Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates revealed his ‘guilty pleasure’: owning a private plane. A 2014 Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session has surfaced recently where Gates was asked by a user about his “most expensive guilty pleasure purchase?”. To this, he replied “Owning a plane is a guilty pleasure.” While acknowledging, Gates explained that the aircraft enables him to reach destinations for his Foundation work that would otherwise be inaccessible. Gates even noted that his friend Warren Buffett once called his own plane “The Indefensible.”
The Reddit AMA has gone viral.
Here’s what he said
“Owning a plane is a guilty pleasure. Warren Buffett called his the Indefensible. I do get to a lot of places for Foundation work I wouldn’t be able to go to without it.”
According to the information available publicly, Bill Gates owns four business jets: two Gulfstream G650ERs, each valued at around $70 million, and two Bombardier Challenger 350s, priced at approximately $27 million each.
Bill Gates shares best investment advice
During the same AMA session, Gates was asked what financial advice he would give to people making under $100,000 a year. His response to this was: “Invest in your education.”
Another user asked him about what is the worst case that you know of where philanthropy backfired? To this, the Microsoft co-founder replied “A lot of our failures have been backing science that didn’t work out. One thing that is tough is when you think the government will take over something you start but they don’t – we had that with a school lunch program. It might have been better if we hadn’t done it.”