Celebs Who Have Publicly Called Out Bill Gates

Once known for his charitable disposition and visionary ideas, Bill Gates' reputation has soured beyond repair thanks to a whole host of controversies that refuse to stay in the past. From sordid details about Gates' scandalous past to Gates' messy divorce with his ex, the founder of Microsoft has weathered PR storms that make the intricacies of debugging Windows look like a walk in the park. So, it makes sense that there's no shortage of famous faces who've decided that Gates, nerdy sweater vest and all, deserves a public dressing-down.

Some might attribute this change to misinformation and conspiracy campaigns that reign supreme in the era of social media, and admittedly, they wouldn't be wrong to do so. After all, Gates became closely associated with two subjects that have attracted many conspiracies thanks to his COVID-era vaccine advocacy and his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. According to a 2024 report by Blackbird AI, Gates has become the victim of the monster he helped create, being targeted by a relentless wave of narrative attacks that target his public image with techniques like "inauthentic activity" and "bot-like amplification."

Still, while it would be easy to chalk all of this up to online troll factories, there's no denying that some of the sharpest knives ever drawn over the years have come from inside the house. It's a varied bunch, too. Tech rivals, former college friends who helped co-found Microsoft, celebrities and politicians — the lineup feels as incongruous as the rebukes are unflattering. Here are some of the people Gates has rubbed the wrong way over the years, and how they decided to air out their grievances in a very public manner.

When you're worth more than one hundred billion dollars, what better nemesis to have than the guy whose net worth hit $800 billion in 2026? The feud between Bill Gates and Elon Musk began in the inside, clubby way billionaire feuds usually do: a stock short. According to "Elon Musk," the official biography written by Walter Isaacson, Musk became vindictive when he learned that Gates had bet against Tesla. Gates wanted to get Musk into philanthropy, holding the short as a sort of leverage, but Musk wouldn't give in, and the relationship soured further from there.

The rift grew wider, and fast. In May 2025, in a Financial Times interview, Gates blamed Musk for the deaths of countless children over USAID cuts that he oversaw under the newly instituted Department of Government Efficiency. Musk fired back at the Qatar Economic Forum a few days later. "Who does Bill Gates think he is to make comments about the welfare of children, given that he frequented Jeffrey Epstein?" he asked (via The New York Post). Musk was still at it in December 2025, writing on X, "Bill Gates is a liar. Always has been." Yes, it turns out billionaire buddies are quite capable of holding a grudge with the same tenacity they employ to go after tax policies.

Speaking of billionaire rivals, when Elon Musk was still, by his own admission, sleeping on a futon in a Palo Alto office and showering at the YMCA, the biggest tech rivalry was the one between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It was a slow-burning feud that predated the web browser and outlasted the floppy disk.

In Walter Isaacson's biography "Steve Jobs," which was published just 19 days after the Apple founder's death, Jobs ripped Gates to shreds and claimed that he's a copycat. "Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he's more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology. He just shamelessly ripped off other people's ideas," he said (per ABC). Elsewhere in the book, Jobs calls Gates "fundamentally odd," writing that he might have been better-served if "he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger."

Isaacson also documents an in-person instance where the two got in each other's crosshairs. Jobs accused Gates of stealing the Mac interface for Windows, but Gates retorted by saying that they both got the idea from Xerox — Jobs just got there first. The scoreboard, in that particular exchange, went to Gates, but which of them got the last laugh in the decades to follow depends on whether you're currently reading this on a Mac or a Windows setup.

One of the strangest examples of animus towards Bill Gates comes courtesy of current U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wrote a book in 2021 called "The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health." In his bestseller, RFK Jr. argues that Fauci, with the help of Gates and other pharmaceutical companies, formed something of an alliance to control the global policy on health issues. The book essentially reads like a sprawling conspiracy theory of Covid-19 in hardcover, including long-discredited misinformation and compiling the greatest hits of the anti-vaccine canon into a single volume. As a cherry on top, he brings Gates into the mix for his advocacy.

Kennedy kept the heat on even after the book's publication. In a November 2021 podcast appearance on Michael Cohen's "Mea Culpa," he argued that Gates should be arrested and prosecuted alongside Fauci. Then, while speaking at an October 2024 Turning Point PAC rally in Georgia, Kennedy accused Bill Gates of funding the Harris campaign through dark money.

Ultimately, Gates decided to sidestep the attacks entirely. In a January 2025 Wall Street Journal interview, he said of RFK, "He wrote a book saying that Tony Fauci and I killed millions of children and made billions of dollars with vaccines. People can judge for themselves whether that's correct or not."

An even more damning testimony to Bill Gates' reputation is Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's account of how Gates and Steve Ballmer (former CEO) tried to rip him off. In "Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft," he recounts overhearing Gates and Ballmer concocting a scheme to dilute his shares because he wasn't contributing as much as before due to his battle with Hodgkin's lymphoma. "They were bemoaning my recent lack of production and discussing how they might dilute my Microsoft equity by issuing options to themselves and other shareholders," he wrote (via Vanity Fair).

The book also details how Gates had allegedly pressured Allen into accepting smaller equity splits. The reason? Gates claimed to have done more of the programming. It's the old, old story of one magnate — or co-founder, in this case — rewriting history the moment the other one isn't looking. In Allen's case, that other person was busy fighting a deadly disease at the time. Allen passed away in October 2018, but his 2011 memoir remains a lasting account of a tech empire and a window into the kind of man his partner was, this time from a man on the inside.

Speaking of people on the inside, no other name on this list comes closer to Bill Gates than Melinda French Gates, who shared a roof and three children with the man. Melinda was married to Gates for 27 years, but the two announced their separation in May 2021 in what would become one of the most talked-about (and expensive) celebrity divorces of all time. She addressed hearsay about their divorce in March 2022 on "CBS Mornings." She didn't deny the question when asked about Gates' rumored affairs, nor did she elaborate much at the time beyond saying, "Those are questions Bill needs to answer."

Is that what led to Gates and Melinda's divorce? "It's not one thing, it was many things. But I did not like that he'd had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no," she said to Gayle King in the aforementioned interview, calling Epstein "evil personified." In 2026, it was revealed in newly surfaced Epstein documents that Gates had asked his infamous friend to help him give antibiotics to Melinda for a sexually transmitted disease he had gotten from another woman. When Melinda was asked about this by Rachel Martin on NPR's "Wild Card" podcast, she expressed her sadness and said, "I am so happy to be away from all the muck that was there." 

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former representative from Georgia's 14th district, has repeatedly gone after Bill Gates for a variety of conspiracy-related issues. On a May 2022 episode of her MTG Live Show, Greene warned viewers that the government wanted to know when they were eating cheeseburgers, "because Bill Gates wants you to eat his fake meat, which grows in a peach tree dish [sic]" (per Vice). She then followed that up by claiming Gates was somehow responsible for the monkeypox outbreak. The next month, she reiterated the conspiracy on X, formerly Twitter, calling Gates a "fake meat bug eater."

Greene is hardly the only conservative activist to go after Gates. Candace Owens famously called the Microsoft founder a "worldwide terrorist" on X. Russell Brand has made several videos about Gates, claiming in an April 2021 video that the billionaire was out to control the world's food supply before subsequently controlling its people. Even Joe Rogan lambasted Gates for supposedly turning into a pitchman for the Covid-19 vaccine. It seems that, increasingly, whatever Gates is selling, the room has stopped buying.