Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s unlikely friendship: the billionaire CEOs ‘weren’t thrilled’ to meet at first ... now the Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway CEOs have been tight for 30 years
- Meeting on Fourth of July weekend, 1991, led to Buffett pledging to donate virtually all his wealth to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other foundations
- Gates ‘didn’t even want to meet’ Buffett and thought his investments ‘parasitic’ – since then the pair’s antics have included McDonald’s lunches together
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are very close friends who have partnered in philanthropy, political activism ... and online bridge. Their iconic friendship began almost 30 years to the day on Fourth of July weekend, 1991.
Buffett was visiting Meg Greenfield, a Washington Post editor based in Washington state at the time, he recalled at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting in 2000. Greenfield was friends with Gates’ parents, so she took Buffett down to visit them. Gates initially had no interest in meeting Buffett as he had little respect for the investor’s livelihood.
“I didn’t even want to meet Warren because I thought, ‘Hey, this guy buys and sells things, and so he found imperfections in terms of markets – that’s not value added to society, that’s a zero-sum game that is almost parasitic.’ That was my view before I met him ... he wasn’t going to tell me about inventing something,” Gates said at a conference in 2019.
However, Gates changed his mind after Buffett began peppering him with “amazingly good questions that nobody had ever asked”, he recalled in a 2016 blog post.
Buffett wasn’t thrilled to meet Gates either, but he quickly warmed to the Microsoft co-founder.
