- Bill Gates often visited Warren Buffett to escape his tightly scheduled life, a new book says.
- Gates's workday was meticulously planned, with activities broken into five-minute increments.
- Their friendship has cooled since Gates's 2021 divorce and Buffett's exit from the Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates built one of the most successful companies in the world and made a fortune along the way, but even billionaires get tired of sitting in meetings every day.
Every moment of the 68-year-old Microsoft cofounder's workday was meticulously planned. His schedule, even down to his free time, was broken down into five-minute increments, New York Times correspondent Anupreeta Das wrote in the book "Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and his Quest to Shape the World."
Despite his demanding schedule of reading up on public health policy and back-to-back meetings, there were days when he sought an escape from his responsibilities in his old friend Warren Buffett.
In her book, Das wrote that Gates would take his private jet to Omaha just to visit Buffett and get away from "a tightly scheduled life, including personal time, largely organized and arranged by" his then-wife Melinda French Gates.
"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."