It's interesting he decided to go this way rather than put it into a sustainable trust and just trickle money out indefinitely.
I suspect he believes that these causes need shock therapy. To eradicate a disease, you are better off doing it all in one go.
I also wonder if he looks at something like the Ford Foundation and realize in the long run that any charitable trust will just turn into an overstuffed political advocacy group that does little to advance his charities or even his legacy.
Was just talking with some folks last weekend about this in a different context. Open-ended foundations can easily have their missions drift and also become essentially sinecures for an executive director.
Ford Foundation is a great example of what can happen. Olin is a good example of a foundation that was set up to dissolve after some length of time.
Mission drift can sometimes go in a positive direction. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for example, functioned primarily as a tax evasion vehicle while Hughes was alive. After his death, the HHMI was in deep trouble with the IRS and sitting on an endowment of ~$5 billion. So it appointed former NIH director Donald Fredrickson to turn it into an actual research funding organization and mend relations with the tax authorities and research community.
You may know this already, but both Olin Foundations are good examples, actually. I believe the John M. Olin foundation dissolution plans were specifically in response to the Ford foundation's drift. The F. W. Olin foundation (John's Father) coincidentally dissolved in the same year, but that was due to largely accomplishing their original goal of endowing engineering buildings at colleges, and pivoting to founding a new engineering college entirely.
I don't really know the details but an organization I was/am involved with did get money from the "Olin Foundation" but didn't know specifics beyond that. Yeah, one of my fellow board members observed that Olin was pretty much the canonical example of a foundation that set itself up to be dissolved.
I've always wondered about the Gates and Buffets commitment about giving away their wealth in death. It assumes that the people of the future are more worthy of it than the people of now. Whatever poverty will exist in the future also exists now. I suspect they've thought about this too, hence the acceleration. If anything, addressing the issues now has a chance of reducing the issues in the future.
There's always something to learn from everyone. Elon reiterated one thing frequently - "We have to get to Mars soon because I don't want to be dead before it happens" (paraphrasing). If this philosophy is used for the right purpose, we can get some cool things happening sooner. Recent events also show that there are people who are not interested in being charitable at all, so it's even more of an imperative.
> It assumes that the people of the future are more worthy of it than the people of now
I don't think that is the assumption. The assumption is that people will treat them well for planning to give away their money without them needing to live their life without their precious wealth.
This is a weirdly conspiratorial idea to my eyes. Not because people don't have unsavory hidden motivations that they give good excuses for, but because this doesn't really seem to confer any benefit.
The benefit of wealth is your capacity to spend it. If they don't spend it in order to give it away on a future date, they have lived their lives without it.
You can say that they are selfishly maintain optionality while they are alive, but that's a less biting critique, I guess.
> There's always something to learn from everyone. Elon reiterated one thing frequently - "We have to get to Mars soon because I don't want to be dead before it happens"
I understand the idea of learning from everyone, even those whose values I strongly disagree with.
But after learning about everything Elon has done in the public sphere, would this statement be more likely just narcissism rather than a deep and inspiring virtue?
The way things are going here on Earth (thanks in part to Musk and "Glorious Leader" Trump), we ain't makin' it to Mars before global resource wars completely cripple all our scientific aspirations, including becoming a "space-faring" species. It's all wasted effort at this point, because nobody seems willing to do what it's gonna take to ensure that humanity has any future at all.
He can have other motivations. Between 2020, 2024, Mackenzie Bezos & Laurene Powell Jobs, the deeply unimpressive philanthropy of the Buffett children, and his own divorce, a very rich philanthropist has excellent reasons to aim for the foundation being liquidated in his lifetime, and not handed off to administrators like, yes, the Ford Foundation or Harvard...
(And then, of course, given his enthusiasm for AI, there is a major question of whether 'keeping your powder dry' is a huge mistake - one way or the other.)
I'm an AI skeptic when it comes to business cases. I think AI is great at getting to average and the whole point of a business is that you're paying them to do better than average.
But I think current AI (not where it might be in a few months or years) is absolutely amazing for disadvantaged people. Access to someone who's average is so freaking cool if you don't already have it. Used correctly it's a free math tutor, a free editor for any papers you write, a free advice nurse.
This sucks in a business setting but I could see it being incredible in a charitable setting. When businesses try to replace someone great with something average it sucks. But if you're replacing something non-existent with something average, that can be life changing.
I'm an AI skeptic and I can empathize with his AI enthusiasm given the problems he's trying to address (or at least professes to be trying to address).
It is good for the other use cases, but it is the worst possible source of advice on subjects where the user has no expertise, and where there are serious health or safety consequences for getting it wrong.
Call a professional for help. Are they breathing, is their heart beating, are they bleeding.
If you haven’t called someone that can actually save the persons life no amount of first aid will help.
Unfortunately unless something is obviously preventing breathing as someone untrained theres not a lot you can do if they aren’t breathing.
Heart beating is pretty easy, chest compressions…
Bleeding again, pressure, and a lot of it to try to prevent the bleeding.
I would want to check what an AI response is to some situations but as long as it just tackles those cases it can probably only do more good than harm.
Id be more worried some good samaritan would start cutting people to try to “get an airway” or some nonsense. That would significantly increase mortality rates…
I'd rather see a Good Samaritan being talked through CPR or whatever by a dispatcher who's trained to give that advice over the phone, rather than having a hallucinating LLM tell them to do something deadly.
I believe the situation here is more a matter of they don’t have a dispatcher to guide them.
In some rural area of Africa they came across a car crash. Two people hop out and assist while a third drives off to notify someone to send emergency help.
An on device LLM might be very useful there depending on what it says…
> The whole point of a business is that you're paying them to do better than average.
...this is a really interesting idea, but I'm not sure if it's entirely true?
If we're talking about a business's core competency, I think the assertion makes sense. You need to be better than your competition.
But businesses also need a whole lot of people to work in human resources, file taxes, and so on. (Not to mention clean bathrooms, but that's less relevant to the generative AI discussion.) I can certainly imagine how having a world-class human resource team could provide a tire manufacturer with a competitive advantage. However, if those incredible HR employees are also more expensive, it might make more sense to hire below-average people to do your HR and invest more in tire R&D.
I think my sense is that the zeitgeist around AI (at least in business circles) is much more “The only way to ensure our continued survival is by embracing ai in all our core competencies” than “your tire company is going to have some adequate hr for a great price.”
An example that springs to mind is the arms race between tech CEOs over who can have more of their code base written by llms.
It’s amazing tech and it seems like it’s being marketed for all the wrong things based off of some future promise of super intelligence.
I really liked the article posted on here a week or two back along the lines of AI is a normal technology. Imo, the most sane narrative I’ve read about where this tech is at.
Economies of scale could vastly benefit a lot of charity work, but few charities can attain sufficient scale to achieve that. There is an unfortunate amount of overhead and administration in charities that do not directly benefit the cause.
In that sense, I suspect targeted and planned large investments into charities with scalable plans is a lot more efficient than years of trickle donations.
The decision can be read in the larger political context. There was some controversy a while back on certain directions the Foundation took like the project on sanitation (aka the toilet challenge) and the backing of charter schools. Regardless of one's opinion of those, he is taking a stand and drawing a line in the sand.
Who manages that trust? There is not shortage of short term needs, and short term value added can compound over time. I think this is a fine approach. He's Bill Gates - his legacy is ensured regardless.
Isn't the Gates Foundation effectively a trust in itself? I'm no economist, I don't know the exact definitions but the projects they do aren't overnight or one-off donations, they need long term (financial) support and guidance; vaccination development takes years, vaccination programs with the intent to eradicate diseases like polio take generations - e.g. the vaccine was developed in the 50's, it took ~70 years to mostly eradicate the virus in humans (only 30 known new cases in 3 countries in 2022).
If you have more money than anyone else on earth, the highest leverage use of that money is going to be to fund projects that require more capital than anyone else can afford to fund and that governments are unwilling to fund. That way you know you are actually adding to the opportunity set and not just displacing someone else. The difficult part is, of course, deciding which of those projects that only you can fund will actually be a good bet, but that doesn't change the fundamental calculation. Not sure if that's Gates' strategy, but it would make sense if it was.
Actually the highest leverage would be to bribe electable politicians to get governments to be willing to fund your projects. It’s remarkably cheap apparently to do.
You could eradicate a disease by killing all the hosts. I worry that the people who want to "eradicate disease" don't actually care about long term outcomes, they just want to have their likeness cast in bronze, with a nice plaque beneath it, lauding their "oversized" achievements in life.
