Some of the richest people in the tech world have really strange eating habits. Just because they can afford a private chef and high-quality, healthy food doesn’t mean they eat well.
Of course, there are those who try to eat healthy. But there are tech billionaires who like to eat junk food for breakfast or who don’t eat for days. So while you might want to follow in their footsteps when it comes to wealth, think twice when it comes to health.
Virgin Group founder Richard Branson drinks 20 cups of tea a day
‘I don’t know how I would survive without English tea,’ Branson told the Daily Mail, starting his day with fruit salad and muesli for breakfast. The billionaire sometimes eats smoked herring instead.
The billionaire spends his days exercising, spending time with his family and holding business meetings, which he prefers to schedule around lunchtime to ‘lighten the mood’.
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For dinner, he prefers group meals where ‘stories are shared and ideas are born’. He goes to bed around 11pm and gets about six hours of sleep each night. He likes to wake up around 6am to play tennis and prefers to have his personal assistant write his emails. We have already touched upon how Sir Richard Branson built his multi-billion dollar Virgin empire, here is the link for our curious readers.
Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos’ breakfast preferences can be a bit strange
Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos also says he doesn’t like to rush in the morning and eats a healthy breakfast.
His fiancée Lauren Sanchez revealed that Bezos makes pancakes every Sunday morning, adding: “Every time he pulls out the Betty Crocker cookbook and I’m like, ‘You’re the smartest guy in the world; why haven’t you memorized this yet?”
Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Sanchez also said that Bezos was very committed to his workouts with personal trainer Wes Okerson.
But when he doesn’t eat pancakes, his breakfast preferences can be a bit strange.
According to D Magazine, during a meeting with a small e-commerce company, Bezos ordered a Mediterranean octopus with potatoes, bacon, garlic yogurt and a poached egg.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ popular menu is cheeseburger + Diet Coke
Gates’ eating habits are not very different from other billionaires. In the past, he has revealed that he eats Cocoa Puffs for breakfast. Although his ex-wife Melinda Gates also reported that he skipped this meal completely. Michelin-starred chef Jordi Cruz said that Gates once booked his entire restaurant for two days and ordered only one Diet Coke.
Apparently he also likes cheeseburgers. When asked about his favorite sandwich on Reddit’s Ask Me Anything event, he replied “Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger”.
The Netflix series ‘Inside Bill’s Brain’ talks about Gates’ fondness for the powdered drink Tang. “I used to buy a packet of Tang, an orange sugary drink they took to the moon, and instead of eating, I would pour orange Tang on my hand and lick it while I was working on something,” Gates says in the documentary. The reason for licking the sugary, powdered drink mix was to get energy without quitting work. (We don’t even want to think about Gates’ keyboard.)
Steve Jobs is known for his unique eating habits
According to Walter Isaacson’s biography, the Apple co-founder sometimes went weeks without eating properly. For a while, his diet consisted only of fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds.
In his first year at university, he gave up meat, then grains and milk. According to Isaacson’s book, the Apple co-founder believed that his diet meant his body didn’t stink and he didn’t need to use deodorant or shower regularly.
According to the biography, Jobs sometimes fasted for several days at a time, which he said gave him a sense of euphoria.
In 2003, when Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he tried to heal himself with his diet, drinking lots of fruit and carrot juice.
Five years later, after part of his pancreas was removed, he reintroduced fish and other proteins into his diet. But before he died in 2011, he was on a largely liquid diet.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk doesn’t exactly eat a healthy diet.
“If there was a way, I wouldn’t eat so I could work more,” Musk says in Ashlee Vance’s biography.
He used to skip breakfast at the start of the day and eat a Mars bar or a donut. But in 2017, she told Entrepreneur, “I’m trying to cut down on the sweet stuff, I should have an omelet and coffee.”
However, he doesn’t seem to have given up on this habit. The billionaire admitted on X earlier this year that he eats a donut every morning. In 2020, he told Joe Rogan, “I would rather eat delicious food and live a shorter life.”
For Musk, lunch is as unnecessary as breakfast. He says that whatever his assistant brings him during meetings, he ‘swallows it in five minutes’.
But he is a big fan of dinners, which usually take place during job interviews. At Reddit’s AMA (Ask Me Anything) event, he said he loves French cuisine and barbecue.
And just like Gates, Musk also seems to be a diet cola drinker. He has expressed his love for this drink several times over the years. Last year, he shared a bedside table with four cans of caffeine-free Diet Coke.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg adopts interesting methods.
In 2011, Zuckerberg set himself a ‘personal challenge’ to eat only meat from animals he hunted himself. According to Fortune, his diet included goats, pigs, chickens and lobsters. Zuckerberg also shared his hunted animals with friends and guests.
According to Rolling Stone, he once hosted Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey at his home and served him a goat he had hunted himself. Dorsey settled for a salad for dinner.
Dorsey is no ordinary eater either.
In 2012, the former Twitter CEO revealed that his daily breakfast was two boiled eggs with soy sauce. In 2013, he switched to the Paleo diet, which bans refined sugar, grains and processed foods.
Dorsey, who often comes to the fore with his eating habits, was a vegan for a while; too much beta-carotene (the orange pigment found in carrots) caused his skin to turn orange in those days.
In 2019, Dorsey said he ate just one meal a day (dinner) during the work week, then fasted all weekend, adopting a trend called ‘intermittent fasting’ that was popular in Silicon Valley at the time. By 2020, he explained, he was eating seven meals a week.
“The first time I did it, on the third day I felt like I was hallucinating, but then I realized how much of our days revolve around food,” Dorsey said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been a vegetarian since childhood.
In a blog post published in 2018, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that he has been a vegetarian since childhood. He also emphasized that he takes vitamin B-12, Omega-3, Iron and D-3 as supplements.
It is also reported that Altman has recently been taking a supplement that has become popular among biohackers as a way to slow down aging.
Warren Buffett eats ‘like a six-year-old’
Warren Buffett once told Fortune that he is ‘one quarter Coke’. He usually consumes his first can with potato chips.
His close friend Bill Gates observed that his diet consisted of hamburgers and Oreos. Buffett jokingly says he eats ‘like a six-year-old’ because six-year-olds have the lowest mortality rate.
Biotech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has interesting goals and a rigorous diet.
Johnson aims to ‘roll back’ his biological age through a rigorous medical program that costs $2 million a year.
He takes two dozen pills and supplements in the morning and eats a vegan diet of soft and solid foods. He limits his daily calorie intake to 1,977 per day.
He also drinks a smoothie he calls ‘green giant’ as soon as he wakes up, which contains compounds such as creatine, collagen peptides and cocoa flavanols.
Summarized from Business Insider article
