He once survived on a powdered orange drink.
In the earliest days of a tiny software company in Albuquerque, the young founder — too busy to leave his desk, too stubborn to learn cooking — would mix tangy orange powder with water and call it lunch. Later came the years of airline meals and drive-throughs, the habit he describes with total candour: “I never learned how to make a healthy meal for myself, so I ate a lot more fast food than I should have.”
Ask him his favourite sandwich and the answer has been the same for fifteen years, a triple-time refrain in a Reddit AMA that became legend: “Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger.” There is a photograph of the world’s most famous technologist standing in a Seattle drive-in line, phone out, waiting for a burger like every other customer. There’s a Seattle chain — the one his late father used to lunch at while opening mail from people begging for donations — where staff still talk about his regular order: a single with fries.
On a Korean TV show in 2025, host Yoo Jae-suk asked if it was true. The guest laughed and said yes: hamburgers and french fries, about four times a week, cheeseburger the chosen one — then immediately added the footnote he’s given interviews for years: he’s cut back on beef because of greenhouse gas.
The compensations are quiet. A treadmill under his desk at home, walking through doctoral lecture DVDs since about 2008. Tennis in the mornings before work, three times a week when health allowed — “tennis is my exercise,” he tells people who expect him to say chess. A nightly ritual of washing dishes. And eight hours of reading before bed, because the thing he has defended most fiercely isn’t a diet at all — it’s sleep. “I basically have to have my eight hours,” he once said. “If I don’t get enough sleep, I just am not good.”
The fast-food confession that made tabloid headlines in the 2010s is by now a small, managed pleasure in a much larger life: private chef at the estate, vegetables he’ll admit to eating, a morning elliptical, a nightly book, a weekly bridge game with the candy-eater in Omaha.
He is the man who ate his way through the entire history of nutritional advice and then funded the vaccine research that may shorten humanity’s obituary list.
His name is Bill Gates. He is 71 years old, worth roughly $110 billion, and he is, by his own cheerful admission, a cheeseburger problem.
Sources & citations
- GeekWire, “Full interview: Bill Gates on… hamburgers” (2019) — Burgermaster, Dick’s — geekwire.com/2019
- tvN “You Quiz on the Block,” Aug 2025 (via Chosun Biz) — “hamburgers and fries four times a week” — biz.chosun.com/en/en-entertainment/2025-08-28
- GatesNotes blog, “Why I’m obsessed with energy/the Tang habit & healthy meals” (2019) — gatesnotes.com
- Business Insider, “Bill Gates working-from-home routine” (2020) — treadmill desk, tennis — businessinsider.com
- Vanity Fair (2021) — Burgermaster origin story, bridge with Buffett
Part 2 of the series “What Billionaires Actually Eat.”