Anyways, the type of person who can earn a lot of money in this economy, and the type of person who can best decide how to spend it altruistically, are almost certainly not the same person. The person who earned the money certainly understand this. Yet. Here we are.
> The person who earned the money certainly understand this
Your cynicism is failing you.
The psycopaths that have accumilated all the money in the world are certain that they are the type of person who can best decide everything in the world on any topic, especially when it comes to people poorer than them - which is of course everyone.
This is the way that foundations and endowments should operate.
Too many well-intentioned organizations wind up milquetoast tax-exempt hedge funds aimed primarily at self-preservation because the received wisdom is that they should focus on building endowments and keep their withdrawal rates below 4% in order to achieve immortality.
I'm a big believer in research-driven philanthropy and mission-driven organizations. But i've seen the institutional desire for self-preservation supersede essential purposes at a few of them, with disastrous implications for their effectiveness.
The Gates foundation probably controls ~5% of the ~$2T that charitable foundations have in endowments globally. If the majority of these organizations adopted these sorts of depletion goals, their program budgets could probably more than double.
>Too many well-intentioned organizations wind up milquetoast tax-exempt hedge funds aimed primarily at self-preservation because the received wisdom is that they should focus on building endowments and keep their withdrawal rates below 4% in order to achieve immortality.
Which charities are giving away less than 4% a year? Charitable foundations in the US are required to give away at least 5% of their endowment a year:
Ha ha, well here's mine. First, I'm way ahead of Mr Gates: I'm already worth almost nothing.
But if I had billions to give, I would be supporting Science Education, Democracy and Journalism. Scholarships for bright, motivated students.
With all due respect to Mr G, I don't believe any of his objectives is possible with stable, educated, science-orientated social progress. Humanity depends on it.
All money spent is voting for allocation of resource. Sometimes there is too much money fighting the same goods in which case it may not be a good allocation of resources. That money can sit to become more money.
At a societal level, immortal wealth is incredibly bad.
At a personal level, because wealth sitting still, having 4% pay for the overhead of maintaining the 96% and then using the pennies left doesn't accomplish much of significance.
You can always wait another year. And then another. When is it time? 50 years? 100 years? "We will maximise good by donating it all in 1000 years" is questionably not a charity at all; it's just a massive pile of money that isn't used for anyone but paying the people sitting on it.
Even if you trick-feed donations to charity over 100 years, the sums may be insufficient to reach a usable scale.
- A big investment in research.
- A concentrated push to vaccinate against a Disease so it goes away for good.
- An infrastructure investment that lifts a community out of poverty.
These themselves produce "good over time," perhaps even faster than the money in the fund rises in value. It's a balance, but immortal trickle donations are likely quite far off to one direction of that scale.
Nobody allows money to sit. People deposit the money into banks. Due to fractional reserves, that's equivalent to loaning the money out so that others can efficiently allocate it instead. That's how money becomes more money.
Charities that aren't actually spending money to do good are just banks in disguise. Banks that don't pay out interest. Why would anyone donate even one cent to banks?
You don't have to love Gates or everything the foundation does to recognize that putting billions toward global health and poverty is way better than setting up a dynasty or letting it sit in investments
I havent looked, and frankly can't be bothered [0], but I expect that even after giving away an unfathomable amount of money, the foundation and gates are probably richer (dollar net worth) than they have ever been.
It has been sat in investments, they have been giving it away, but they can't keep up with it.
And/or when you die. We need more people trying to make the world better while they are here instead of treating the finish line like the, well, finish line.
Exactly. Look at the Walton and other families hoarding wealth by abusing tax law and lobbying to make it even worse, and the armies of advisors and attorneys parasitically helping them.
Gates is thousands of times better than most. He and Melinda have done more good for the world than all but a few handfuls of individuals. I've heard estimates his original MSFT stake would be worth over a trillion dollars now.
Among billionaires maybe he is on the good side. But in general?
Linus Torvalds did more for the world than Bill Gates, IMHO. And he didn't need to set up a system that first appropriates money in order to "be generous" later.
What diseases has Gates eradicated? Polio has been surging back and nOPV (which Gates stands to generate a lot of personal wealth from, by the way) has been a bit of a bust. Measles is going strong, too, and Malaria seems to have been a bit of a token effort for Gates.
You may want to check your numbers because polio type 2 and type 3 are both still around (in fact, cVDPV type 2 is very, very common). The GPEI website has the recent numbers, updated weekly (although with ~3 month lag).
400k to 4k is not 400k to 0. Eradication means 0. People don't get smallpox vaccines today because we hit 0. American children get ~4 doses of IPV still, despite what you are claiming as "eradication."
Attributing that whole reduction to Gates alone is a ridiculous thing to do. He didn't even fund most of the project and the only thing he really brings to the table is money. This has been a multinational effort with literally millions of people for 3 decades. Gates mostly wrested control from them in the last decade.
If he manages to bring the project over the finish line, I will celebrate his achievement. At this point, signs point to failure of the GPEI being a near certainty. Unfortunately, we'll be back to 400k in about 10-15 years if we give up at this point.
I mean, the lifestyle of rich babies doesn't even require that much money. He can easily provide them the money to travel to a random city and buy a luxury condo and set up a food-truck business. A couple of million is enough to one day decide to pack it up and buy a farm.
Sure, but only capitalism concentrates so much wealth in such few hands
An alternative would be that company like Microsoft couldn't gain so much wealth, simply because their revenue would be capped / taxed high enough that the extra money they make goes back directly to people and governments
In this case, *everyone* gets to vote and choose for what philanthropies the amount gets used, rather than having just "one guy" deciding for himself how to spend all this money, which is prone to errors
The government spends about 10x the amount of money on foreign aid than the gates foundations entire budget ever year. Not to mention the hundreds billions spent on domestic aid every year. So your dream is already a reality.
Or, why not do both? If you are worth billions, you can give millions to your kids and give the rest to charities of your choice. Everyone wins.
This attitude of "I'd rather burn everything" feels like such a massive waste of an opportunity to leave a quality legacy behind and legitimately make the world a better place.
There's a pretty clear line between "this inheritance is enough to make you comfortable and sort you out for life" and "this inheritance will make you rich beyond your own comprehension" - there's a certain amount of money that nobody has a need for.
So you are saying his life is miserable because he will never know the joy of giving to Bill Gates because he is giving to his children. I think you're living that life.
His foundation really does seem to do a good job with 'effective altruism'. There's a reason they're marked as secondary beneficiaries on all my accounts.
Also, as a recommendation, you guys should look into whether your employer matches charitable donations to 501Cs in any amount. I find giving a solid chunk of my discretionary budget to charity every year lends a sense of purpose to a job that wouldn't otherwise have much (at least, in the sense of helping others).
I enjoy being a dev, and I've given serious thought to simply continuing working once I reach my FIRE number and donating half of what I earn to charity. I think most charities would have more use for my money than my time, given my disability
> There's a reason they're marked as secondary beneficiaries on all my accounts.
Strictly speaking, the foundation discourages individuals from donating directly to them, mostly because the tax treatment of giving that way isn't necessarily favorable. They've set up Gates Philanthropy Partners as a 501(c)(3) charity which is aligned to the same philanthropic goals.
(Of course there's also many other worthwhile players in the broader EA space.)
I worked there and would encourage you not to do that.
It'd be smarter to see who they are giving money to (which is all public) and give directly to those orgs. The Gates foundation itself spends a lot of money on consultants, "government engagement" (aka lobbying by another name), and fancy dinners.
That's fine or maybe even noble for a family foundation, but it's probably not something individuals would want to fund.
Anecdata, but the brother of a friend was working on malaria in a SE Asian country and the Gates Foundation got interested in what they were doing, and wanted to find out more about it before possibly funding some of their work. They flew the entire team to the US, put them up in expensive hotels for a few days and flew them all back. They calculated that the cost of that was three times their annual budget. It would have made more sense to me to either (a) fly someone from the Gates Foundation to the country so they could see things first hand or (b) conduct the investigation / interviews via the internet. Given that the Foundation's people weren't in-country anyway, (b) seems like the best option all round given the environmental costs of flying.
> They flew the entire team to the US, put them up in expensive hotels for a few days and flew them all back. They calculated that the cost of that was three times their annual budget.
Are you sure about that?
Let's say every employee gets a $1000 round trip flight, plus $2000 for 4 nights in a decent hotel, a total of $3000 per head. Are you telling me that employee is paid $1000 a year or less?
The way they talked about it, the total per head was north of $5k, and they lived in an incredibly poor / cheap country. I wasn't fact-checking their figures, but they weren't the kind of person to exaggerate for effect.
