So for about 2 years or so but because youve given so much money, the richest man is jeff bezos. If do you think that if you had stayed in college to get a degree a sign that i havent given away money fast enough to drop out of top 10 and the market has been wrong. [applause] actually market has been strong. Microsoft is up 35 this year. To what do you attribute that . The 5 most powerful companies in the world are the Technology Companies, microsoft has a god share of that, i get to spend about a sixth of my time over at microsoft, so so recently you said that the biggest mistake youve made professionally was that microsoft should have had the android technology, why was that the biggest mistake . Well, when youre in a field and youre doing what was called windows mobile, remised being the mobile operating by very tinny amount, tough trial, we didnt assign the best people to do the work. Biggest mistake i made and clearly the company that that should have achieved that and we didnt and stopped momentum to go to android and became the operating system globally. Today youre the only company over a trillion dollars, so how much better could you have been . [laughter] well, market cap is only an indirect thing that in an imperfect way will reflect what the company is doing, microsoft would be far more valuable if we had won the operating system competition, android is huge asset for google. Recently i had a chance to interview your wife belinda and she describes how you met and she said that you approached her in a parking lot and you asked her for a date and you said in 3 weeks we could have a date and she said that wasnt spontaneous enough and then she gave you her number and then you called her right away and said tonight and said that spontaneous enough. It worked out . It did. Lets talk about what you most want to focus on today which is Breakthrough Energy and what youre doing in Climate Change era, two main areas of focus are k to 12 education and health care in least wealthiest people around the world. Why are you so worried about Climate Change . Well. The Climate Change gets worse every year, what you have to do is dramatic in reshaping the entire physical economy that we have, the greatest consequence that we would have are farmers in poor countries, droughts, the floods, the heat, will cause a problem, we already have a malnutrition and deprivation to get substantially worse and its a very complex problem, not just the r d part but the recreation of products and deployment of products so helping educate people about, okay, what what are the sources of these greenhouse houses and how do you get on a path of innovation so that you can get Global Adoption and actually bring emissions down dramatically, you know, i have that now as a priority to articulate. The south side of the foundation . Okay, the part where you mitigate and help the poor countries where better seeds, better policies partly through development aids, thats through the foundation, mitigation part, the part where you invent new ways of making fuel, electricity, cement, steel, meat, thats done directly by me with a lot of investments including the funds that you mentioned, ventures is a fun that i assembled a group of 22 people to put money into companies that are trying to commercialize, breakthrough. A 1 million, you put in 250 million, can 1 billion make a difference . A billion, they have 20 investments, late next year will probably raise another billion to a billion and a half, you know, this is all about innovation broadly defined, we need to make these dramatic changes and right now the premium, if you said, okay, you to make steel but no emissions, that steel would cost you four times what steel does today. Your electric bill would more than double if we take the technology we have today, yes, supporting those companies and drawing other investors in, green investing didnt go very well in the first realm and so it looked like the field that might evaporate and not only theyve been able to invest, the first billion fully committed within the next year but weve got other investors, so thats gone quite well. The technology, they only invest in companies who have a chance of reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions by half a percent each each company. They found 20 and im sure theyll find another investor. Im the smallest investor, am i going to get my money back . Probably one of the things you invest is high risk and likely to have significant successes, you can deduct it, but risk of return are high. We do expect to make profit out of the fund. Why do you think some people that theres no such a thing of Climate Change, what is compelling to say theres no Climate Change, political reason, theres some people who dont believe that theres Climate Change . Well, they must not have taken enough science courses or something, i dont know. Climate change requires indepth study. The United States has become partisan issue which is unfortunate, you know, might make it harder to achieve the type of agreements we need in the United States, we have two people, people that deny Climate Change and those who think its easy to solve. Global warming from Climate Change . The problems caused by the Greenhouse Gases is worse than just the average temperature going up. It causes there to be extremes of precipitations, you know turn up my aircondition and so the idea that the sea level rise, heat wave, these things are Climate Change is probably better term to capture breath of problems. The history of human civilization, any evidence that people will do things that will affect their great, great grandchildren but that they wont see the benefit from . In other words, if you try to eliminate carbon in the atmosphere you