Bill Gates: "I'd rather pay for vaccines than travel to Mars"

Billionaire Bill Gates has said he would rather pay for vaccines than travel to Mars, which he believes is not a good use of money.

“It's really, really expensive to go to Mars. You can buy measles vaccines and save lives for $1.000 (£814) per life saved,” he told the BBC.

Fellow entrepreneur Elon Musk has said he wants to colonize Mars, while Jeff Bezos has also joined the "space race".

SpaceX, the rocket company Mr. Musk co-founded in 2002, has made it his ultimate goal to send crewed flights to Mars and eventually colonize the Red Planet.

Mr Bezos, the founder of Amazon, heads aerospace company Blue Origin and took a short trip to space in 2021, while British tycoon Sir Richard Branson also reached the edge of space on the Virgin Galactic rocket plane.

Mr Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, also believes that artificial intelligence will transform humanity "quite dramatically".

"It will help us examine medical and scientific questions. It's not just robots, but it also helps with reading and writing,” he said, adding “Actually, there's been more progress there than on the robotics side. Both will give us much greater productivity."

Mr Gates also spoke of his surprise at becoming the face of conspiracy theories during his pandemic Covid-19.

"I didn't expect this," he said, referring to theories that wanted him but benefited from the virus or started it himself.

“During the pandemic, there have been tens of millions of messages saying that I deliberately caused it or that I'm watching people. It's true that I'm in the vaccine business, but I'm in the vaccine business to save lives."

“These messages kind of turned it around. I guess people are looking for the "boom" behind the curtain, the overly simplistic explanation. Malice is much easier to understand than biology.”

"By my grandmother's standards, I'm crazy"

Mr Gates, who has spent much of his life as the world's richest man, has given away tens of billions of pounds to charity, often targeting global health, particularly children.

He now divides his time between climate change and eradicating malnutrition and diseases such as polio and malaria.

On whether he is frugal in his personal life, Mr Gates said: “I don't have a giant wardrobe. I don't wear jewelry. When I unwrap a present, I don't bother to fold it up and use it again. My grandmother never threw away a paper bag or a string in a package in her life. So, by her standards, I'm crazy.”

Mr. Gates divorced his wife, Melinda, in May 2021. When asked if he would like to find love again, he said: "Sure, I'm not a robot."