The problem is the good guys have to spend donations on lobbying because otherwise the legislators are only hearing from the bad guys. This is a story as old as time I think.
Exactly. He doesn't need 20 years. That's just him trying to draw attention to himself.
If he was really serious about giving away his money, he could write a single check to the Red Cross || Doctors Without Borders || insert charity here and in five minutes be done with it.
The world doesn't need more vanity charities. It needs its existing charities to be better funded.
Says who? They can (ethically) invest it and fund programs off a 5%-8% or better return. They can find new things to do. They can donate some of it into health research that is currently under-funded.
And with such a sum of money they would surely have to hire staff to work all that out. Can thy do that?
I’ve tried volunteering at certain orgs before, I filled out forms and literally they rejected me because they had no more staff to organise and oversee more volunteers.
If your solution is just invest it, well, the Gates Foundation may as well hang on to it (you think you can do better job than Buffet?) and setup a system to dole it out.
If the org has to find new uses for it, surely the Gates Foundation is in a better position to get that done?
I'd be more willing to give this idea credit, if the total annual budget for the ICRC ($2B) and Doctors Without Borders ($1.6B) was more than a few percent of the total amount being proposed (>$100B invested or ~$8B/yr for 20 years).
You'd require those organizations to more than double in size to use the funding provided. That's not a good plan. Bluntly, his plan is better than yours.
I've got no love for Gates, but are you just trying to draw attention to yourself? What's your agenda? You're the one making a fairly outrageous unsupported claims.
> That much wealth could probably fund every food bank in the country indefinitely
That seems like an incredibly stupid way to spend money that has been eradicating diseases and saving lives in countries where food insecurity isn’t a choice.
For you (or other folks) working in tech and giving to charity, apart from corporate match, another couple pieces of advice are to consider a Donor Advised Fund. They are really easy to set up, and then you get some benefits, like the ability to "bunch" your donations (can help with tax deductions) or donate appreciated investments (like RSUs) without paying capital gains tax.
Agree on the Donor Advised Fund (I use Fidelity). If you have highly-appreciated stock, you definitely should look into a DAF. Another benefit is that it is extremely easy to donate to a charity; click and submit and you don't have to worry about paperwork and putting each donation down on your taxes.
Let's say you just won the startup lottery and you've got a significant amount of now tradable stock. Some of which was early exercised and the cost basis is effectively zero. Some of which was RSUs or non-qualified options and you owe ordinary income. And that you're way over into the top tax brackets.
If your zero cost basis stock is Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS), there's a very nice discount on federal capital gains, so you might not need to do the rest of the stuff.
Otherwise, if you donate your apprechiated zero basis stock, you get to save federal capital gains of 20% + 3.8% net investment income. Plus it offsets against your ordinary income that's 37%. So that's a 60.8% discount on being charitable for the feds. If you live in California, capital gains are regular income, so you're saving 13.3% because the capital gains go away and offsetting 13.3% on your ordinary income, so your total discount is 87.4%. In other words, your difference in cash after taxes for selling $1M of zero basis stock or donating $1M of zero basis stock is $126k.
When the government is telling you it only costs $126k to give a charity $1M, it's pretty compelling. The math used to be different, when you'd get credit for state taxes on the federal return, but that was many years ago now.
Even under ideal circumstances, the priority of a government is to serve the needs of its citizens. Sometimes, these happen to align with global needs, and sometimes not.
In order to improve global health or address other issues that impact countries beyond where you live, the government (even an idealized version without waste, corruption, or political games) might not be the most effective way to accomplish this.
Right. But taking the combined $140 billion net worth of Bill and Melinda, about 30% (or whatever 'fair' rate you want to assume) shouldn't have been theirs to give away. Let them spend the other part however they want.
What I find kind of interesting is that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet argue that they should be taxed more, but they don't do anything to further that goal aside from media soundbites and headlines. They could fund an incredible war chest for a lobbying apparatus who's sole purpose would be to create a more fair tax system. But no such thing happens.
Charitable funds fall victim to the same fundamental issue, leadership is more interested in benefiting themselves than putting the money towards the aims of the charity.
In general I donate to places local to me. I'd much rather see a bench at a local park than hold on to some hope that my money does something meaningful to a large international charity organization.
I think what it comes down to is that there's no general rule. There are a lot of organizations you could give money to and it all depends on what it is.
> You lowering your tax rate and giving that money to charity isn't magicking more money into the world, it is just a different allocation.
This is only ever true if you assume that government tax spending is 100% efficient, with nary a fraction of a cent being wasted. I don't think that's a safe assumption.
No. The assumption is that charity and government have roughly equivalent efficiency. Both government and charities have (wildly varying) overhead and government agencies may enjoy economies of scale that charities do not. Yet another area of the world that contains a surprising amount of detail.
If that entity used my tax dollars wisely (looking at nordic countries), yes I agree paying taxes is superior. I have no interest in contributing more towards our 1T/yr defense budget or subsidizing oil and gas.
The sovereign wealth funds of the Nordic countries weren't built with tax dollars, but rather with oil revenue. We could do the same thing here if there were political appetite for holding energy companies responsible and the wealth they produce as belonging to the people living on the land the resources are coming out of.
We're doing better now than we were 50 years ago, but the Nords are light years ahead.
Norway is basically anything but the Saudi Arabia of Europe. The ONLY thing that is similar is that they both have oil and natural gas in their territory.
Well they do both have monarchs! Though the royal palace in Oslo is a public park. As I was strolling the park, to my surprise I attended a quick fanfare as the king left his palace and his driver (I presume) almost ran over a dumb kid that darted in front of the royal sedan. then at the end of the royal avenue, at the foot of the most glorious mathematician sculpture, the royal sedan turned a corner directly into rush hour traffic, which his highness had to endure just like the rest of us commoners.
What a lovely anecdote, I've been to the royal park in Oslo once and it's gorgeous!
As an Austrian, I personally prefer to look at my royals in the catacombs of St. Stephens Cathedral though ;)
Grass is always greener on the other side. Trust me there is plenty of waste of tax money in the nordics too. Recent example. Every month the govt pays 4 million dollars for a healthcare journaling system that is not used (because it does not work). And that is just the on going cost (even more was spent building it).
Or a school admin system built for 100 million dollars and crap. They even spent a lot of money trying to prevent a open source client that solved a lot of the issues they had.
Maybe in absolute money it is less than the US. But remember US also have a lot more people.
So, there is a limit to these deductions, meaning, the government is still usually getting the lion's share of most people's taxes (and, generally, I think 50% of your income is the max you can deduct).
I think there is value to letting people allocate some percentage of their income directly to causes they are passionate about. Even if you assume the government is efficient and not bloated, and benevolent, this lets people contribute to causes without waiting for political consensus, or to smaller causes that would not be on the government's radar (yet) or ever. It's more pluralistic. It lets smaller causes bloom. It keeps me civically engaged.
On a personal note, I do take issue with the amounts spent on "defense" (which is often bombing people or threatening to directly or indirectly), and would rather help folks than bomb other folks.
> The waste, fraud, and abuse that runs rampant throughout the government tells us that the powerful often use taxpayer dollars as their own slush fund.
I don't know that it's worse than any other institution? At least voters can remove the corrupt, and they are prosecuted. Are you saying these uber-wealthy and CEOs aren't just as corrupt or worse?
What I am saying is that I have a choice whether my money goes to a corporation or to a charity. I don't get to choose whether I pay taxes or not.
More often than not, corruption in government does not result in the perpetrator being prosecuted or even removed from office.
I am amazed at all the people who are so sure that corporations and/or wealthy investors are corrupt, but give big government a pass. As if the same types of people don't run both.
Its probably not so much that government gets a pass as much as government is the organization that, by virtue of being a citizen, they own and control, so when things go wrong it is their own fault, and they really don't want to accept blame for their own faults. They would have to ask "How did I manage to fuck this up?", which is a hard question for most people to ask themselves.
When it is distinctly someone else's organization it's much easier to throw pointless shade to make one feel better about their own failings.
> I am amazed at all the people who are so sure that corporations and/or wealthy investors are corrupt, but give big government a pass.
Where do you find these people? I've never met them. It seems like everyone complains about government waste and corruption - even when it's not happening!
> Sure the government does much to relieve the suffering of people around the globe;
If we're talking specifically about the U.S. government, I suspect its decisions cause more suffering globally than they alleviate, though of course there are open philosophical questions inherent in any attempt to quantify suffering.
It's OK to do both and who is this ideal charitable recipient you are talking about? You mean the one that takes your money and does whatever it wants with it?
