- Bill Gates said he “had a really good, very long dinner” with President Donald Trump last year.
- Gates said he told Trump to retain PEPFAR, a long-running foreign aid program that combats HIV.
- Trump signed an executive order halting all foreign aid programs for 90 days after he was sworn in.
Bill Gates said he pushed President Donald Trump to maintain America’s aid and relief programs for HIV during a meeting they had in 2024.
Gates told The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick in an interview published Sunday, that he “had a really good, very long dinner” with Trump at Mar-a-Lago after Christmas.
“Well, we talked about the world broadly, but my first request was on HIV, where there’s a question of whether the US maintains the PEPFAR program that’s over twenty years standing, that keeps over ten million people alive with HIV medicines,” Gates told Remnick.
PEPFAR, or the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, is a foreign aid program that was started by then-President George W. Bush in 2003. The program has saved 26 million lives and prevented millions of HIV infections around the world, the State Department said on its website.
But funding for PEPFAR was paused on January 20, after Trump signed an executive order freezing all foreign aid programs for 90 days until they are reviewed. According to the State Department, the US has given over $110 billion in funding to PEPFAR.
“I got his ear for three hours. He couldn’t have been nicer. Doesn’t mean that other people won’t come in and say the HIV money should be cut, but I did my best,” Gates said of his meeting with Trump in his interview with The New Yorker.
It is unclear what will become of PEPFAR under Trump. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a waiver “for life-saving humanitarian assistance” to Trump’s executive order on foreign aid.
“This resumption is temporary in nature, and with limited exceptions as needed to continue life-saving humanitarian assistance programs, no new contracts shall be entered into,” Rubio said in a statement on Wednesday.
Gates has given money to philanthropic causes like climate change and global health since stepping down as CEO of Microsoft, the software giant he cofounded with Paul Allen in 1975.
Gates was Microsoft’s CEO until 2000, and was its chairman until 2014. He left Microsoft’s board in 2020. Gates said in a LinkedIn post in March 2020 that stepping down from the board would allow him “to dedicate more time to philanthropic priorities.”
According to the Gates Foundation’s website, Gates and his former wife, Melinda French Gates, have given $59.5 billion to the foundation since its inception in 2000. French Gates left the foundation in June, three years after she’d announced her divorce from Gates. The couple had been married for 27 years.
The foundation had a total endowment of $75.2 billion as of December 31, 2023.
In April 2018, Gates told medical publication STAT in an interview that he had suggested to Trump to hire a science adviser only for Trump to offer the job to him.
Gates said he declined the offer, telling Trump that it wouldn’t be “a good use of my time.”
Representative for Gates and Trump did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
