President-elect Donald Trump appears to be collecting tech CEOs and billionaires like they’re trading cards, as he recently met with philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Gates recently shared his experiences at the dinner in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, saying that Trump “impressed” him at the dinner.
“I had a chance, about two weeks ago, to go have a long and actually quite intriguing dinner with him,” Gates shared.
The dinner included Gates, Trump, and the incoming White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.
According to Gates, the conversation at the dinner was focused on innovation in the global health sphere, and when they discussed the potential for developing a cure for HIV and polio mitigation efforts, Trump got “pretty excited.”
“He, in the Covid days, accelerated the vaccine innovation,” Gates shared with the Journal. “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.”
The Bill and Melina Gates Foundation has been targeting both topics for some time now, and Gates said that Trump seemed “fascinated” to hear how he could help eradicate polio, a disease that, at its peak in the 1950s, was killing or paralyzing half-a-million people every year.
“I felt like he was energized and looking forward to helping to drive innovation,” Gates said about the conversation during the nearly three-hour dinner. “I was frankly impressed with how well he showed a lot of interest in the issues I brought up.”
Trump has now met with Gates, X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and more.
Bezos and Zuckerberg have also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, as has OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Ford, Google, and more.