Assumes a lot about every administration. I don't see how anyone can look at what the US Government has done and failed to do over the last decades and call it the ideal charitable recipient. Even when it's doing the right things, it wastes enormous amounts of money to do so and the primary beneficiary is one of the wealthiest populations in the world.
Of course, you wouldn't expect them to be the ideal charity; they are explicitly not a charity. Anyone who is actually trying to be a charity should have little trouble using funds more charitably than any government in the world.
It might be surprising, but there are charitable people outside of USA too. I do consider paying taxes the best way to help those in need, but I don't live in the US personally.
It assumes a lot about future administrations too. When Obama was in office I complained a lot about the Executive branch consolidating power and using executive orders, and the Democrats were fine with it because he was a "good" administration.
But guess what? If you give too much power to a position, people who want to abuse the power will try to get themselves there.
I wasn't upset that Obama was consolidating power because I thought Obama would abuse it. I'm upset that he consolidated power and then left it to whoever would come next, and then has the gall to be surprised that consolidating power under the Executive would undermine the power of the Legislature the moment a President who was willing to abuse said power was sworn in.
We're cooked because of the fucking team sports. Both parties have had the chance to reign in the Executive and neither has the balls to use it against their own guy
Number of EOs issued is a poor measure of centralization of power. Most exercise of executive power these days don't even require an EO, just a decree from one of the executive agencies. And looking at Trump vs Obama is myopic. This process has been going on continuously since at least the FDR admin.
Even in qualitative terms, the "consolidation" was incorrect. Congress abdicated its responsibilities, and the Federal agencies picked up the slack. They're not controlled _centrally_, it's not like Obama was ordering agencies to write particular rules.
We now see what the central consolidated control actually looks like.
When it comes to funding various "public good" efforts, we don't need agility. We need fairness and at least some kind of public influence over what gets funded.
The problem with leaving everything to private charity is that only the wealthy people and churches doing the donating dictate what counts as "public good" without you and I having any say over it. We luck out when the donor has good intentions and chooses to donate to an organization doing good, and we have no say when the donor has evil intentions and chooses to donate elsewhere. Allowing a small handful of rich donors to decide what counts as a good cause is not ideal.
> The problem with leaving everything to private charity is that only the wealthy people and churches doing the donating dictate what counts as "public good" without you and I having any say over it. We luck out when the donor has good intentions ...
It is problematic even with good intentions.
People don't have time, expertise or usually even the motive to systematically examine ROI. They or someone they know has a 'good cause' and they support it. For example, endowments at their alma mater - likely a school for wealthy kids, new buildings for the hospital (that serves wealthy people), new research in diseases that are problems for the wealthy, etc.
They can't know without talking to people who have experience with poverty, for example, and those aren't the people coming to dinner tonight.
> The problem with leaving everything to private charity is that the wealthy people doing the donating dictate what counts as "public good" without you and I having any say over it.
The thing about public goods is that people tend to agree pretty closely about what they are. The wealthiest person in the world benefits from, e.g. clean air just as much as you do. You should be a lot more worried about wealthy folks who don't donate to charity and just spend the money on big luxury yachts and the like, because these folks are essentially free-riding on everyone else.
> The thing about public goods is that people tend to agree pretty closely about what they are.
Is there some data that shows that?
> The wealthiest person in the world benefits from, e.g. clean air just as much as you do.
We can find public goods in common for many groups, but that's actually a bad example. Wealthy people care about clean air in their neighborhood; pollution is therefore concentrated in poor areas. They don't site the new incerator (or drug treatment facility) on the Upper East Side of Manhatten.
Many needs are specific to poverty. For example, wealthy people are not subject to malaria; they are no illiterate; they don't need toilets or labor rights; they can afford college for their kids regardless of tuition; they have unlimited access to safe, fresh, healthy food. They don't need more available and less expensive health care, so they donate to cancer research and high-tech therapy and not to the medical clinic in the poor neighborhood.
Given (at least the USA's) increasingly polarized population, I don't think it's at all true that people agree closely about what should be funded, and I'll admit that fact makes my argument weaker: The danger of a particular wealthy person "donating to evil" is similar to the danger that the majority of the country votes to "fund evil."
I also agree that wealthy folks spending their wealth on luxury yachts while the public suffers is also something to worry about. Who knew? Gargantuan wealth inequalities are mostly downside for everyone but the wealthy!
Shouldn't we be a lot more worried about how political polarization might impact government choices, compared to private sector ones? Private actors who spend their own money have to pay for their own choices and are accountable to themselves in a way that political operatives fundamentally don't. I see a lot more potential for 'evil' on the political/state actor side.
Yeah but it's not either or. And people are always want to contribute to their pet causes. Go tell someone who's sibling died of cancer or whatever that they shouldn't donate to cancer research because the state should do it. Like yes it should but however much they do you may have personal reasons to want to do more. So private charity is always going to be a thing in parallel to public works.
A group of people engaging in topics they are passionate about in their private time is what a state is. Perhaps what you are trying to say is that you only want to help out your friends?
I'm trying to reconcile how https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM is 'helping out your friends.' See, we can all create straw-men. It's not very useful for discourse. The vast majority of us want what is best for humanity, but we have different views on how to deliver it.
You can fund the people (government) or you can fund specific people whim whom you have an intimate trust (friends). The only other choices are to fund yourself or nobody, neither of which are applicable here. Not sure why that is so hard to reconcile.
You are framing it as a binary "you either fund the government or only your friends." You really believe there is no in between? You are framing this as if you're on some high ground and we either have to agree with your opinion or we are selfish. There are other ways to advance humanity than your opinions. Government is not some benevolent entity. The supposition that it is has no basis in data from present reality or history. As one example, see marxist/communist governments killing their own people as the leading cause of death in the 20th century.
Of course not. It's quite literally just the people. If you cannot trust the people with your charitable donations, but still wish to donate to a person, then you're going to have to narrow that down to the specific person you can trust (i.e. your friends). There is no in-between.
There is a major important nuance. It is just some people, who happen to control the government (ie: use of force) to achieve their ends. "The people" are diverse and have different opinions, and the "government" represents a small portion of them. I've certainly donated to charitable organizations that are not my friends, but have a proven track record of effectively using money for specific goals. The government rarely meets this criteria.
Yeah, no. A government is not "a group of people engaging in topics they are passionate about." A government is an entity with authority to tell you what you have to do, and if you don't do it, eventually people with guns will show up at your door and take you to jail.
That's a very narrow aspect of government, and one that I have hardly ever encountered. Law-abiding people don't do it because of government coercion but because they believe in being cooperative members of their community and don't want to hurt others.
Another, much larger aspect of government, especially democratic, is people getting together and doing things as a community that can't be done individually.
"I have not encountered something" != "it does not exist." The logical conclusion to defying a government is people with guns showing up to put you in cuffs and take you to jail. Even over something as piddling as a littering fine or parking ticket . . . watch what eventually happens if you refuse to pay it.
People getting together and doing things as a community does not require a government. We can and should do that of our own free will. That's not to say governments aren't needed. But labeling them as "people getting together and doing things as a community" ignores their ability to enforce their laws, including the sanctioned use of violence or the threat of violence to coerce people into obeying or to punish them.
> The logical conclusion to defying a government is people with guns showing up to put you in cuffs and take you to jail. Even over something as piddling as a littering fine or parking ticket . . . watch what eventually happens if you refuse to pay it.
That may be logical, but it doesn't happen. I've had unpaid parking tickets for long periods and nobody showed up at all, much less with guns. Where do you live that they jail you for it, much less go out and find you? Your local government must be very well-funded to have resources for that, not to mention having a fascist attitude - how popular is that with constituents?
> People getting together and doing things as a community does not require a government.
It depends - many times it is the most or only effective way. It has decision-making mechanisms - including elected representatives, hearings, experts - and executive mechanisms including employees, equipment, contract managers, processes, institutional information such as maps of infrastructure, and loads of experience. Imagine some neighbors in NYC trying to put in just a new streetlight.
> But labeling them as "people getting together and doing things as a community" ignores their ability to enforce their laws, including the sanctioned use of violence or the threat of violence to coerce people into obeying or to punish them.
It doesn't ignore it, but your prior comment repeats the Internet trope that that's what goverment is - a coercive mechanism with guns. That's only one narrow aspect - the great majority of what government does, and how society works, has nothing to do with that. It's for the outlaws, not for the great majority.
> People getting together and doing things as a community does not require a government.
