In WHAT'S NEXT, the tech visionary and global health and climate philanthropist Bill Gates invites viewers to join him on a learning journey to explore pressing issues facing our world today.
In Episode 4 of What's Next? The Future with Bill Gates (2024), titled "Can You Be Too Rich?", director Neha Shastry takes Bill Gates on a journey of self-interrogation — pressing one of the world's wealthiest people to reckon with his own role in the inequality he is trying to solve. Can a billionaire truly be part of the solution to a problem his existence helps perpetuate?
Gates explores the widening income gap and the most urgent pathways out of poverty, sitting down with Senators Bernie Sanders and Mitt Romney for a wide-ranging conversation that cuts across party lines. Together they navigate the sharpest fault lines in the debate: whether billionaires should exist at all, how wealth taxation actually works, and whether financial incentives drive innovation or entrench inequality. The episode does not let Gates off the hook — it asks him to hold the contradiction of being both philanthropist and symbol, and to answer for it honestly.
Neha Shastry is an Indian American film director and producer whose work focuses on the intersection of power, justice and pop culture. Her engaging and immersive work has been recognized with a DuPont, an Emmy, and many other accolades.Her feature documentary The Act of Dreaming (2025) is an all-vérité portrait of three families from different corners of the world as they navigate their first year in the United States. The film is currently making the rounds at film festivals.
Her episode about the wealth gap for Netflix's What's Next with Bill Gates (2024) has been praised by The New York Times and featured on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Other directing credits include the series The Murdochs: Empire of Influence (2022), which was named one of the best documentaries of 2022 by The New Yorker. She also made two films for the MGM+ series The Ruling Class (2023).
She produced All In: The Fight for Democracy (2020), a film about the history and legacy of voter suppression in the U.S. through the lens of Stacey Abrams' work. The film was shortlisted for an Academy Award and won best documentary from the Hollywood Critics Association, the AAFCA, and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. She also produced Convergence (2022) for Netflix, which was nominated for an Emmy, and Harry & Meghan (2023), one of the most-watched documentary series on Netflix.
From 2021-2022, Neha participated in Netflix's inaugural Nonfiction Directing Fellowship, an incubator for upcoming directors of color.
She started her career at Vice News as part of the founding team that built the brand into a juggernaut. Early on, she produced their critically acclaimed coverage of Russia's annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine. She later became a tech reporter and producer for CNN before transitioning to filmmaking.
2025 Nominee News and Documentary Emmy. Outstanding Science and Technology Documentary
Executive Producer - Morgan Neville
