Bill Gates — a prominent donor for Kamala Harris’ election campaign last year — recently detailed a three-hour dinner he had with Donald Trump.
Sitting with The Washington Post in an interview published Friday, the tech billionaire and global health innovator shared the ways in which the Republican president-elect surprised him in his enthusiasm to “drive innovation” in global health causes like eradicating HIV and polio.
“I had a chance to have a long and actually quite intriguing dinner with him,” Gates said of the encounter.
“We touched on a lot of things. It was over three hours, to my surprise,” Gates admitted.
Explaining that global health is his primary area of interest through his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and that “such amazing things have happened and can happen there,” Gates said that the discussion with Trump that stood out to him most was the eradication of HIV and polio and how the president-elect’s response to COVID could serve as a template for his initiatives with other health crises.
“I spoke a lot about HIV and that the foundation’s literally working on a cure for that. We’re at an early stage, and so he, in the COVID days, accelerated the vaccine innovation, so I, you know, was asking him if maybe the same kind of thing could be done here, and we both got pretty excited about that,” Gates said. “We talked about polio, where we’re very close to getting that done — but if you stop, it’ll spread back, and so I explained why it’s been tough in Pakistan, Afghanistan, we’ve had cases show up in Gaza, we have cases in Africa.
“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 shared.
Gates concluded that Trump “was energized and looking forward to helping to drive innovation” around his global health initiatives, which left him “frankly impressed.”
“I was frankly impressed with how well he showed a lot of interest in the issues that I brought up,” Gates said.
Watch the segment via The Washington Post in the video below.
Bill Gates talks about the recent three-hour-long dinner he had with President-elect Trump.
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) January 17, 2025
Gates says the only other person to join from the Trump side was Susie Wiles.
Gates says he was impressed by Trump’s interest in the issues he discussed, which included polio… pic.twitter.com/wCzDBK4U8Q
