Bill Gates reveals ‘laughable’ conspiracy theory that people confront him about in public

Over the last decade or so conspiracy theories have gone from niche things that you'd only know about if you were on some mailing list, to widely discussed and joked-about on social media.

Start researching popular conspiracy theories and it won't take you long to get to ones about Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Bill Gates, with more than one major theory getting thrown his way.

Gates has addressed some of these before (since they do tend to crop up time and again) and has done so once more on the podcast The Rest is Politics.

He said "you almost have to laugh" at how often he gets approached by people accusing him of one of the major theories - microchipping.

As he put it, this involves "somebody coming up to me on the street - which has happened several times - and saying that I've chipped them and I'm following them around".

The theory is spuriously founded on the fact that his massive charitable foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has funded vaccine roll-outs for millions of people over the years, and has the crazy central idea that these injections contain microchips to track us.

Gates said: "You almost have to laugh you know - lady, why would I want to know where you are? I mean, really, is that how I spend my time? Tracking you?"

If you start to look into the theory particularly deeply you'll likely find it all links into weird 'New World Order' ideas that take you into some really dark corners very quickly, but as Gates said, the logical fallacies are incredibly obvious when you think about it.

Another theory revolves around Gates' purchases of land in the US. A small corner of the internet suspects it's for nefarious purposes, but Gates said he owns 1/4000 of the country's farmland - and what could he really do with that?

He joked: "At least in my math I have a hard time pulling off a conspiracy unless you get up to at least two or three 4000ths."

Gates said on the podcast that these theories don't really bother him personally, but that he has a team monitoring them in case they become too widespread, at which point he's got little choice but to respond and publicly refute them.

Still, while he makes that all sound quite relaxed, it doubtless has to be frustrating to be the subject of ridiculous and often serious accusations like this, however little logic or evidence there actually is to back any of them up.