What Billionaires Eat: From Elon Musk's to Bill Gates' fondner

Just because billionaires have money for professional chefs or high-quality, healthy food doesn't mean they follow a diet that suits them. While some of them follow the latest nutritional trends such as the Paleo diet or veganism, others enjoy eating baked goods for breakfast or avoid food altogether for several days. So when it comes to wealth, these are the people you want to take an example from, but you should think twice when it comes to health.

Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and Blue Origin

Jeff Bezos prefers to have a slow breakfast in the morning, and he does it in a healthy way. Earlier this year, the businessman's girlfriend Lauren Sanchez told the Wall Street Journal that on Sundays he personally gets up to the stove and bakes pancakes. "Every time he picks up a Betty Crocker cookbook, and I tell him, 'You're the smartest man in the world; why haven't you memorized it yet?" the woman recounted with a smile. Bezos is also "incredibly devoted to exercise," she said, along with personal trainer Wes Okerzon. When not baking Sunday pancakes, however, Jeff's breakfast choices can seem eccentric. In 2014, at a meeting with a small e-commerce company that Amazon eventually acquired, Jeff ordered a Mediterranean-style dish in the morning. It consisted of octopus with potatoes, bacon, garlic-yogurt sauce, and a poached egg, D Magazine reported.

Bill Gates, owner of Microsoft

The Seattle native admitted to reporters that he loves Diet Coke and drinks it three or four times a day. "In a year, all those cans produce about 35 pounds (about 16 kilograms) of aluminum," he said in 2014. Earlier this year, Michelin chef Jordy Cruz reported that Gates once fully booked his establishment for two days and ordered only Diet Coke. For breakfast, Bill usually eats Cocoa Puffs, though his ex-wife Melinda claimed he might skip that meal altogether. Gates is also partial to cheeseburgers and Tang, a powdered drink that resembles Fanta when diluted.

Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, Twitter, SpaceX

"If they came up with a way of not eating and working more, I wouldn't eat," Musk admitted in a conversation with Ashley Vance for the biographical book "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future." Musk usually skips breakfast, but may snack on a Mars bar or donut. "I try to cut back on sweets and have to have breakfast with scrambled eggs and coffee," Ilon told Entrepreneur in 2017. But that's a prescription he doesn't seem to be following much. In March of this year, the billionaire wrote on Twitter that he starts every morning with a donut. "I'd rather eat tasty food and live less than the other way around," he told Joe Rogan in 2020. Ilon also has an unstable relationship with lunch. According to him, whatever his assistant brings him during meetings, he "inhales it in five minutes." But dinner is a must for Musk; in 2015, he revealed that he loves French cuisine and barbecue. And, like Bill Gates, he loves Diet Coke.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and owner of the largest social networks

Zuckerberg has experimented with many diets in his life. In 2011, he adopted a "personal challenge" to eat only meat from animals he had killed himself. This is a goal he shared with his subscribers, according to Fortune. His eating regimen included consuming goat meat, pork, chicken and lobster. Not only did Mark eat this way himself, but he also treated friends and acquaintances who came to visit him. In particular, one of the former Twitter owners, Jack Dorsey, who saw the cold goat meat on the table, politely declined and limited himself to a salad that evening.

Jack Dorsey, Owner of Block

In 2019, Dorsey declared that he ate only once a day during the work week, in the evenings, and fasted on the weekends. At the time, he was following a trend popular in Silicon Valley called "intermittent fasting". According to Jack, this eating regimen helped him to concentrate well on solving various issues. In 2020, Dorsey already said he was eating seven times a week, again in the evenings. "The first time I tried it, I felt on the third day like I was hallucinating. It was a strange condition. But the next two times I realized with obvious clarity how much time we spend eating and how time slows down during a long fast," he told the Ben Greenfield Life podcast.