In a recent appearance on the All-In Podcast, Elon Musk shared some revealing thoughts about Bill Gates that highlight a surprising disconnect between Gates’s public persona as a tech visionary and his actual grasp of technical subjects.
The conversation began when the hosts asked Musk about Bill Gates’s recent memo on climate change.
Musk’s response was unexpectedly candid: “You know, you’d think that someone like Bill Gates who clearly started a technology company that’s one of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft, being… you’d think he’d be really quite you know, strong in the sciences. But actually my at least direct conversations with him have… he’s he is not strong in the sciences. Like yeah, this is really surprising.”
Musk then recounted a specific encounter that illustrated this point. “He came to visit me at the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin and was telling me that it’s impossible to have a long range semitruck and I was like well, but we literally have them. And you can drive them and Pepsi is literally using them right now.”
Musk continued:”You can send a trusted person to drive the truck and verify that it can do the things that we say it’s doing.”
However, Musk said that Gates pushed back, saying: “And he’s like, “No, no, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work.”
The exchange became more telling as Musk pressed Gates on the technical details. “I was like, well, so it must be that you disagree with the watt hours per kilogram of the battery pack. So you must think that perhaps we can’t achieve the energy density of the battery pack or that the watt hours per mile of the truck is too high. And when you combine those two numbers, the range is low. And so which one of those numbers do you think we have wrong? And what numbers do you think are correct?”
Gates’s response left Musk baffled: “And he didn’t know any of the numbers. And I’m like, well, then doesn’t it seem that it’s perhaps you know premature to conclude that a long-range semi cannot work if you do not know the energy density of the battery pack or the energy efficiency of the truck chassis.”
The conversation reveals a stark contrast between perception and reality when it comes to technical expertise, even among the world’s most prominent technology figures.
Musk’s recounting suggests that Gates’s certainty about what was “impossible” wasn’t grounded in actual data or technical understanding, but rather in assumptions that contradicted the physical evidence standing right in front of him.