cant really do it in your lifetime because the carbon is trapped there, maybe if we change policy a 100 years from now theyll be reduction, barely rarely people want to do something that will help their great, great unborn grandchildren, how do you motivate people to do something . The United States has been willing to take on very difficult problems like cancer and make gigantic investments knowing that the real payoff would be many decades down the road. When that was first being pushed, people were saying, hey, this is important. Climate change is like that where you got to take a longterm perspective and government did its best when its taking the longterm perspective and funding the basic r d and the policies that lead to scaled appointment. So today if we do nothing with respect to Climate Change will the oceans rise up and have ocean front land or is it going to be under water in 20 or 30 years . Not well, uncertainty in models are still fairly fine, we have 1 peter meter or 2meters. The numbers have gone up. Before the ipcc only took the most conservative view which would have been half meter, now the understanding is at least a meter and significant possibility that its 2meters. Electricity grid is 25 or so. Exactly. 24 comes from agriculture and forestry, why is that causing such a big increase in carbon . Well, the net category is a variety of things, when you clear land, youre taking the carbon in trees, plants, releasing all of them, like burning the land say in indonesia for Palm Oil Plantation and the other thing like cows and grasseating species have a digested system that emits methane and methane is a very powerful Greenhouse Gas and cows alone account for 6 of global emissions and so we need to change cows. Cows. Actually of all the categories, the one that is has gone better is this work and so you have people like impossible or beyond meat which i invested. Do you eat it . Absolutely. Healthier for you or atmosphere . Slightly healthier for you in terms of less cholesterol, its, of course, dramatic reduction in methane emissions, you know, animal cruelty, manure management and the pressure that Meat Consumption puts on land use, the main reason we need to increase is not the population increase, its as countries get richer eat more meat and meat is an inefficient way of creating calories and so its super helpful. With respect to solar, for example, is solar a solution to our problems . Its part of of solution, if the sun would shine 24 hours a day it does. Somewhere, then that 25 youd have a solution, so wind and solar are very helpful and the fact that the prices have come down quite a bit, but people think, may think thats a total solution to that electric sector, electricity unfortunately has to be reliable, its got to work during, you know, 10day period that tokyo needs 23 giga watts of electricity, no solar, no wind for 10day periods. The need to have base load generations like nuclear or others, or to have a miracle in storage so that you can save that energy is very high. The final solution to Climate Change, when we get to zero, a lot of things that use hydrocarbon would shift over to use electricity, one of the necessary elements is to get electricity to zero but the electric sector even in the u. S. Will have to more than double in size because transportation and buildings and industrial applications that have used hydrocarbons directly will shift over to use electricity. Electric grids, thats been in the news lately with respect to what we might have done in russia and are you worried that if we had big electrical grids the United States could be subject to be knocked out by cyber terrorism . Well, thats even true today. There are things like internet in the electric grid that modern society is very dependent upon. So as we grow the electric sector, we will have to take that very seriously. The u. S. Has not built substantial transmission, even some various projects, even that didnt get built, theres a real policy problem with transmission which is a necessary piece of eventual zeroemissionelectricity solution. You have been investor in nuclear technology, is that the solution, better Nuclear Plants . It is for many, many locations an important part of the solution to have energy thats available on demand and todays Nuclear Plants unfortunately, their safety characteristics, just dont make them competitive, so the two still being built in the u. S. , that would be fairly extensive electricity, so the Third Generation of nuclear which is what seems right now is way to expensive. The question is can we create a a new generation, fourth generation advance nuclear whose economics are over twice as good, whose safety is much better and the answer is yes, we can, because we havent done new generation of nuclear and we have much better understanding of how to do that. Whether the United States will step up for the pilot plant for the fourth generation is a question. What about fusion . Is that an answer . Its very exciting and very difficult to do. Theres about 7 companies that are messing around with fusion, put money into mitrelated one called Common Wealth fusion systems, that technologically is very, very difficult, no one has gotten to so called energy break even where you have to create 10 milliondegrees of temperature in order for the reaction in the sun, the fusion to take place and so to do that economically and get net power output is a huge scientific challenge, it definitely should be funded but unlike fusion thats very straightforward engineering to build that next generation does require invention. Fusion requires a lot of invention. What about electric cars, do you think thats a solution . It absolutely if you look at the transport sector 14 . Passenger