SimplyAbuDhabi XXXVII

Innately competitive, he can’t help acknowledging that he and Melinda may have helped to avert 10 million future deaths with their partnership with Gavi, the vaccine alliance, and save 27 million with the Global Fund, which aims to end Aids, tuberculosis and malaria. He doesn’t know if anyone has saved more, he says. But vaccines are so simple, effective and cheap, they’re addictive. “The great paradox for me was that these vaccines had been invented and children were still dying of diseases like rotavirus when we could help so easily.” The internet is not going to save the world, he believes, nor are driverless cars or tourist trips to space, “but eradicating disease just might”, which is why he has refocused his life. It’s hard to criticise him for it. He’s tricky to interview because he’s so obviously doing the right thing, giving not only his wealth but his time to saving lives, so it seems mean-spirited to highlight any minor flaws, and I suspect he isn’t used to anyone pointing them out. You could say he is too dry and analytical, but I suspect he’s trying not to sound too arrogant. He knows he doesn’t need to show off his wealth; only Amazon’s Jeff Bezos can beat him. Nor does he care too much about material possessions - he is one of the few tech billionaires who went to private school, his father was a successful lawyer and his childhood in Seattle was already comfortable before he started “messing around” with computers. He is happy using his local drive-thru burger shack in Seattle to order his $7 burger and fries and he wears a $10 watch. But he can’t stop talking about Africa’s need for bouillon or stock cubes. In Davos, Switzerland, last month, while other CEOs networked and partied, he met the makers. “There is an opportunity to put micro-nutrients into bouillon cubes,” he says. 052 | SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL Bill Gates in Tanzania, 2017 SIMPLY INFLUENTIAL | 053 “They are superheavily used in Africa, even in the poorest households, so this is a very cheap way of improving their health.” When I meet him again in Ethiopia he has had a haircut squeezed into his schedule and visited two more continents without a break. I go to two health clinics where the foundation has sponsored the drugs and vaccines and chat to the medical staff, but Gates doesn’t want the gratitude of patients, the selfies for his 47 million Twitter followers or the photoshoots with babies; he wants results, so he stays behind to work. This is a man who admits that as CEO of Microsoft, “I learnt all my employees’ numberplates off by heart so I could check what time they were leaving every night.” It infuriates him when the headlines from Africa are all either about pitiful orphans with huge eyes or corrupt aid projects. “The world operates in stories and, irritatingly, stories of one life saved or a tiny amount of money being spent corruptly are way better than millions of people saved. It’s way more evocative,” he says. “If I jumped in a river and grabbed a child it would be taken more seriously than the millions of lives we saved.”