Bill Gates Warns Of Tough Years Ahead For US Economy, Invests In GreenTech

Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder, one of the world's most vocal philanthropists and incidentally the richest man in the world, predicted that the US economy could take years to recover from the current economic turmoil.

He argued on ABC's Good Morning America, that the Obama administration might have to rise taxes significantly in order to balance the federal budget and that the president may need to be more creative and focus on long term issues instead.

Gates told his audience that "The budget's very, very out of balance. And even as the economy comes back, without changes in tax and entitlement policies, it won't get back into balance. And at some point, financial markets will look at that and it will cause problems"

But rather than staying passive as many would do, Gates has been active and put his money where his passion lies. He told Cnet on Sunday that he has invested in a green technology fund launched by Vinod Khosla, an Indian-American venture capitalist who is one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems.

The Khosla fund has already managed to raise over $1 billion to finance startups that focus on green technologies and alternative energy generations.

In addition he joined former colleague ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold to back Terrapower, a little known company which aims at improving dramatically the efficiency of Nuclear power plants worldwide.