cars with about another factor, 2 or 3 in battery improvement which is possible, the mainstream for passenger cars can become electric, you to make that transition, youve got to make sure electricity is emission, but for trucks and trains theres almost no chance batteries would be good enough and there showl still need to create liquid fuels either with electricity, biofuels, some way, fuels are amazing, you know, the emergency density of gasoline is 30 times the Energy Density of best battery we can make, if you look at a container ship that crosses the ocean, having fuels be 30 less efficient, 90 of the weight would be the batteries instead of cargo, so its unlikely to work in those cases so we need ways of making fuels that are zero carbon. When you talked to heads of state about this, do they roll their eyes, happy to meet with you, can i have a selfie, do they really do anything and what are you trying to get heads of state to do . Well, in the paris Climate Conference one of the things that was missing was the focus on r d and france actually said yes, we want this for the first time at a cost a real issue that gets the scotts and it was called Mission Innovation which Prime Minister moti got to pick the name, that commitment of over 30 governments to Double Energy r d was significant milestone that came out of that conference. In order to get that commitment ui had to make commitment that there would be Breakthrough Energy that would take things out of labs and help them get into the marketplace and so theres been some progress, climate is complicated enough that, you know, you dont want you want a broad set of people in the government to understand the complexities and in terms of the r d where it needs to be done, unless the u. S. Is engaged unlikely to happen because so much of the worlds capacity to do innovation is here in the United States. The United States pulled out more or less of the paris accord, though, not technically so for another year or so, is that of concern to you and do you think this is going to hurt the effort to change Climate Change around the world. Yeah, its a huge step backwards. Even if you meet all the current commitments in that climate accord, youre still way over 2degrees of warming and most countries are behind commitments they make, compare emissions and theres a little bit about thats easy, natural gas, onetime thing is a lot of that and yet the world is falling short and so to have people like the United States say, okay, even thats not important, it just shows how daunting its going to be, theres no way we will get there without the u. S. Coming back in a strong way. Do you think if you meet with President Trump you can convince him on paris or is that beyond your capabilities to do that . I i someone else should do that. [laughter] all right. So let me go back for a moment to early days, you famously dropped out of harvard and you then started your company, but i think said subsequently that actually you thought the computer revolution was occurring or Software Revolution was occurring but you were wrong and if you stayed in harvard for 2 years or so it wouldnt have made a big difference, is that right or not . Yes, the urgency that i felt that if i didnt get microsoft right away somebody would do a great job working Software Company and we didnt have a chance, that probably not being true, i could have waited 2 or 3 years and the opportunity to do microsoft would have been there. Anyway, i felt the sense of urgency and its not like today things like the learning company because its a great book, its not like i missed some part of my education. When you dropped out your father and mother said are you sure you know what you want to do, if one of your children dropped out of college to start a new company, what would you say . Well, i would have to say. The yes. The dropping out is not decision. You can always go back. If you dont have kids that you need to support its a very lowrisk thing particularly in the culture in the United States where trying to start something and failing is not black light of life. What was it to enable you to beat everyone else in business, bill gates, what was the unique factor that made you the most successful . Yeah, we were actually the first but there were companies and all singleproduct companies who got ahead of us in terms of sales, you know, buy by about 1991 we did become the largest of all of them, we werent an engineering company, we were about how you hire smart people and tools to develop software broadly. So, for example, word perfect was a word processor, somebody might remember, they did so well with the product that growth sales rivaled ours when we were doing products, windows that became mainstream in 1995, we became far larger than the other software companies. Now, subsequently, you know, google, apple, amazon have become, you know, also extremely successful, but in the 90s we were the strongest by far. Okay, the Largest Companies in the world in the United States are Technology Companies, apple, facebook, google, microsoft and so forth, you worry that theres too much power and too much data in the hands of Technology Companies and are you surprised that government hasnt done something more than theyve done today about that . Well, technology has become so central that government has to think, okay, what does that mean about elections, what does it mean about bullying, what does that mean about wiretapping authority that is let you find out whats going on financially or, you know, drugs, money laundering, things like that, so, yes, the government needs to get involved. I for the earlier years of microsoft said to people i didnt have an office in washington, d. C. And eventually i regret that stateme