That may be true, but government (at least a democratic one) is just people getting together and doing things, so if you already have one you can save the effort of the community trying to organize a second community on top of the community they already have for no good reason.
> But labeling them as "people getting together and doing things as a community" ignores their ability to enforce their laws, including the sanctioned use of violence or the threat of violence to coerce people into obeying or to punish them.
That literally tells of people getting together and doing things. These are not magical powers. They are simply community action. I suppose it highlights that people getting together and doing things isn't all sunshine and rainbows, despite your apparent dream for a world where there is only happiness, but such is reality.
I expect the aversion is that those who wish to donate to charity only want their friends, not entire communities, to benefit. The "trouble" with a community at large is that everyone is able to participate, whether you like them or not. That's not to say that a community cannot see a charitable benefit indirectly, but the key point is that they want to keep the primary benefit away from strangers.
There are plenty of such organisations. Some are legal, some are not.
The government is the only one with a legal monopoly on violence; it redistributes resources in the society and it's not run by incorruptible angels but by fallible human beings - human beings who were put there thanks to investments of millions of dollars.
> A government is an entity with authority to tell you what you have to do
If it is authoritarian, perhaps, but even that is still a matter of a group of people. Most seem to believe that government should be democratic. You may not find yourself in a democratic state, but that would only continue to contribute to what makes the day funny. Perhaps you didn't read the entire thread and are posting this without understanding the full context under which it is taking place?
No, all governments have the authority to tell people what to do. Some governments operate within a legal framework that limits that authority in many ways, but if an organization has no authority over the people who live in a given area then it isn't a government.
> all governments have the authority to tell people what to do.
But, again, that government is the very people we're talking about, at least as far as a democracy goes. Although even in the case of an authoritarian government, the individual authority is only as strong as the people are willing to go along with recognizing it, so it is not really that much different. No magic here, just people.
> Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority on the minority.
It is not - that would be some theoretical pure democracy, also called 'mob rule'. Democracy, as the word is actually used, requires universal human rights which protect the minority. For example, freedom of speech means the majority can't control the minority's speech, whether they like it or not.
Democracy also includes separation of powers, usually between legislature, executive, and judicial, which prevents the concentration of power.
> It's nothing to be proud of.
It's only something to be proud of if we make it that way.
>I enjoy being a dev ... I think most charities would have more use for my money than my time, given my disability
You could be massively wrong about that. Many charities are desparate for IT help. I am a developer and volunteer at a charity. I have done some IT stuff for them (mostly setting up some Airtable databases) and it has been (modesty aside) transformative for them.
It seems his foundation already has significant funding. I would give to other charities, focusing on high impact work in specific regions or domains that knight not be as popular.
>His foundation really does seem to do a good job with 'effective altruism'
Can you provide some sources for this? I'm by no means an expert in this area, but my city happened to receive some of his modified A. Aegypti since 2017 and it didn't make the people here happy, at all. Though I don't even think there's a comprehensive study on how much good or harm came from it.
What a completely unhelpful comment: for all you know they are infertile. Having children shouldn't be done for such selfish reasons as mere personal fulfillment. I care about the kind of life a hypothetical human offspring would have (which is why I choose not to have any currently). Creating a family is a really weird solution to bring up.
But your rage is valid, I think it is just misplaced. The above commenter to you could perhaps be more effective in their decision making regarding filling their existential void. But family planning is a rash and presumptuous 'solution' to filling that need.
> There's a reason they're marked as secondary beneficiaries on all my accounts.
That's just insane. Bill Gates is absolutely not a good guy but you cannot be convinced to that given how much you idealize him. Have children. I would have replied to the sibling comment saying the same but comments become unreplyable once they get enough downvotes.
I have to disagree. I am an ordo amoris enjoyer and cannot agree with Gates giving a red cent to overseas causes until we fix things like drug treatment, cancer treatment, and cures for neurodegenerative diseases.
He’s of course within his rights to ignore this but I am within mine to remind everyone to please help your friend, your neighbor, your town, state, and country before you look further afield.
> I am within mine to remind everyone to please help your friend, your neighbor, your town, state, and country before you look further afield.
Nah. We have memberships in families, neighborhoods, friend groups, local areas, cultural groups, nations, and the whole world. And problems at any of these levels can grow to the point where they affect us, too. And places where the needs are most acute and broad stand the greatest chances of developing to not be as acute of problems anymore and indeed to offer value to the overall world community through trade.
Indeed, the extreme version of what you're saying is why so many only give to their church communities which are insular and isolated. Or to just retain everything.
70% of my giving is domestic, but I think it's nuts to ignore the rest of the world. Yes, things improved in distant lands maybe are harder for me to see and have less of a direct impact on those around me; so discount their benefit some, but that marginal benefit is so much larger...
You have to weigh that against the fact that you are much more able to figure out how to actually do what's needed at levels where you see things firsthand. At least, that's been my experience; it's much more realistic to start a nonprofit that can make a real difference locally, then perhaps scale with time, than it is to found something with a global mission, lacking global context on how things manifest around the world.
More importantly, I'm not a utilitarian, and do not subscribe to "effective altruism" or other utilitarian philosophies. At the end of the day it's Gates' money to do with as he wishes and it's my internet account to argue against that as I wish.
Sure, but even when you apply discount rates due to uncertainty of efficacy and distance of effects, the numbers can still be big.
At this point, I spend substantially my entire life in local service (I am a schoolteacher and I give away 6 figures locally annually). I still don't think it would maximize my effective impact to ignore the rest of my country or the rest of the world.
As someone who grew up in a Christian faith tradition that said Jesus Christ died for the sins of all of us and that we are all made in God's image, I find this position so bizarre. If we are all children of God, why should I prioritize the well being of a single stranger in Ohio over twenty strangers in Kenya? I can understand an argument for prioritizing one's family, especially if you are a parent, or even one's immediate community, but while I personally love America, the vast majority of Americans are as distant from me as anyone else in the globe.
This is a pretty common question that's raised: how can we square this with loving our fellow man?
The short answer is Christianity isn't a utilitarian belief system. While God loves everyone equally, he puts some of us closer together in love: family, friends, neighbors, countrymen. This incurs a greater obligation, plus we ought to love more those who are closer to us.
Sadly, a lot of Christian faiths teach dogma before the underlying reasoning or take a Bible-only approach which I find to be incredibly incomplete. In case your upbringing didn't include much theological reading, I would strongly recommend Civitas Dei and Summa Theologiae; the latter is less explicitly relevant to its definition but probably a better book overall.
I really don't see how anything I wrote was that controversial; he's free to disagree and pursue his own beliefs, obviously. Everything someone says that's not wrapped up in formal logic or statistics is implicitly opinion; the fact that I find repeatedly saying so tedious and ridiculous doesn't mean I'm asserting I am somehow an arbiter of the One True Faith.
We all act as we think best. I can try to change how others think. That's about the start and end of it.
A single cent? I think you vastly underestimate how little a dollar does in the US, and how much it does outside.
Moreover, insisting on going all-in on medical research before doing any immediate lifesaving sounds to me like a gross perversion of what should be, in its most simple case, an urging to make sure your kids are clothed and fed before donating to the food bank. Surely ordo does not make it unvirtuous to save a drowning foreigner even if your kids would miss a meal for it.
I’m under the impression that Aquinas says outright that it makes sense to make exceptions to the general ordering to aid those in grave need that are “low” in the order, and stuff like mosquito nets are a prototypical example of this imo. Lives saved, families preserved, terribly unjust suffering averted, etc for literal pennies on the dollar.
I don't think any individual should have the power to unilaterally choose where to deploy billions of dollars, but your vision is equally myopic. Nothing about being a US citizen gives you any moral priority over any other person.
> help your friend, your neighbor, your town, state, and country before you look further afield
Many of my friends and family don't live on my neighborhood, town, state or country. They live in the world. Consider broadening up your social circle a little bit. Our lives don't have to be limited to where a horse can travel to any more.
Sure, the world has changed. But rightly-ordered love isn't about geographical layout, it's about the natural order of community and social structure. That has changed but "mosquito nets in zimbabwe" being on the way outer end of a right ordering of love hasn't.
I think the world has changed more than you think.
You are assuming that I don't have friends or family in Zimbabwe. Which is true in this particular case. But it might as well not. As I said I have friends and family in several countries.
You seem to think this phrase implies a prescription that people ought to donate first to their adjacents (unambiguously enough to be worth including without a definition).
I'll note that, given how many sources seem to contravene that interpretation, the probability that your use of this term did not come downstream from Vice President Vance has dropped precipitously. Which might be useful information for anyone looking to diversify their information diet.
