Bill Gates: book attacks ‘myth’ of the good billionaire – 02/02/2024 – Market

What’s wrong with a billionaire who dedicates $60 billion of his fortune to solving world poverty, investing in education and researching vaccines and medicines? In the opinion of American journalist Tim Schwab, a lot.

For the author of “The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire”, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a mere instrument of power of the founder of the Microsoft, which uses philanthropy to gain influence, burnish its reputation and take advantage of tax incentives.

Like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, the “robber barons” of the 19th century, Gates used philanthropy to polish his image, damaged by his lack of business ethics, according to the author of the work, which has not yet been released in Brazil.

After the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in 1999, which found the company to be a monopoly engaged in anti-competitive practices, Gates’ reputation was in the gutter. The billionaire was described as greedy and unscrupulous.

It was at this time that Gates set up the foundation, which has an endowment of US$67 billion — in 113 countries, the GDP is less than that.

The change in news coverage was complete: the “evil” Gates began to be portrayed as the world’s greatest philanthropist and a force for good.

The institution has already disbursed more than US$72 billion in philanthropic projects. He worked to combat HIV in India, encourage industrial agriculture in Africa, vaccination policies during the Covid pandemic, new educational parameters in the United States, eradicating polio and fighting malaria.

But Schwab doesn’t buy the version that Gates had an epiphany and converted to good boyhood.

“Bill Gates is not simply donating money to fight disease and improve education and agriculture. He is using his vast fortune to buy political influence and remake the world according to his narrow worldview,” he says.

The author describes Bill and Melinda Gates as “a foundation with a retrograde colonial vision that relies heavily on highly paid technocrats in Geneva and Washington to solve the problems of the poor living in Kampala and Uttar Pradesh.”

Over the course of 496 pages, the author investigates the foundation’s numerous philanthropic initiatives — and demolishes Gates’ image.

One of Schwab’s main criticisms is the foundation’s lack of transparency. In the United States, resources directed to philanthropy receive tax incentives: it is estimated that for every dollar donated, there is a 50% benefit for the donor, in undisbursed taxes.

In the journalist’s reasoning, this is taxpayer money and there is no transparency about how this money is actually spent. In the foundation’s financial reports, there are only vague descriptions and it is not possible to evaluate the effectiveness of the programs, he says.

The author of the book reports having tried numerous times to speak to the foundation, without a response.

Schwab has valid criticisms. He questions, for example, the initiative to promote transgenic seeds and industrial agriculture in Africa, much criticized by small local farmers. Million Berlay and Bridget Mugambe of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa published an article in Scientific American titled “Bill Gates Should Stop Telling Africans What Kind of Farming Africans Need.”

The author also attacks the family planning program sponsored by the foundation in African countries — hormonal implants inserted into women’s arms that prevent pregnancy for up to five years. He cites reports of women who were not “allowed” to remove the implant when they decided to get pregnant earlier, and tells how professionals in Uganda and Malawi tried to force women to have the implants.

And Schwab blames the foundation for the fiasco in the distribution of Covid vaccines, which arrived much earlier in rich countries. He also accuses the Gavi alliance, the foundation’s vaccine initiative, of raising resources from governments and passing them on to large pharmaceutical companies without major discounts or benefits for poor countries.

The press is another target of the author’s diatribes. According to him, the media simply flatters Gates and the foundation without deeply questioning their practices.

He claims, without showing concrete evidence, that the fact that the institution is a major donor of resources to press outlets — including Guardian, Der Spiegel, CNN, Financial Times, Le Monde, ProPublica and NPR — influences coverage.

Often, the writer’s ill will towards the book’s protagonist contaminates the work. He criticizes the fact that the Gates Foundation did not find a magical solution against malaria, but disregards that the institution’s resources made it possible to purchase mosquito nets that saved thousands of lives.

Schwab does not hide the hatred he feels towards Gates, whom he calls “immature”, “incapable of having true friends”, “arrogant know-it-all”, with a “God complex” and “cancer of democracy”.

The repulsion is so great that it compromises the credibility of the book. Instead of presenting the facts, such as the less than encouraging results in initiatives that were touted by the foundation, Schwab focuses on adjectives and the rejection of neoliberalism.

At some point, he says people might be asking themselves “how should someone like Bill Gates spend his philanthropy dollars?”

And therein lies one of the book’s shortcomings: it does not offer a satisfactory answer. “My belief is that if the foundation is going to continue, Bill Gates should not be allowed to have any institutional role in it,” he says, at one point, suggesting that he be removed entirely and replaced by a group of administrators.

Questioning unanimity is always healthy. But the solutions proposed by Schwab are unrealistic and assume that billionaires should not exist.

“When we allow a person — any person, no matter how benevolent or well-intentioned — to acquire this extreme wealth, we are giving that person extreme power. The question, then, is not how Gates’ money could be better spent, but why do we allow someone to have this amount of money and power.”

The problem is that income inequality is a reality, and Gates —and other billionaires— exists. So which is better: a billionaire like Elon Musk, who gives away a tiny portion of his fortune, or Bill Gates?

For Schwab, there is no possibility of redemption. “We need to consider existential questions about the ability of a billionaire — any billionaire — to help advance social progress through philanthropy.”