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Bill Gates, entrepreneur and investor and technology and venture capitalist, Recommending BestBooks

Bill Gates's Book Recommendations – His Reading List, Sources, and What They Reveal

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Books

Bill as a reader

Bill Gates reads the way an engineer debugs a system: to understand how something really works before trying to change it. The Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist works through dozens of books a year — overwhelmingly non-fiction — and has spent more than a decade publishing his reactions on Gates Notes, where his summer and year-end reading lists have become a fixture. He reads with a pen, arguing with authors in the margins, and gravitates to books dense enough to reward that effort: energy and materials, global health and disease, economics and development, history, biography and the honest use of statistics.

What ties the shelf together is purpose. Gates reads to make decisions — where a foundation should spend, why a disease persists, how a grid actually delivers power — so he prizes writers who go both deep and broad and who let the data lead. That instinct shows up as a handful of recurring intellectual anchors: Vaclav Smil, whose quantitative histories of energy shape how Gates thinks about climate; Steven Pinker and the late Hans Rosling, whose case for measurable human progress underpins his evidence-based optimism; and biographers such as Walter Isaacson. Fiction is rare and usually earns its place by illuminating something real. The result is less a list of favourites than a working library for understanding — and trying to improve — the modern world.

Bill's reading themes

  • Energy & ClimateHow energy and materials underpin civilisation — and decarbonisation.
  • Global Health & PandemicsDisease, biology and preparedness at planetary scale.
  • Progress & Data-Driven OptimismThe empirical case that the world is measurably improving.
  • Big History & ScienceLong-run, first-principles accounts of how we got here.
  • Business & Statistical LiteracyUnderstanding markets, development and numbers honestly.
  • Select Fiction & MemoirThe rare novel or life story that illuminates something real.

What Bill's reading reveals

Read together, Bill Gates's recommendations describe a particular way of thinking rather than a taste in books: quantitative, systems-minded, and cautiously optimistic because the numbers, as he reads them, point that way. The spine of the list is Vaclav Smil. Gates recommends Smil more than any other author — Energy and Civilization and How the World Really Works — because Smil treats energy and materials as the physical substrate of everything else, and that lens runs straight into Gates's own work on climate. It is the clearest example of reading feeding action.

Around that spine sit three reinforcing threads. A progress thread — Pinker's Enlightenment Now and The Better Angels of Our Nature, Rosling's Factfulness — makes the empirical argument that life is improving and that clear-eyed data beats gut pessimism; it is the intellectual justification for the whole philanthropic project. A science-and-health thread — The Gene, The Code Breaker, The Great Influenza — tracks the biology and pandemics that define the Gates Foundation's mission. And a how-the-world-works thread — How Asia Works, Business Adventures, How to Lie with Statistics — insists on understanding development, business and numbers from first principles before acting on them.

The through-line is that Gates reads to model reality and then to change it. Even his rare fiction and memoir picks — A Gentleman in Moscow, Educated — tend to reward the same curiosity about how people and systems actually behave. It is the reading list of someone who treats a book less as entertainment than as one more input into a decision.

How Bill's reading evolved

  1. Formative yearsEarly readingA lifelong non-fiction habit that began young; documented favourites from this period are sparse, so it is kept deliberately light.
  2. 1975–2000Microsoft eraBusiness and science reading; Warren Buffett lends him Business Adventures in 1991.
  3. 2000–2014Philanthropy & global healthFoundation work pulls his reading toward disease, development and economics.
  4. 2015–2019Energy & climateThe Vaclav Smil arc reshapes how he thinks about energy and materials.
  5. 2020–presentPandemics & systems thinkingThe Great Influenza and his own pandemic and climate books; reading as an input to global problem-solving.

How the books connect

  1. Business Adventures

  2. From how businesses work, Gates zooms out to the biggest system of all — energy — through the author he recommends most, Vaclav Smil.

    Energy and Civilization

  3. Smil's synthesis deepens into the physical realities — materials, food, fuel — that any climate plan has to reckon with.

    How the World Really Works

  4. Understanding the system leads to measuring it honestly; Rosling supplies the data discipline that resists gut pessimism.

    Factfulness

  5. And the data, read at scale, becomes an argument — Pinker's case that life is improving, which anchors Gates's optimism.

    Enlightenment Now

Bill's reading list20 books

Related readers

Influenced byWarren BuffettClosest friend and mentor; lent Gates his favourite business book, Business Adventures.Key influenceVaclav SmilThe author Gates recommends most; Smil’s energy histories shape his climate thinking.Similar thinkerHans RoslingFactfulness; a personal friend whose data optimism underpins Gates’s worldview.Similar thinkerSteven PinkerTwo Pinker books have held Gates’s title of favourite — the case for measurable progress.Recommended together withWalter IsaacsonA recurring biographer on Gates’s lists, from Leonardo da Vinci to The Code Breaker.Adjacent ideasYuval Noah HarariSapiens and 21 Lessons; Gates recommends him while publicly debating his conclusions.

Frequently asked questions

What are Bill Gates's favourite books?

Across his Gates Notes writing, Gates has singled out Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now as a favourite and John Brooks’s Business Adventures as the best business book he has read. He has also named a small set of all-time favourites, and returns again and again to the work of Vaclav Smil.

What is Bill Gates's favourite business book?

Business Adventures by John Brooks. Warren Buffett lent Gates his copy in 1991, and Gates has described it ever since as the best business book he has read — a set of New Yorker stories about how companies actually succeed and fail.

Why does Bill Gates recommend Vaclav Smil?

Smil is the author Gates recommends most. His quantitative histories — Energy and Civilization, How the World Really Works — treat energy and materials as the physical basis of civilisation, which is exactly how Gates frames the challenge of climate change. Gates has called Smil one of his favourite authors.

Does Bill Gates read fiction?

Rarely, but he does. His non-fiction dominates, and the novels he recommends — such as A Gentleman in Moscow — tend to be literary and character-driven, or, like David Foster Wallace’s String Theory, chosen for the sheer quality of the writing.

What kinds of books does Bill Gates recommend?

Mostly non-fiction about how the world works: energy and climate, global health and pandemics, economics and development, big history and science, and the honest use of statistics. The common thread is reading to understand complex systems well enough to act on them.

Where does Bill Gates share his book recommendations?

On his own site, Gates Notes, through long-form book reviews and his summer and year-end reading lists. Each recommendation above links to the specific Gates Notes review or list it comes from.

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Reading themes

Authors on this list

Last verified: July 2026Edited by: Inteldo Editorial Team