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Bill Gates, Bill & Melinda Gates FoundationThe following op-ed was exclusively provided to Business Insider to coincide with a speech Bill Gates is giving for the Munich Security Conference. The following is an abridged version of his remarks. When I decided 20 years ago to make global health the focus of my philanthropic work, I didn’t imagine that I’d be speaking at a conference on international security policy. But I’m speaking here at the Munich Security Conference because I believe our worlds are more tightly linked than most people realize. War zones and other fragile state settings are the most...

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and world’s richest man, said in an interview Friday that robots that steal human jobs should pay their fair share of taxes. “Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social Security tax, all those things,” he said. “If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.” Gates made the remark during an interview with Quartz. He said robot taxes could help fund projects like caring...

Twitter was told it was "bounced" from Wednesday's meeting between tech executives and President-elect Donald Trump in retribution for refusing during the campaign to allow an emoji version of the hashtag #CrookedHillary, according to a source close to the situation. Twitter is one of the few major U.S. tech companies not represented at Wednesday afternoon's Trump Tower meeting attended by, among others, Apple's Tim Cook, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and Tesla's Elon Musk — an omission all the more striking because of Trump's heavy dependence on the Twitter platform. With some 17.3 million followers of his account, the...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: My little tech blogger buddies, who really literally hate me, are just gonna be beside themselves today. They're not going to know how to process this. They are going to be confused and angry and questioning the purpose of life, all because Bill Gates went on CNBC's Squawk Box this morning and was asked by the hostette there, Becky Quick, "Donald Trump mentioned he had a phone call with you. How'd that conversation go, Mr. Gates?" GATES: I had an opportunity to talk to him about innovation. You know, a lot of his message, in the same...

President-elect Donald Trump has an opportunity to establish "American leadership through innovation," Bill Gates told CNBC on Tuesday. "A lot of his message has been about ... where he sees things not as good as he'd like," the billionaire Microsoft co-founder said on "Squawk Box." "But in the same way President Kennedy talked about the space mission and got the country behind that," Gates continued, "I think whether it's education or stopping epidemics ... [or] in this energy space, there can be a very upbeat message that [Trump's] administration [is] going to organize things, get rid of regulatory barriers, and...

Full Title: Bill Gates teams up with Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos to lead a $1 BILLION venture to tackle climate change In a bid to tackle climate change, Bill Gates has joined forces with some of the richest people in the world, including Sir Richard Branson and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, to create a £800 million ($1 billion) fund. The initiative, named Breakthrough Energy Ventures, plans to invest in green energy over 20 years. Its funders hope that this long-term approach will help to deliver the next generation of reliable and affordable energy to the world.

President-elect Donald Trump has an opportunity to establish "American leadership through innovation," Bill Gates told CNBC on Tuesday. "A lot of his message has been about ... where he sees things not as good as he'd like," the billionaire Microsoft co-founder said on "Squawk Box." "But in the same way President Kennedy talked about the space mission and got the country behind that," Gates continued, "I think whether it's education or stopping epidemics ... [or] in this energy space, there can be a very upbeat message that [Trump's] administration [is] going to organize things, get rid of regulatory barriers, and...

A vast, mysterious complex dating back more than 5,600 years has been unearthed just 1.5 miles from Stonehenge, British archaeologists have announced. The finding in Wiltshire reinforces the theory that Stonehenge was a sacred monument and suggests the entire region was ritually active hundreds of years before the enigmatic stone circle was erected. Found during excavations ahead of the construction of a new Army Service family accommodation, the 650-foot-diameter complex is known as a "causewayed enclosure." It consists of more than 3,100 feet of segmented ditches arranged in two concentric circles. According to archaeologists at Wessex Archaeology, the remains date...

Transport hubs in Los Angeles, Denver and Washington are soon to trial Total Recall-style high-speed body scanners A startup bankrolled by Bill Gates is about to conduct the first public trials of high-speed body scanners powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the Guardian can reveal. According to documents filed with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Boston-based Evolv Technology is planning to test its system at Union Station in Washington DC, in Los Angeles’s Union Station metro and at Denver international airport. Evolv uses the same millimetre-wave radio frequencies as the controversial, and painfully slow, body scanners now found at many...

One of the most popular punching bags on the presidential campaign trail this year is America’s bio-pharmaceutical industry. Bashing drug companies was telegraphed early on as a key Democratic strategy to shift the blame for the failure of Obamacare to contain health care costs away from the Democratic/insurance industry alliance that wrote the law. Unfortunately, their policy proposals, designed to suppress drug prices, are likely to cause far more harm than good. Consider efforts by President Obama, supported by Hillary Clinton, to undermine the market-based pricing in Medicare Part D to pay for other government spending. My organization joined 25...

