to make the quality of that encounter far higher, the waiting far shorter, and to take the very constrained resources that these countries have and have far better health care.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
And the initial pilots, $50 million projects.
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Bill Gates
Exactly.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
And what does it ultimately look? I mean, if this is the pilot and we're together in a couple years from now, what does it look like?
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Bill Gates
Well, the goal here is that every citizen of the world, but let's just say in Africa should, in their native language, have a virtual doctor that they can talk to and it understands the health system. So if you're a pregnant woman, it'll remind you what to do and help schedule your appointments. If you're somebody living with hiv, you'll understand what to do and you won't have to. If you're doing okay, you won't have to be a burden on the health system. So this will become just expected that we'll have a doctor, and it streamlines our interaction with the health system.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
Look like a separate app that people will have on their phone. Will it be through an Open Air app? Will be through a Gates foundation app. What is it?
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Bill Gates
No, you'll essentially, it's a tab, either ChatGPT or one of the other products. The nice thing about the Health tab is, you know, that that's partitioned so that when you're sharing about your health results that's not feeding into other AI work that you're doing.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
And how did you decide? I know Microsoft has a partnership of course with Open, but how did you decide to do with Open AI as opposed to. We just talked to demos from deepminds or Anthropic or one of the other models.
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Bill Gates
Yeah. So you'll see the Gates foundation working with Anthropic and Google and Microsoft and OpenAI. We have major things that we'll do with each of them. OpenAI jumped up and was super generous on this. Of course they have a foundation that owns a significant amount of their company. Right. You know, the value in that foundation actually rivals the world's biggest foundation, the Gates Foundation. And so they'll often, in terms of their capacity to donate, be a, be a great partner.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
What do you think of that? The fact that Open Air will ultimately, given the ownership structure, be perhaps the largest foundation in the world.
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Bill Gates
You know, it'll depend on how much the value goes up.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
Right.
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Bill Gates
Over time. But I think that's incredible. I Wish, you know, 25% of lots of great companies was going to go to the point poorest in the world. You know, essentially my ownership of Microsoft indirectly has done exactly that.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
Right. But you've had what you've been one person and in some cases two people or more. You have a board. Obviously this is going to be, you know, what they are going to do is be very different in terms of how it's governed, I imagine.
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Bill Gates
Yeah, they're hiring people in, they have a top notch board that's encouraging them to put more activities into this philanthropic side. And you know, but you know, I'd also say Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, they really want to see AI used for these societal purposes. And so we'll pick the best partner in different areas. But the quality of the work at all those companies is phenomenal.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
You know, Elon Musk is suing Open AI over the sort of structure of the company and whether it can even go public and whether it can have this, this effective foundation longer term. And it has a huge impact long term on Microsoft too, depending on how it all works out. What do you think is going to happen?
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Bill Gates
I doubt that that will be successful. That's a little bit sour grapes on his part. I mean, after all you have people, not just Microsoft, but lots of people investing many tens of billions into the company and feeling like, okay, this new structure is going to work. Well, they've renewed their board. I'm very impressed. They've gotten through a lot of challenges and, you know, they've got to raise the money. And so their, their new approaches provided the confidence that they'll succeed.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
But this is going to, I think it's going to trial.
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Bill Gates
Yeah. I mean, look, the number of lawsuits that are out there is very high, but I predict that opening, I'll continue to do.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
Well, one of the things that we've talked about a lot before is jobs and AI and just what's going to happen. And you've talked about the idea that over time, you know, you plan to cut staff in part because of, I imagine, no, towards the foundation.
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Bill Gates
Yeah.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
Well, what does that look like?
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Bill Gates
You know, for the foundation, we want to be as efficient as possible. Remember, you know, we're saving lives for like $1,000 per life saved. And so always making sure that we are ultra efficient, you know, measuring the impact of every grant. And so we're not going to make a substantial reduction, but we are going to go down a little bit in order to keep our operating expense around the 12% level. And so we're asking everybody to be creative about, okay, you know, could we have used third parties to do this or could we use AI to do it? And I'd say every organization should probably be asking those questions.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
Do you think that when we look at employment already right now, and sometimes it seems a little soft, it's gotten a little softer. Do you think that's a function of AI?
