Bill Gates sat down with Chris Wallace for an interview in Washington that will air this week on Fox News Sunday.
While the Microsoft co-founder has tried to remove himself from the tech world and focus more of his efforts on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in recent years, he did provide FNS with his thoughts on the issue of user privacy, and the increasingly strained relationship between the government and big tech.
“The growing feeling in Washington is that big tech does not do enough to protect users’ privacy and that it shows political bias,” remarked Wallace. ” Do you see merit in either of those arguments?”
Gates said that the government most certainly should be talking to the tech world about what exactly it is that they do.
“There’s nothing inappropriate,” Gates remarked. “I was naive; I didn’t have an office in Washington, D.C. I thought that was a good thing and I even bragged about it.”
Gates continued. “I later came to regret that, so these – I’m sure these guys are learning better than I did, that they need to come back here and start a dialogue and there will be new types of regulation for these companies.”
Gates is in Washington this week making the case to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for continued U.S. engagement abroad, and with the hope that the government won’t cut foreign aid budget; seemingly going against the President’s mantra of America First.
“The President’s mantra is America First,” said Wallace. “You seem to be suggesting that in terms of America’s interests, you’ve got to look a long way beyond America First.”
Gates responded: “Well, I think that the broad definition of our interests, including investing in allies, and not doing every transaction, is one that we have to maximize our benefit, taking, you know, world institutions and have them just focus on the United States.
What we did in terms of the post-World War II institutions has been a fantastic thing,” Gates continued. “That included having a common view of the future with our western allies. If you really follow that line of thinking, the idea of helping Africa, of working on an HIV vaccine to stop the AIDS crisis, you just wouldn’t do it.”
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Gates and Wallace last sat down for a Fox News Sunday interview in Sept. 2017.