Let’s for a second imagine a world without nuclear energy. That’s a tough one but let’s try. No nuclear bombs, of course, no Chernobyl and Fukushima, no worries about Iran and North Korea. A wonderful world, maybe? Probably not, because without nuclear energy we would have burned millions more tons of coal and billions more barrels of oil. This would have brought about climate change of such proportions that what we have today would have seemed negligible. Nuclear energy and uranium, which feeds it, are controversial enough even without any actual accident happening. Radioactivity is dangerous. Nobody is arguing against...

On Wednesday, the leftist Bolivian government turned away a donation of 100,000 chickens from American businessman-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates, calling it “offensive.” “He does not know Bolivia’s reality to think we are living 500 years ago, in the middle of the jungle not knowing how to produce,” César Cocarico, the country’s minister of land and rural development told journalists in La Paz, according to the London Financial Times. “Respectfully, he should stop talking about Bolivia, and once he knows more, apologize to us.” Gates rolled out his chicken plan on his blog, gatesnotes, where he declared that if he were poor,...

The immense popularity enjoyed by Pope Francis ever since his election in 2013 has precipitated sharply during the past year, and he no longer ranks among the top ten most admired men in the world, according to a massive new study involving 31,000 interviews.

Melinda Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, led the charge when it came to faulting current data for being sexist and failing to show the real challenges facing millions of women who are often invisible in statistics. "We cannot know what to do for women and where to invest to have the greatest return unless we have good data .. and we really don't have the data we need," Gates said. "We cannot close the gender gap without closing the data gap," she told Women Deliver, attended by more than 5,500 participants from over 160 countries... ......

Bill Gates said investment gains should be taxed at the same level as ordinary income — a bold call for one of the world's largest investors. Speaking Monday on CNBC's "Squawk Box," Gates said that he's "pleased" that there is more discussion around changing the tax code. When asked what he would alter, Gates sided with his pal Warren Buffett and said he supports raising the earned income tax credit. But Gates also said he would raise the tax rate for capital gains — the largest source of income for the richest Americans. The current top tax rate on capital...

The Zika virus outbreak currently gripping the Americas could have been sparked by the release of genetically modified mosquitoes in 2012, critics say. The insects were engineered by biotechnology experts to combat the spread of dengue fever and other diseases and released into the general population of Brazil in 2012. But with the World Health Organisation(WHO) now meeting in Geneva to desperately discuss cures for the Zika virus, speculation has mounted as to the cause of this sudden outbreak. The Zika virus was first discovered in the 1950s but the recent outbreak has escalated alarmingly, causing birth defects and a...

Project Veritas has released its third undercover video of another Common Core executive revealing the political ideology behind the national educational standards. And this time the anti-American agenda is made clear. The featured Common Core salesperson in this video is Kim Koerber of National Geographic Education (funded by the Gates Foundation, by the way) and a former Pearson Education publishing executive. Her expressions of hatred for America's founding documents coupled with her undying love for Common Core brings the problem to an entirely new level. Plus, she brings a new meaning to the word disgust when talking about those...

On Thursday, February 4, Satya Nadella will celebrate his second anniversary as the CEO of Microsoft. It's been an eventful couple of years. Microsoft has grown its crucial cloud business, released Windows 10 to a much better reception than its loathed predecessor, launched a bunch of great apps for iPhone and Android, and generally made people like it a lot more. But the real victory of Satya Nadella — the truly monumental shift — has been within the company. Under Nadella, Microsoft is pointed in one direction for first time in modern memory.

A former Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) executive reveals in a Project Veritas undercover investigation how textbook publishing giant Pearson Education won the $1.3 billion contract to put Common Core-curriculum-loaded iPads into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), despite the fact that, he alleges, other publishers outpaced Pearson in their bids for the contract. In this fourth video of a series by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas – focused on exposing the corporate cronyism behind the Common Core standards reform, Gilbert Garcia, Ph.D. tells the undercover journalist that “the big boys” of the textbook publishing world are Pearson, McGraw-Hill and HMH....

The billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has told the BBC that the United States "should set a better example" by taking in more refugees. Mr Gates said his home country "had the capacity" to follow the examples of Germany and Sweden, who were "to be congratulated" for welcoming migrants. But he acknowledged that relaxing immigration laws "was not easy". Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Gates added that governments were dealing with "tight budgets". However, he emphasised that the issue was largely a political one, and that "the total number of refugees is not a world record".