Bill Gates: I’m following in Buffett’s footsteps, I have a lot to accomplish before retirement

Bill Gates, the 68-year-old American billionaire and founder of tech giant Microsoft, said he hopes to follow in the footsteps of his old friend Warren Buffett, who is chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at 94 and has no imminent plans to retire.

“My friend Warren Buffett still comes to the office six days a week,” Gates told CNBC. “So I hope my health allows me to be like Warren.” The Microsoft co-founder still has a lot he wants to do, he says. He remains a “technology adviser” to Microsoft, and spends much of his time using his net worth — currently $128 billion, according to Forbes estimates — to fund potential solutions to the world’s most pressing issues, particularly disease, poverty, climate change, access to health care and education.

These issues are the focus of Gates’ latest project: a five-part Netflix documentary series called “What’s Next?” “The Future with Bill Gates,” which premieres Sept. 18. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year. “We haven’t eliminated polio, we haven’t eliminated malaria. I’m very committed to these things,” Gates said. “We want to cut child deaths in half again, from 5 million to 2.5 million.” That’s a big reason, Gates says, why he wants to wait as long as possible to lighten his workload significantly. In his mind, that means “at least 10 years, if my health allows me, to work at this level,” he says. “I hope it’s 20 or 30 years.” Gates’ current workload is a far cry from the intensity of his early career, when he was single-mindedly focused on launching Microsoft and then building it into a tech giant. “I don’t work very hard now,” Gates says. “In my 20s, I didn’t believe in weekends and vacations. “So it was kind of out of control.” He expected his employees to show a similar attitude, even memorizing workers’ license plate numbers so he could “see when people come in and when they leave,” he told the BBC in 2016. It was Buffett who convinced Gates that he needed to be kinder to his employees and to himself. The billionaire investor assured Gates that he didn’t have to “fill every minute of my schedule” to be a serious businessman, and that it was more important to control your time, Gates told journalist Charlie Rose in a joint interview with Buffett in 2017.