Tuesday on CNBC, Microsoft co-founder and multibillionaire Bill Gates recounted a conversation he had with Donald Trump a couple of weeks ago. He had fairly nice things to say about both the conversation and the potential of the incoming Trump administration.
Naturally, neither the Associated Press nor the New York Times found these elements of the CNBC interview to be newsworthy.
Here is the portion of the CNBC interview where Gates discussed his meeting with Trump (full 23-minute interview is here):
Transcript:
REBECCA QUICK, CNBC: He (Donald Trump) had a phone call with you. How did that conversation go?
BILL GATES: I had an opportunity to talk to him about innovation. You know, a lot of his message has been about where he sees things not as good as he’d like.
But in the same way President Kennedy talked about the space mission and got the country behind that — I think that whether it’s education or stopping epidemics, other health breakthroughs, finishing Polio, or in this energy space — there can be a very upbeat message that his administration is going to organize things, get rid of regulatory barriers and have American leadership through innovation, be one of the things that he — he gets behind.
And, of course, my whole career has been along those lines and he was interested in listening to that, and I am sure there will be further conversations.
Gosh, Gates even made a JFK reference — which was nice, but also a virtual guarantee that what he was saying would be ignored as much as possible. Let people know that Bill Gates compared Trump's potential to that of the sainted John Fitzgerald Kennedy? You must be kidding. That cannot be allowed.
The Associated Press covered the announcement of the Gates-led energy venture fund on Monday. AP business writer David Koenig noted that Gates had spoken with Trump a couple of weeks ago.
Koenig also relayed Gates' unfortunate belief that what the government does in the energy sector is more important than the investments private-sector entities make:
TITANS OF NEW INDUSTRY SPRING $1 BILLION CLEAN ENERGY FUND
... Gates is the chairman of a group of 20 investors who call their fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures. They want to speed innovation in the $6 trillion energy market. At the top of the investors' list of criteria: nurture technologies with the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least a half gigaton.
... The initial $1 billion sum, he said, is still much bigger than any previous clean-energy fund and is enough to signal the investors' seriousness. (This was in response to an apparent AP indication that it thought the amount involved to be low. — Ed.)
Gates has said that the investments he makes won't matter as much as the choices that governments make. He believes there is broad support in Washington for energy research and development. But, he added, "it's hard to say" whether clean energy continues to get government incentives or what energy policies a Trump administration might pursue.
"I had a phone call with Trump" a couple weeks ago, Gates said. "It wasn't some super-long call. I talked a little bit about the innovation in various spaces that got me excited. He seemed to think innovation might be a fruitful area and said that we should talk more. At some point we'll get into some depth."
Gates' perspective that what the government does is more important is unfortunate but not surprising, given that his co-investors include Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros and Richard Branson. It's also disappointing, because he should remember that the tech innovation boom of the 1970s and 1980s didn't have the government involved at all, except in creating tax and regulatory, well, climates that made risk-taking and venture investing viable. Gates even told CNBC that part of Trump's "upbeat" message is "get(ting) rid of regulatory barriers." The more the government is involved, the more we will see much more in the way of new erected regulatory barriers, and the less we will see of getting rid of them.
As much as the AP has demonstrated its love for alternative energy and the idea of fighting "climate change," one might think that the Gates' conversation with Quick might also have been considered newsworthy, as it elaborated a bit further on what Koenig reported on Monday. Nope.
The New York Times also had a Monday story on the Gates venture, which reported only that "Gates ... said he had a brief telephone call with Mr. Trump several weeks ago but declined to describe it further."
Otherwise, the story by Hiroko Tabuchi and Henry Fountain was a predictable fear-and-loathing scare piece about a potential President Trump energy policy. Based on a search at the paper's web site, the Times apparently didn't consider the fact that Gates chose to describe the Trump phone call further with CNBC worth covering as a fresh in-house story — even though the paper ultimately posted a three-minute segment from that interview Tuesday afternoon which did not include any of the portion shown above.
Perhaps the Times feels slighted by Gates, who may have saved his disclosure for CNBC because he knew it would be more widely seen and covered. If that's the excuse for not covering what Gates said in a separate story, what an immature reaction.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
