Bill Gates has flagged a quiet but pointed concern with the Trump administration's growing habit of picking up equity stakes in private American companies, warning that the practice could end up rewarding ownership over engineering. Speaking to CNBC, the Microsoft co-founder said the trouble starts when the government begins favouring firms it part-owns over rivals with better technology. His larger worry is predictability: factory builds and chip fabs are 20-year bets, and policy that shifts on a weekly news cycle makes those bets harder to price. "Government operates best when it's kind of predictable," Gates told CNBC, adding that companies need to know what tariffs will look like for the next 20 years before they pour billions into a plant. The unease, he said, is about intent. Is Washington helping a nascent technology for the good of the country and treating all companies equally, or is it building a portfolio it then wants to protect? "The rules of the game we're playing are pretty unclear right now," he said. From Intel to IBM, Washington's shareholder list keeps growing The list is long and getting longer. The federal government took a 9.9% stake in Intel last August, paying $20.47 a share for $8.9 billion worth of stock. That holding has since quadrupled in paper value to roughly $36 billion as Intel shares rallied past their dot-com peak. In May, the Commerce Department lined up $2 billion in equity across nine quantum computing firms, with $1 billion going into IBM's new Albany-based quantum chip foundry, Anderon, and $375 million into GlobalFoundries for a 1% slice. D-Wave, Rigetti, Infleqtion, PsiQuantum, Atom Computing and Quantinuum each picked up around $100 million. Diraq took up to $38 million. The pattern repeats in critical minerals. The administration owns roughly 15% of MP Materials, 10% of USA