Bill Gates on Crisis Response

The Department of Justice, joined by twenty state attorneys general and the District of Columbia, filed suit on May 18, 1998, before Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, focusing on predatory strategies and barriers to entry. Gates himself never testified at trial; instead his pretrial videotaped deposition became infamous, with a source present calling him evasive and nonresponsive as he sparred with examiner David Boies over the contextual meaning of words like compete, concerned, and we. When excerpts played in court, the judge was seen laughing and shaking his head, and reporting noted that many denials were directly refuted by prosecutors with snippets of emails Gates had sent and received. An Intel vice president quoted a senior Microsoft executive's stated intention to smother Netscape and cut off its air supply by giving away a clone of its flagship browser for free.

On April 3, 2000, the district court ruled Microsoft an abusive monopoly that had committed monopolization, tying, and blocking of competition in violation of the Sherman Act, and on June 7, 2000, it ordered the company split in two. The victory dissolved on appeal: on June 28, 2001, the D.C. Circuit overturned Judge Jackson's rulings, adopting a drastically altered scope of liability because of the judge's own misconduct, including secret press contacts during the trial, and it vacated the breakup. Microsoft then settled with the Justice Department on November 1, 2001, agreeing to let PC manufacturers adopt non-Microsoft software, and the district court accepted most of the settlement in 2002, with obligations expiring November 12, 2007. Critics on the other side called the result a special antitrust immunity; Gates later said the litigation years contributed to Microsoft losing the mobile operating system race to Android, which he called his biggest mistake.

Gates spent years warning that the world was unprepared for a pandemic, telling a TED conference audience in March 2015 that the next global outbreak would catch governments flat-footed, a warning that preceded the arrival of COVID-19 in late 2019. During the crisis, media outlets treated him as an authority despite his lack of public office or medical training, and his foundation created the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator in 2020 to speed the development and evaluation of new and repurposed treatments. He described frequent conversations with Anthony Fauci on vaccines and medical innovation. In April 2021 he drew criticism for arguing that pharmaceutical companies should retain vaccine patents and for opposing the TRIPS waiver, contending that safety protocols and the difficulty of transferring production, not intellectual property, were the real constraints on supply; his foundation had encouraged Oxford University to partner with a major manufacturer rather than give away its vaccine, and Oxford chose AstraZeneca.