The richest person on the planet has down-to-earth tastes.
Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates chows down on McDonald’s Big Macs at business meetings and insists that his hotel rooms are stocked with Diet Coke, The Daily Telegraph reported Friday.
“If you get the lunchtime slot with Bill, you’re eating burgers,” Joe Cerrell, a managing director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, told the paper.
“Someone will always be sent to get bags of McDonald’s. I don’t think Melinda [Gates’ wife] lets him have them at home,” he dished.
Gates guzzles so much soda that he has “hotel rooms full of Diet Coke,” Cerrell said.
The 60-year-old software mogul — who has a net worth of about $82 billion — has a McDonald’s Gold Card for unlimited free fast food, the UK Guardian reported last year.
But despite his affection for the Golden Arches, Gates also has a soft spot for farm animals, he told the Telegraph.
“I’m very much the product of an urban upbringing. Once, in high school, we went to someone’s farm and had to kill the chickens to eat them. I was like: “This is horrific. Somebody actually has to choke these things. Oh my God! Why am I being asked to do it?” he said.
The billionaire also schedules every minute of his day and can be “pretty impatient,” Cerrell revealed.
“With Bill you really do have to know your stuff. It’s like briefing the smartest guy in the room,” he said. “He can get very frustrated if he thinks his time has been wasted. He’s very funny too – absolutely not arrogant. Our days are pretty structured.”
“His day is planned for him, in the style of the US president, on a minute-by-minute basis. Every meeting and handshake is timed to the second,” he said.
His tight schedule sometimes irks his wife, Melinda, according to the site.
“Well, there’s the question of sorting out the calendar. We have so many things to do, and that’s always a challenge,” Gates said.
“And I’m a night person. If I have a good book, or I’m doing something on the computer, I have a tendency to stay up. I never tell Melinda I’m tired the next day or she’ll say it’s all my fault, but she can often tell. I’ll try to be energetic, and she’ll say, “You stayed up too late again,” he said.