Bill Gates is not the subject of any single episode of The Bob Zadek Show represented in these excerpts. He appears instead as a recurring example invoked by guests across four episodes between 2011 and 2022, in arguments about political influence, government failure, corporate welfare, income inequality, and automation. The excerpts do not supply a biography, a title, a company history, or a founding date; they show only what each guest made of his name.
Influence beyond politics
In a June 2011 episode with Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason TV and Reason.com, Gates appears in an argument about whether libertarians should work through third parties or through the major parties. Answering a caller from Portland, Oregon, Gillespie said he does not worry much about partisan politics, and that influence can be had either way. He then argued that politics is not what matters most: very few people, he said, will remember who was Speaker of the House or House Majority Leader in 1960, but they will remember the creation of the birth control pill. In that comparison, Gillespie placed Gates alongside Steve Jobs as figures who “are in the long run going to be much more influential on society than Michael Dukakis or George H.W. Bush.” Nick Gillespie – The Voice of Reason (2011)
Bob Zadek’s own contribution to that exchange concerned structural impediments facing third parties, not Gates. He told the caller that Democrats and Republicans have built in so many structural impediments, from funding to access to media to primaries, that winning as a third-party candidate is very difficult practically. He described the growth of independents as a workaround, and closed the episode by calling the ballot box the last frontier. Gates functions in the segment only as Gillespie’s illustration of private over political influence.
Government failure and the pandemic
In an April 2020 episode with Alex Tabarrok, an economics professor at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and co-founder of Marginal Revolution, Gates appears in a discussion of testing during the early pandemic. Tabarrok said the CDC completely botched the first test and that the FDA, following its usual slow bureaucratic procedures, did not allow private and state labs to run their own tests. He called that a very costly mistake and said the two agencies are essentially responsible for thousands of deaths that could have been prevented had we acted earlier. FDA (2020)
Tabarrok then turned to the present: he said he did not understand what Trump was thinking, and criticized the idea of a task force with Ivanka on it, saying she has no capabilities in this area. He proposed getting a noted epidemiologist instead, and said: “Let’s get Bill Gates. Bill Gates is doing much more to address this crisis than the government is.” He called that amazing, said he was glad Gates was doing it, and added that the fact that Gates is doing more than the government is an absolute crime. Bob Zadek replied that this should not be a headline, because Gates has always done more than the government more effectively, and said they would explore it after the break. The excerpt ends before that discussion resumes.
Corporate welfare and the tech industry
In a January 2021 episode with Lisa Conyers, co-author of a book on welfare for the rich, Gates appears in a segment on corporate welfare in the tech industry. Conyers said that Elon Musk and many others in the book, including Gates, like to tell people they built their companies on their own as entrepreneurs and good businessmen, but that pulling back the curtain reveals massive public support. In her account they are not the stellar, brilliant entrepreneurs they would like people to think they are, and they receive tax dollars to be so successful. Welfare for the Rich? (2021)
Asked by Bob Zadek how tech benefits from welfare to the rich, Conyers said the industry’s public image is not what it is cracked up to be. She acknowledged that many smart people in Silicon Valley created tech products and built an industry out of nothing, but said that as they grew they joined the gravy train like everybody else. She stated that since 2013 the industry has received almost $9 billion in state and federal subsidies, and described data centers in Phoenix, Arizona, receiving incentives to build and subsidized energy to run. She also described the largest companies going to cities and asking how much they will be given to move there. Gates is named only in her opening characterization of entrepreneurs who deny receiving support.
Inequality, wealth, and consumption
In a January 2021 episode with Edward Conard, author of The Upside of Inequality and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Gates appears in a taxonomy of inequality. Conard offered four commonly used definitions: market income, income after taxes and transfers, consumption inequality, and wealth inequality. He used Gates to illustrate why consumption is a poor measure of a person’s resources: Gates has a lot of money and income and a lavish lifestyle, but his lifestyle is very small, because he cannot consume very much of his money — most of it is invested and most of it is given to charity. Questioning Biden’s Inequality Narrative (2021)
Conard added that consumption inequality has not changed since the 1960s, with the 90th percentile consuming about four times more than the 10th. He said wealth inequality is what proponents of redistribution point to because it is more extreme, and explained that about 40% of the population consumes all of its income, leaving zero wealth. He described a small group who produced an innovation or are extremely skilled, or who own a business that is extremely valuable, and asked whether we would want to take that business away. He argued that giving people Gates’s stock in Microsoft would lead them to sell it and consume the money, so most economists would agree the right measure is consumption.
Automation and layoffs
In a July 2022 episode with Steven E. Rhoads, author of a book on the economist’s view of the world, Gates appears in a discussion of layoffs and labor regulation. Rhoads said there was a debate between Gates and Larry Summers: Gates said we really should have a tax on robots because so many people are losing their jobs, and Summers replied by asking why just robots, since any machine that puts a person out of a job does the same thing. Rhoads used the exchange to argue against too much regulation of business, and described French rules that apply to companies of more than 50 people — paid vacation, restrictions on firing — which he said lead firms to pay overtime rather than hire and produce a large number of businesses with 49 employees and almost none with 51. The Economist’s View of the World (2022)
Bob Zadek’s contributions in that segment were about competition and layoffs rather than Gates. He said the smartest people spend day and night in company offices trying to figure out how to give customers what they want at the price they want to pay, and that this is what passes for cutthroat competition. He compared a business laying off employees to a customer switching to a cheaper hairdresser, calling it the identical decision magnified. He closed the exchange by describing the marginal cost of the 51st employee, who he said is legislated out of a job.
Across episodes
The excerpts show no development in the treatment of Gates across episodes; he is invoked in 2011, 2020, 2021 and 2022 as a stable reference point, and the guests who invoke him — Nick Gillespie, Alex Tabarrok, Lisa Conyers, Edward Conard and Steven E. Rhoads — each use him for a different argument rather than responding to one another. The 2021 episodes are the closest to a shared theme, with Conyers treating Gates’s wealth as subsidized and Conard treating it as a case study in why wealth and consumption measure different things, but neither guest refers to the other.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Gates’s role at Microsoft, the date the company was founded, his philanthropy beyond Tabarrok’s and Conard’s passing references, or any response by Gates to the claims made about him. They do not say whether the robot-tax proposal was made in a particular forum, or what became of it. They do not give the title of Conyers’s book or the name of Rhoads’s. Everything the article reports about Gates is secondhand characterization by show guests, not testimony from Gates himself.