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Bill Gates
Maybe not to date, but, you know, two years from now, four years from now, particularly in the white collar area. Yes. You know, the world will be more efficient. You know, that'll free up resources to do other things. As robots come along, then you'll see the same thing over in the blue collar space as autonomous driving comes along, you'll see that in that particular vertical. And so productivity will go up and we get to decide, do we do new things, do we reduce work week, do we let people retire earlier? Eventually society is, is, is better off.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
Here we are in Davos. The President's going to be speaking later this afternoon. There's a lot of hand wringing going on among a lot of the political leaders about things, you know, what's happening with Greenland and other pieces of the puzzle. And I'm curious what you're talking to lots of people over the last 24, 48 hours here. What are you hearing? What are you thinking?
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Bill Gates
Well, it's, you know, you never can guess what, what might happen next. It's a kind of an uncertain environment, you know, does that eventually a road business investment or, you know, these alliances that have been around for a long time, you know, I'm pretty focused on the global health work and getting, you know, what's been a very challenging year with childhood deaths going up for the first time in 25 years. You know, trying to make sure that between restoring the generosity there and the innovation that we get back on track for the incredible reduction that we've had since 2000.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
And how you, and how confident or optimistic are you are about that now, given, given all that uncertainty?
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Bill Gates
Well, you know, the worst thing that can happen in the world is to have adversarial relationships leading to war. You know, that destroys a lot of resources. You know, so I'm hopeful. You know, I think the US has had good alliances. You know, I hope we can take a long term view of helping those countries. You know, I. All this innovation should improve things, but it'll always be somewhat determined by how well we get along with each other. You know, advancing, avoiding conflict. And so, you know, a little bit I worry that we may not be as peaceful as we have been.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
So I was going to ask you, this has always been a global conversation here at Davos and about globalization. Microsoft succeeded in large part because of globalization and how you just feel about the sort of splintering of it and sort of what I think of as almost the end of neutrality used to be that businesses, especially big businesses, thought of themselves as neutral global players. And now, at least in the U.S. we're back to the very idea of American or national champions, if you will.
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Bill Gates
Well, I don't think we've gone that far. Maybe some of the rhetoric, you know, is in that direction. The challenge for the things I'm focused on is that the needs in Africa, with all of the tension around Ukraine and the Middle east and the polarization and, you know, are the old alliances working? Do we really believe in promoting democracy? It's meant that the continent where the majority of children will be born during this century is getting less help, you know, less debt relief. And so it really challenges us as a foundation to tell people, look, great work has been done here. New tools, including AI, will let us do better. So can we get that back on the agenda? You know, we're reaching out to religious leaders, to medical workers, to diaspora members and trying to say, you know, the, the results are miraculous and let's, let's work together on this. And it's tough in a very noisy environment. So far, we're not, we're not succeeding in that Right.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
And then finally US Budget looks like it actually might include a lot of the things that seem to have gone away last year.
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Bill Gates
Well, the congressional budget always included full funding for malaria and vaccines and things. And it's fantastic that the bills going through Congress that it looks like will get passed by the end of the month really maintain it's less than 1% of the budget. But it's very, very important because it saves millions of lives. It looks like that will be maintained. And so, you know, I'm really pleased because it's Republicans and Democrats coming together, which, you know, sometimes they don't nowadays on this, they did.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
Could the White House ultimately decide, though, not to spend that money the way it's been directed? I mean, that's the big question.
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Bill Gates
Well, that's why I continue to have a strong dialogue with the president and with the key members of the Cabinet saying, you know, you can shape this, you can make sure it's very well spent. But, you know, let's all take the power of the purse that the Congress has and get that money out there. Last year, because of Doge, that didn't happen this year, I think we can avoid those type of reductions.
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Andrew Ross Sorkin
Right. Thank you. I appreciate it. This is great.
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Bill Gates
Member.
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Cameron Costa
Thank you for listening to this special Squawk Pod reports from Davos. There are plenty more interviews from Davos. Joe's interview with President Donald Trump Becky's interview with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy OpenAI's CFO Sarah Fryer. Follow us on Squawk Pod wherever you're listening now and each of those episodes will pop up on your podcast feed automatically. Squawk Box is hosted by Joe Kernan, Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin. Squawk Pod is produced by me, Cameron Costa and Zach Valise. Our editor is Julie Tras and Katie Kramer is in Davos this whole week. Have a great day.
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