Bill Gates

I mean, I asked — first time I met Bill Gates in 1991, I said, “If you’re going to go away on a desert island for 10 years, you had to put your stock in two companies in the high-tech business, which would they be?” And he named two very good stocks. And if I’d bought both of them, we’d have made a lot more money than we made, even buying Coca-Cola. But he also would have said at the same time that if he went away he’d rather buy Coca-Cola, because he would have felt sure about that happening. It’s — you know, different people understand different businesses. And the important thing is to know which ones you do understand and when you’re operating within what I call your “circle of competence.” And the software business is not within my circle of competence, and I don’t think it’s within in Charlie’s. Charlie?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: New board member Bill Gates has been talking about education reform in America, and columnist George Will quoted you in an article about Patrick Byrne’s efforts to reform education in America. Could you share with us some of your thoughts about these two efforts, or your efforts, to reform education? Thank you. And Charlie, as a big Ben Franklin enthusiast, has always said that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and I think we’ve been spending that ounce of prevention, or providing it, here in Omaha. I think it’s a — you know, Charlie will have a lot more to say on this. I admire the fact that people like Patrick and Bill Gates and a lot of other people, John Walton and Teddy Forstmann, all kinds of people — Bob Wilmers, up in Buffalo — are attacking the problem. It’s probably the — next to the nuclear, chemical, and biological problem — I mean, it’s the number one problem of the country is making sure that the educational system is the best in the world. We’ve got the resources and we’re not providing it, we’re not delivering it. So, it’s very complicated when you operate through thousands and thousands of school districts and you work with many, many unions, and you’ve had, to a great extent in many areas, the rich opt out of the system and set up a separate system.