Word: bono
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...April the Gateses had U2 to lunch. "Bono thought it was important for us to get to know the other band members," Bill says. "They give him the license to spend time and credibility on this. This way I could say, 'Look, Bono is really, really having an impact. Things would be very different without him. You should feel superproud about the leniency you're giving Bono to do this...
That night the Gateses went to their first U2 concert. The next night they went back to see it again. They were stunned by the way Bono could move thousands of people at a rock concert to vow to make poverty history. "You always worry for him when he gets up onstage to say these things," says Melinda. "Yeah, [we think] Oh, no, these are normal people here!" says Bill. Bono slept at their house, and the three of them stayed up until 3 a.m. scheming about the G-8 summit and listening to Bono's impressions of Martin Luther...
...people you expect to come to the rescue. Rock stars are designed to be shiny, shallow creatures, furloughed from reality for all time. Billionaires are even more removed, nestled atop fantastic wealth where they never again have to place their own calls or defrost dinner or fly commercial. So Bono spends several thousand dollars at a restaurant for a nice Pinot Noir, and Bill Gates, the great predator of the Internet age, has a trampoline room in his $100 million house. It makes you think that if these guys can decide to make it their mission to save the world...
Such is the nature of Bono's fame that just about everyone in the world wants to meet him--except for the richest man in the world, who thought it would be a waste of time. "World health is immensely complicated," says Gates, recalling that first encounter in 2002. "It doesn't really boil down to a 'Let's be nice' analysis. So I thought a meeting wouldn't be all that valuable...
...took about three minutes with Bono for Gates to change his mind. Bill and his wife Melinda, another computer nerd turned poverty warrior, love facts and data with a tenderness most people reserve for their children, and Bono was hurling metrics across the table as fast as they could keep up. "He was every bit the geek that we are," says Gates Foundation chief Patty Stonesifer, who helped broker that first summit. "He just happens to be a geek who is a fantastic musician...