Not physical adjacents, no. If your brother lives two thousand miles away you should still focus on him more than your neighbor.
I'm unsure what Vance has to do with this. My belief comes from my religious upbringing and (in this case) Saints Augustine and Aquinas. Vance is not a spiritual leader or theologian of any sort.
I think I absorbed much of this when I was pretty young - I had sort of settled on this way of thinking before ever picking up Civitas Dei - but reading and writing on it during my schooling helped me understand why.
Actually, no he can't. OFAC will absolutely destroy him if he does. I have a remote job and I am even explicitly banned from doing any work for my company while I am in China or a bunch of other countries.
Oh it's you again, you're the guy echoing specific contemporary political figures, and dressing up American isolationism in rhetoric. In the other thread you were claiming that America subsidises Europe's healthcare by paying for its defence.
Funny how when I specifically share opinions that you specifically dislike, you sling mud about "echoing". Of course, everyone else's opinions are well-founded and of their own mind. Mine, on the other hand, are downloaded straight into my head from a daily Fox News broadcast. You can tell by how my opinions aren't your opinions, and therefore must be those of some Bad Guy or not Real Opinions.
You’re only sharing one opinion (America should isolate), and you’re presenting it as a fact (you refer to being „correct”).
I think you’re projecting the dislike towards your opinion. If I see American electoral politics seep into HN, I’ll call it out, as dictated by my intellectual curiosity.
I actually have the opposite position on this. 1st world countries already have the funds and economy to pursue exactly what you describe. Just they lack the political will. I don’t care to subsidise that intentional lack of investment.
I would much rather give to charities focusing on countries that don’t have the economy/ability to fix their basic issues.
Why should some arbitrary border be drawn? And if we don't take care of the world, who will? I think that's an abdication of the most serious responsibilities.
If you were to live very close to the border of, say, Canada or Mexico, would you support giving financial support to alleviate suffering in those countries?
That depends. Generally nation is a big part of how one defines rightly-ordered love. But if, say, I lived near the border, regularly went down to Mexico, had friends or colleagues there, then probably so. but more focused on alleviating their suffering than that of the country or state.
I think he wants Gates to focus his philanthropy on the Seattle region before expanding the scope of his giving to all of Washington. That could probably consume Gates' entire fortune, so the question of what to do next is irrelevant.
You clearly have never actually looked at effective altruism and what it tries to be. You would otherwise know that your values are diametrically opposed to the values of that movement and said values are neither right nor wrong, they're personal.
Of course I have. I am well aware that my values are diametrically opposed to it at a first-principles level; I find utilitarianism to be an incredibly hollow worldview that fails on many grounds, not least of which are the teleological (disordered love is no virtue.)
I don't have to argue from the first principles of the EA crowd. Everyone believes in something and I believe they are wrong; your epistemic relativism makes no sense to me. Borderline absurdist.
fwiw I'm not an EA and I generally agree with you. It's fine to believe they're wrong, but it's an entirely different thing to tell other people they should think they're wrong.
Isn't that how most disagreements shake out at one level or another, once you strip away enough of the garnish? I am by nature either blunt or an asshole, depending on whom you ask, and may have come across more as the latter here, but the core message is about the same as most disagreements: "I believe my position is right because ABC, your position is wrong because DEF, you should believe mine instead."
Sure I did. I'm aware his giving isn't just mosquito nets. That doesn't mean I believe the money is being directed correctly.
If your position is "it's his money so none of us should comment", I'd expect equal pushback on people saying "wow I really agree with how he's spending it."
This is just cruel nativism, a rejection of humanity except for the in group you happened to be born in. I hope everyone rejects this sociopathic outlook on the world.
And Gates is investing in Alzheimer's research FYI.
Reducing rightly-ordered love to "cruel nativism" is an incredibly uncharitable representation. I'd urge you to do some reading in comparative religion. Although I'm a Christian, I've found it instructive to spend some time going through other religions' texts, other philosophies, because dismissing them as backward or wrong does nobody any good. Learning more makes my conversations more productive and helps me better understand my own beliefs.
My issue with Gates is that he wants to fight climate change, yet he's personally an environmental disaster with his yachts and jets. I'm not saying he has to live like a monk to be credible, and maybe his foundation is doing a good job (never looked into it), but either he's an hypocrite, or I disagree with him on how to fight climate change.
I think it's pretty clearly hypocritical, but also if his actions are (far) more than offsetting his own emissions and impact, it's still a net positive.
Of course, he could choose to not live a super-high consumption lifestyle in addition to his climate philanthopy, but if I had to take one or the other, I'd rather him continue throwing money at climate work than take fewer private jet rides.
But... he could easily do both. This is why I have such a hard time taking anything said about climate change seriously from the likes of Gore, Gates, and celebrities. They don’t practice what they preach.
And it’s not like we’re talking about some huge sacrifices here. Go from a 50K sqft house to a “modest” 10k sqft one. Don’t sail around on personal yachts. Fly commercial. Use Zoom. Simple stuff that would give them a lot more credibility. As it is, it’s a whole lot of “do as I say, not as I do.”
I think it matters how it's done. If someone has super high consumption but also invests in clean energy to save the climate that's cool by be. If someone has super high consumption but also invests money into lobbying to deny the lower classes access to consumption as a means of saving the climate I would resent that person.
My issue is, he wants to fight climate change… then tries to spend $200bn in less than 20 years. This afflux of money creates a spike of consumerism, then a sudden dip after that. Consultants in foundations will scramble to spend that money for sure, and they themselves will buy private jets for that.
The way to fight climate change is to keep people at a low level of consumption, and spend his own money very slowly, very scarcely. And keep people with small cars, no Cadillac for any consultant.
While it might be hypocritical it doesn't matter whatsoever what he does with his personal life if his foundation is pouring billions into making the world a better place.
Helping people out of poverty is really bad for the environment too but I don't think we should be complaining when someone does that.
On a global scale his yacht(s?) and private jets are nothing, and if it helps him do good by establishing/maintaining relationships with the right people they're an "investment" into a stopping climate change.
I'll ask the same question I've asked elsewhere because "I want to believe:" How do you measure how much someone has made the world a better place? Especially when so much of their actions, their consequences, and their second and third order effects are either unknowable or papered over by PR campaigns.
You can't really measure how much good someone has done, but their foundation has been going for 25 years and as mentioned in the article they've donated 100billion dollars to something already.
If anyone deserves a bit of good faith it'd be the Gates family, it's probably not all pretty and perfect but I am convinced they're doing a lot of good.
You'll have to ask someone else about proof, but I imagine someone would've leaked something within these 25 years if they were running a tax evasion scheme or something else fishy.
So without hard proof I repeat: Let Bill have his toys, it's a piss in the bucket on a global scale and the donated 100 billion dollars will have offset that in some way or another many times over.
Let's just say my "sniff test" says good, and while not always right I think I am here and that's good enough for me.
If his net effect on the climate is positive then you are only arguing that he could be even more efficient at it - but you are not in position to do that without knowing all his personal context. Outside you can only judge the net result - which is not a bad one.
Being a hypocrite is a fairly minor sin, and doesn't take away from the good he does. I could make a long list of worse qualities Bill Gates possesses, but I'll still acknowledge the good.
The thing that's always made me skeptical of Gates and any other enormous foundations is that they operate at such a high level and with such enormous budgets that they basically exist in the same "amoral" world of nation states and corporations, but yet they face none of the scrutiny or criticism that those entities face.
How do you judge the actions of someone when those actions are powerful enough to move markets, take down regimes, and change people's lives for generations?
We take them at their word and assume that everything they do is well-intentioned and good and has zero negative impact or secondary effects, but is that really the case?
To me it seems like the only charity that can be trusted is a small-scale one that acts locally and with lots of transparency.
Why would they have to be perfect to deserve donations? A "small-scale charity that acts locally with lots of transparency" may be great, or it may be terribly inefficient in their real-world ability to improve the well-being of the people they are supposed to benefit. And either choice would be better than not donating anything to anybody.
May be great or may be terrible applies to both the small and the the nation-state sized charity right?
Maybe my judgement or efficiency is bad when I try to help my neighbor. Okay, whoopsie. Now apply that margin of error to a foundation whose decisions impact millions of people and possibly entire societies, possibly for generations. The unintended or possibly negative effects can be enormous and long-lasting.
Yes they're local, but its not like there's a limit to how many local charities there can be in the world.
Operating at a huge scale requires you to lump people together into groups and make assumptions about who they are and what they deserve, as you've done in your example. To me that sounds antithetical to the concept of charity. And even with the best intentions, if you mess up, you're messing up a huge scale.
