Bill Gates says ultra-wealthy would ‘have a third as much’ if he created tax system

Bill Gates said that billionaires like himself would be much less wealthy if he designed the U.S. tax system.

In the Netflix show “What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates,” the Microsoft co-founder said it was a “strange thing” to “have people worth a billion, 10 billion, a hundred billion.”

“Under the tax system I would go for, the wealthy would, say, have a third as much” money, Gates said while sitting down with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the episode.

Sanders, meanwhile, said he would “go a lot further.”

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Gates’ latest comments on taxes echo ones he made to The Independent earlier in September.

“If I designed the tax system, I would be tens of billion dollars poorer than I am,” he said. “The tax system could be more progressive without damaging significantly the incentive to do fantastic things.”

He also told the outlet he was in favor of the estate tax.

Gates also indicated he thought that the world would be better off if billionaires would “voluntarily chose to give more money away” and that wealthy individuals should donate money to help fight inequity.

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“It’s a huge amount of wealth, which if you even tried to consume it, it would be kind of absurd,” Gates said of billionaires. “You want that money to be given back to society, not just consumed. In a rich country of the U.S., the fact that there’s still deprivation says that our social safety net is not funded as well as we’d like it to be, but I’m not someone who thinks outlawing wealth above a certain size is the right way to go about it.”

Gates pledged in 2022 to give away “virtually all” of his wealth to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He created the foundation, which focuses on global health, development, gender equality and other issues, with his then-wife Melinda French Gates in 2000.

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He and French Gates are also two of the co-founders of the Giving Pledge, along with longtime Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. The initiative has more than 240 signatories and asks them to donate a majority of their fortunes.

The world is home to over 2,700 billionaires, including Gates and his estimated $138.6 billion personal fortune, according to Forbes.

FOX Business’ Breck Dumas contributed to this report.