Bill Gates, the original tech titan, is going around telling just about anyone who will listen to him that the free market is terrible at innovation.

It all seems to have started in 2010 when he complained to TED audiences about the “ridiculously low levels” of government spending on basic research on green energy, a line he has repeated in multiple venues.

Then in June this year, Gates gave a lengthy and eyebrow-raisingly odd interview to the Financial Times in which he said not once but repeatedly that it is the public sector, not private companies on their own, that will deliver a global shift to a clean-energy economy, and that as much as he loves philanthropy, it is no replacement for taxation as a mechanism to deliver wealth redistribution.