Charity just means helping someone. Do you think no one in Chad needs or is offering help? And if you don't know anyone in Chad who's in need of charity then...why do you want to do charity in Chad?
It seems that our notion of charity has been warped in such a way that it somehow doesn't count unless it's some enormous large-scale mission carried about by Charity, Inc for the benefit of some group of people far away. It's all very abstract, and that just creates room for fraud or exploitation.
Paying off a local person's debts or putting their child through college will probably be far more impactful and meaningful than sending your money off to some giant organization.
Have to disagree about the 'effective' part. Gates seems to have had a knack for massive inefficiencies and negative externalities in every way that he has impacted the world. Think of how many man-hours (measured in human lifetimes) have been wasted due to the shortcomings of various MicroSoft programs. Weigh that against his health initiatives in the third world. Or the impact of dimming the sun by depositing massive quantities of particles in the atmosphere: the resources consumed and carbon emissions that placing them would entail, and of course the intended effect, which is to impede human progress as measured by the Kardashev scale. Everything starts to look much more efficient if this is taken as the goal, though.
He's not curing polio, though. His polio program is spreading it because they use a live virus, and a low percentage of the population is getting it. People are now getting paralytic polio from others who got the vaccine.
This is just one example of the Kreuger-Dunning that permeates all aspects of the Gates Foundation. His interventions have been mainly disasters, distorted public policy, and gobbled up biotech IP in the process. He controls the money spicket and is very petty and cocksure about what is "right." Researchers and public policy experts who disagree with his ideas get cut off.
Governments should set public health policy and manage the needs of their people, not billionaires, biotech companies, or NGOs.
There are issues with the oral vaccines, but what you're saying is completely untrue. The total number of paralyzed kids has gone down dramatically as a result of the work Gates has done. By any metric, this is a good thing
OPV unfortunately does cause paralytic polio disease indirectly by infecting unvaccinated people. It's worth it IMO because the total number of paralyzed people has decreased, but in the long term we have to switch to IPV to completely eliminate polio. This will take decades and many billions of dollars though.
Yes, it's called cVDPV. It's caused by the virus in the live vaccine "unweakening" itself, and it's typically happening in people with weakened immune systems (e.g. from chronic malnutrition). It's not causing unvaccinated people to get infected, per se.
Most cases are mild, and on average there are about 300-400 cases per _year_ for the entire world.
But it's absolutely heinous to accuse Gates of deliberately infecting people with the live virus. The weakened vaccine has been the standard for polio vaccination for the last 80 years. There is simply no alternative for it for places like DRC or Chad. Inactivated vaccines require refrigeration and injections, and this is not feasible.
We're >.< this close to eradicating polio: https://polioeradication.org/wild-poliovirus-count/ - there are only two countries with the wild virus. A little bit more, and we can actually stop vaccinating from polio altogether.
I largely agree, but there is essentially no possibility of ever eradicating polio with the current OPV strategy.
If you stop vaccinating, cVDPV will spread person to person. Some people carry virus for decades and it can become infectious at any time, many years after they were first vaccinated or infected. There will sparse but significant episodes until all humans who were vaccinated with OPV (or infected with the wild virus) have died.
but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it!
It's ok if we don't eradicate the virus. The point is to prevent children from being paralyzed, and it works for that.
Unfortunately, if you look at the situation with type 2, you will see what happens when OPV stops too early (and type 2 is a much less aggressive disease than type 1). In a perfect world, OPV cessation happens in most healthy communities rather soon, while the people who are in need of a much stronger vaccine continue to get OPV.
Also, Gates's pet project of a novel OPV has been shown to have caused a few confirmed cases of VAPP now, so it seems that project won't save OPV.
Essentially the best hope for eradicating polio within 20 years seems to be giving out a lot of OPV to places like Afghanistan and the DRC and forcing the local warlord to give it to the kids who need it (the latter has generally been a total failure of the Gates project). Once OPV gets wild-type and cVDPV outbreaks under control, a global switch to IPV seems safe to prevent future outbreaks. But, to get there, it seems a very aggressive OPV campaign is necessary compared to where we are now. It may take a militarized organization to do this, also, given the fact that you necessarily have to deal with tribal warlords. Shame we don't have USAID any more...
We aren't going to do that because it seems we generally aren't capable of doing that. So we're likely stuck with a decent amount of polio for a long time.
cVDPV outbreaks die out on their own, and the newer vaccines are designed to be less likely to escape.
People also don't carry the virus for decades. That's a myth. People with a weakened immune system can get infected with polio even after a childhood vaccination, so that's probably where this myth comes from.
It's not a myth at all, off the top of my head I know of at least two cases studies including the study that led to the discovery that remdesivir may treat polio
I don't see his post as an attempt to self-promote as some commenters here have made. To what purpose? He's already known to most adults, already rich beyond anyone could possibly dream to be. And it sounds like from the post that he already had this path planned albeit several decades after his death.
I think accelerating that timeline is a good thing as I think he will be better than anyone who came after to direct how the funds as applied.
MSFT is up 18x during that time and the S&P 500 is up 5x during that time. His investments are some mixture of MSFT and other things, so we might say he would have been up around 10x if he'd given no money away.
Since his net worth is only up 3x, that means he gave away about 70% of his wealth.
However long he took, he has ~70% less wealth than he would have had if he didn't do it. If it took him longer, that only means he gave the wealth after it had more time to appreciate.
It's part of the strategy. He endowed a giant philanthropic org. You can leverage an endowment by investing it aggressively and spending the proceeds to keep the fund running indefinitely. What he is now announcing is a pivot to start spending principal so the endowment starts to shrink until it hits zero.
I was talking about this with a friend recently -- Romans flaunted their wealth by improving shared social infrastructure (open market spaces, parks, etc), and the robber barons of the 19th century flaunted their wealth by building cultural institutions (eg Carnegie libraries).
It seems like most "effective altruists" want to do things that help "humanity" but don't help "people" -- so developing technology to explore the stars is on the table, but fighting poverty is not.
> It seems like most "effective altruists" want to do things that help "humanity" but don't help "people" -- so developing technology to explore the stars is on the table, but fighting poverty is not.
You seem to have very weird ideas about how EA funding works in practice. Long-termism is flashy and peculiar so it gets a lot of excess visibility, but "fighting poverty" tends to get the bulk of EA money, and the most controversial cause that still gets real sizeable funding seems to be animal welfare.
> developing technology to explore the stars is on the table, but fighting poverty is not.
Weird that you have that impression, since most EA-related organizations (GiveWell, Effective Altruism Foundation, etc) are heavily focused on donating to charities that address poverty or malaria in Africa
While I agree this is technically accurate, it implies there was something imoral about how he got his money. He created the most popular modern OS and a myriad of other technical innovations. It would be almost impossible to create more positive good in the world through his charitable donations than Microsoft
This is such a whitewash of Microsoft's history. There's a reason Microsoft is a convicted monopolist - they used brutally unfair tactics to push out competitors, including open source ones. Have we all forgotten the IE winter when browser innovation stopped for almost a decade thanks to Microsoft killing Netscape in the crib?
Microsoft is not an ethical company - a pattern that has continued today with their user-hostile decisions.
Microsoft’s first 10,000 employees became phenomenally wealthy at the IPO. That’s far more of a worker paradise than any startup unicorn you’ll see today.
>While I respect anyone’s decision to spend their days playing pickleball, that life isn’t quite for me—at least not full time. I’m lucky to wake up every day energized to go to work
Bit of an unfair comparison though.. Most people dont retire from a job where you're literally handing people money.
That said, I'm a huge fan Bill's work post-microsoft :)
>The Gates Foundation’s mission remains rooted in the idea that where you are born should not determine your opportunities.
Arguably he's already done so much for billions of people. Had typing on computers not became the main way businesses communicate , anyone with bad, handwriting would be stuck in menial work.
When I was growing up in the 90s my hand writing was so bad it was assumed I would never amount to anything.
Then computers completely take over all aspects of business in the early 2000s. No one is writing TPS reports by hand.
All of a sudden my horrible handwriting doesn't matter. It's still really bad. But I've made 6 figures for well over a decade, along with an amazing year at about 200k.
None of this would of been possible without Gates. I also owe the creator of Android Andy Rubin. It's been a while ( and it might of been one of the other co founders), but I was able to thank Rubin. His response was something like "Well, we still need to get building applications working on Android."
I've also been able to thank( on this forum) Brendan Eich, the inventor of my first programming language, JavaScript. Amazingly humble for someone who helped create trillions in wealth.
