Melinda French Gates rips into the sleep habit Bill Gates once loved

Dismissing the supposed valor of executives who fill sleepless nights with work, French Gates calls the phenomenon “so dumb.” In shrugging off the CEO all-nighter, French Gates is also railing against the larger machismo and puritan ethos that praises at least pretending to work oneself to the bone. 

This past spring, French Gates left the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which she ran for more than 20 years with ex-husband and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Departing with $12.5 billion under her wing, French Gates tweeted that it was time for her to move into the “next chapter” of her philanthropic journey. 

On her own, French Gates has wasted no time in carving her distinct path. She immediately donated $1 billion to women’s rights and reproductive rights groups, backed a presidential candidate for the first time, and called out other billionaires like Elon Musk for what she described as their lack of philanthropic efforts. That’s all to say: French Gates isn’t holding back. 

And when it comes to men who say they don’t sleep, she’s not shy about sharing her thoughts.

Whether it be their ego or sleep deprivation, these men aren’t necessarily all that great to share a room with, French Gates tells Vanity Fair. Herself aiming for seven or eight hours of sleep, she notes that many of the men who assert that they sleep three or four hours aren’t exactly a blast to hang out with. “Some of us didn’t want to be around them! Let’s be honest!,” she tells the magazine. 

None other than French Gates’ ex-husband was once a part of this sleepless rat race. 

“In my thirties and forties, when there would be a conversation about sleep it would be like ‘Oh, I only sleep six hours,’” Gates said in a 2023 episode of Unconfuse Me with Bill Gates. “And the other guy says, ‘Oh, I only sleep five,’ then ‘Well, sometimes I don’t sleep at all.’” Those experiences sent the message to Gates that a lack of sleep was good and he had “to try harder because sleep is laziness and unnecessary.”

Now, he claims to know better, saying on the podcast that getting sufficient sleep is key to “maintain[ing] good brain health,” and is “one of the most predictive measures of any dementia, including Alzheimer’s.” Indeed, poor sleep has been linked to a shorter life span, among other health problems. Women who sleep well live about two years longer than those who don’t. For men, the difference increases to five years, according to ra study of of 172,000 adults.

Even if many higher-ups claim to be burning the midnight oil, it turns out that CEOs actually tend to sleep more than the rest of the workforce, or at least more than they’d like you to think they do. People with greater seniority get to snooze more. Board chairs report getting enough sleep the most (100%), followed by chief executives (77%)s, with non-managerial employees at dead last (38%), according to a 2023 survey of almost 4,000 adults from Expert Reviews.

And staying up late doesn’t seem to do much more than make leaders act like a cranky toddler shirking nap time. It actually appears to backfire, as it leads to unplanned absenteeism and results in about $44.6 billion in lost productivity, according to a 2022 Gallup report. 

In other words (or French Gates’ words), turning a blind eye to the importance of shut-eye is “dumb.”