Bill Gates’s visits to Warren Buffett were an escape from a jam-packed schedule, new book says

“When Buffett asked Gates why he couldn’t control his life and live it in a way he wanted to, Gates would simply shrug. ‘Bill likes to have a schedule; I don’t,’ Buffett said in an email,” Das wrote.

Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, would even pick Gates up from the airport sometimes, and the pair would have “freewheeling conversations,” according to the book. When Gates couldn’t make it to Omaha, they’d play bridge together online, the book said.

Since Gates’s divorce in 2021, Buffett has resigned from the Gates Foundation, and The New York Times reported that their friendship has cooled over the years.

Representatives for Gates, French Gates, and Buffett didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Gates has previously praised Buffett’s more relaxed approach to scheduling.

“It took far too long for me to realize that you don’t have to fill every second of your schedule to be successful,” Gates wrote in a Threads post in May. “In hindsight, it’s a lesson I could have learned a lot sooner had I taken more peeks at Warren Buffett’s intentionally light calendar.”