Gates Appears On Colbert Report, Talks Healthcare, Microsoft And Steve Jobs

Microsoft co-founder and co-chairman of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates just appeared on The Colbert Report, where he was answered several questions ranging from health care to his time at Redmond as well as his thoughts on Steve Jobs.

A fair part of the interview focused on Gates’ charity work with his foundation, and how he is helping with healthcare around the world. The philanthropist had already vowed to eradicate polio from the world within the next six years, and he repeated his promise again:

“Polio was down to 250 cases in the entire world [last year]. So within the next six years we’ll get it down to zero, and it’ll become the second disease to ever be eradicated.”

Hopefully it does, hopefully it does.

Speaking about his foundation’s work in the United States, Gates told Colbert that they are focusing on education because of his and his wife’s experiences while growing up in the US:

“We’re incredibly thankful for all the help we had [educationally] to allow us to be successful.”

His time at Microsoft (and life after it) is always a topic that comes up, and Gates declared that his life had slowed down in these past few years. He no longer spends time staying up all night (as he did in the past), though he still has a passion for math.

Still despite all this, Gates declared that his time at Microsoft was phenomenally fun and the coolest thing he could ever have done. Right you are, Bill.

At the end of the interview Colbert asked Gates about his public persona and how it compared to that of Steve Jobs who was known for being a cool guy. Gates agreed that Jobs was always cooler than him, but noted that it was simply his style:

“He was brilliant. He had his own style, his own approach. Mine is, I guess, a little geekier than his was.”

Right, geekier is the word. All in all, this was another classy interview from the founder of Microsoft.