Bill Gates visits Atomium, meets EU leaders

American billionaire Bill Gates has visited Brussels and met with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and several European commissioners, in addition to briefly visiting the Atomium. 

“It was a great pleasure and a true honour to welcome Bill Gates to the Atomium this week,” wrote Geoffroy Coomans de Brachène (MR), chairman of the Atomium and a member of the Brussels parliament, on social media.

While Gates only spent about 25 minutes at the Atomium, Coomans de Brachène said the time was “filled with fascinating discussions about the future of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, innovation and science”.

“Almost 70 years on, the Atomium still embodies that wonderful conviction that science and progress can contribute to a better world,” Coomans de Brachène said. 

The news website EU Debates also wrote enthusiastically about Gates’s visit to the European institutions, describing the Microsoft founder as “a clever man who knows that listening can be at least as important as speaking.”

Gates visited the Sewer Museum in Brussels three years ago. 

Prior to that, he visited the Belgian capital in 1998 and was met by a group of Brussels activists, including the recently deceased Noël Godin, who threw cream tarts at him in protest. Four of them hit Gates in the face.