Apart of me thinks Gates could still lead some innovation in computing. I hope somehow he's still coding under a pseudonym perhaps, and occasionally answering tech questions.
Pretty much everything you named is simply first-to-the-market horror-show from design perspective.
Javascript? Check.
Android? Check.
Windows? Again, capturing market via transitioning from DOS.
They did focus on many important things like having exceptional backwards compatibility (transitioning from DOS, etc), and kernel team does a decent job usually, but none of this is necessarily attributable to Gates and it's simply what you have to do to capture a market/platform.
I don't know if this is genuine sentiment you're expressing or just naivety, but people that can glaze this hard this easily usually go very far in life. I'll give you that, I wish I could do this.
I agree with this. We had multiple windowing environments, all arguably superior in various ways, and we had multiple office suites, all with better technology than the Microsoft versions. Then I wonder how much worse off are we because Windows and Office came to predominate instead of one of the others? How much rent seeking has gone into building Gates' fortune? How much has been lost financially by innocent users to Windows security vulnerabilities?
On the handwriting thing, I see a general decline in my children's handwriting because they spend so much time typing. That bothers me personally, since I appreciate good handwriting, and I would think it spills over into other fine-motor skills tasks.
>I don't know if this is genuine sentiment you're expressing or just naivety, but people that can glaze this hard this easily usually go very far in life. I'll give you that, I wish I could do this.
Ohh it's 100% genuine, I went from living on food stamps, multiple evictions to 200k at my peak. Making a bit less now , but I'm still very comfortable.
Ultimately these technologies made computing and programming extremely easy and cheap. You can make a lot of money using your Windows PC to code Android apps in JavaScript.
I'm a not tech purist, if it works it works. Yes better OSes and languages exist, but they weren't really accessible to me. I still suggest most new programmers start with JavaScript or Python so you don't get too bogged down with boilerplate and type systems.
> When I was growing up in the 90s my hand writing was so bad it was assumed I would never amount to anything.
I'm curious where you grew up? I am high school class of 1992. I skipped third grade, where a lot of penmanship is taught. We had a computer lab in Junior High (so late 1980s), I had a PC Clone at home that we bought in 1985. I'd turn in writing assignments printed on my epson dot matrix printer. To my knowledge, my appalling handwriting was never considered by anyone.
This feels like one of those threats teachers use to reinforce something they don't have any other strong argument to support... while reminding you that it will end up "on your permanent record."
In no way would I want to downplay Gates' effect on the industry (though I personally think it was much more in the 80s and early 90s than in the heyday of the 2000s) I think people would have built computers without him, and its possible that we would have been better off overall in a world where the Amiga won, not the IBM PC, or the Mac, etc.
Gates is more notable for NOT Netscaping or Sunning or Lotus-123ing his company than for any particular decision.
I don't see computers being widely adapted without Microsoft deciding to essentially give Windows away to OEMs.
Of course this was anti competitive, but it was a massive net good.
The point is computers became extremely cheap. We're at the point where you can get a used laptop for 100$, install Linux on it and write code to your hearts content. The only thing limiting you is your own skill set.
I don't think computers become affordable without Microsoft
> I don't see computers being widely adapted without Microsoft deciding to essentially give Windows away to OEMs.
I'm not sure how making the OEMs pay for a license on all the computers they sold (and report on those numbers), regardless of what was installed is 'essentially giving away'. Yes, the OEM price was a lot lower than the retail price, but OEM versions came without direct support, and at least for large OEMs, without all of the trappings of retail (wholesalers/distributors/cross marketing expenses/shelf rental/etc)
I feel like if, in the counterfactual where people continued writing things by hand, as an adult you thought your handwriting was holding you back, you could probably improve it? It’s not an innate property of a human, it’s a practiced skill. And as a child there is not a good incentive structure to make kids who aren’t for some reason perfectionistic learn to write really well.
> None of this would have been possible without Gates.
Though he and his company did a lot to change the prevalence of typing, if he or Microsoft didn’t come along, someone else would have led the computing revolution with probability 1.
Is this satire? Bill Gates didn’t invent computers, he just started the company that won the PC revolution, very talented and intelligent, but also well placed and lucky.
Why would bad handwriting be a barrier to success? I'm asking honestly. After all it's a trope that doctors have terrible handwriting, and typewriters and word processors have been around for ages. Also, talking from experience bad handwriting can easily be improved by paying a bit more attention to what you are doing and some practise.
Bill Gates is rich in part because his company screwed over so many people. Sure they made some products that people wanted and needed, but they also shipped some real crap and behaved like arseholes. It's good that he's giving it all away; it would have been better if he had less because his company was more ethical.
No criticism of the man, but I think he may fail in this part of his goal
> People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that "he died rich" will not be one of them.
It's easy to forget how absurdly wealthy the very richest in society are. Say he started this initiative on his 70th birthday and he's spreading his giving fairly lineraly over the next 20 years but dies just 1 day short of his 90th birthday, he'd still have about $13,698,630 to his name. I think most would consider someone with that money to their name rich.
If Bill Gates gave away 10% every year of the wealth he has, after 20 years, he would have remaining 12%.
He should dedicate the remaining 12% to venture capital for all of the businesses he crushed and the people who suffered, for “boiling the tech space” and killing the innovation. The least he can do.
And the rest of the rich crooks should do the same dedicating their wealth to reversing the harm that they caused.
> So he’s going to selflessly donate it to himself to save himself from taxes? What a hero.
You don't really "save yourself from taxes" by donating money to charity.
Option A: sell stock for $100, pay taxes of $20, spend $80 on yourself
Option B: donate stock of $100 to charity, and spend $0 on yourself
Which of these options leaves Gates with more money in his pocket to spend on himself?
Giving money away doesn't save you from taxes on your income; you just forego the income entirely. The money is gone. It's no longer yours. Why would you be paying taxes on it?
>You don't really "save yourself from taxes" by donating money to charity.
That's not really true if you have sufficiently appreciated assets and are in a high tax bracket. You can donate those appreciated assets and collect an annuity from some percentage of the face value donation and basically be shielded from any capital gains.
Does Gates have the power to change tax code? "Look at outcomes" makes more sense when it's something you have at least a moderate amount of control over.
If he'd be serious about it, he'd spend 0.01% of his fortune to buy politicians (he just has to bid more than the fossil industry etc) and have them change the tax code.
Is anyone stopping him, et al, from just paying more? There's an option for that on US tax forms (though I'm guessing tax returns for billionaires are a little more complex than what a Form 1040 can handle).
People suggest this often whenever a rich person says they should pay more taxes but unless I can specifically say I want my extra taxes to go to a specific government agency or office, I have no idea why I would do this. Just so Boeing can get a larger contract with my extra taxes? At that point I would just donate directly to causes that support what I want instead of dealing with the middle man.
You can give to state and local governments and get a federal tax deduction [1], per 26 U.S. Code § 170 (c) (1)
> (1) A State, a possession of the United States, or any political subdivision of any of the foregoing, or the United States or the District of Columbia, but only if the contribution or gift is made for exclusively public purposes.
But not if you make a gift to federal agency (unless that's listed somewhere else)
You can only write off ~ 67% of your income in through charitable deductions IIRC. Of course, I suppose if donating shares of appreciated stock that doesn't quite apply the same way.
It is heartwarming to see him continuing to give away most of his wealth even if he's left with a billion or more at the end, and I wish other uber-rich would follow suit.
How much power is concentrated in the hands of individuals... It's great that Gates is choosing to use that power philanthropically, but it also raises questions about the long-term role of private wealth in solving public problems.
When the government doesn't do it, private parties have to; when there's a significant percentage of the population voting for "small government" parties, more responsibility goes to (wealthy) individuals.
When the government doesn't do it, it's because wealthy individuals have already bought the government. And have invested huge amounts of money into bamboozling the population into voting against their own interests.
No they don't. It can also be that neither the government nor private parties give.
Making it an either/or often makes space for the individual to make excuses for why they don't share because out there somewhere there exists some government program that vaguely looks like charity.
He talks about this in today's NY Times interview and he is pretty unsparing against Elon Musk in particular for his role in killing USAID. Says he is directly complicit in killing children while at the same time, he is technically still a signatory of the Giving Pledge.
Well, it's not as if the public sector is solving many problems these days. We seem to have decided, collectively, that we'd rather have more problems.
> We seem to have decided, collectively, that we'd rather have more problems.
... because a faction of the rich decided they wanted the poors to believe government can't do anything useful, and launched an ongoing decades-long propaganda campaign to that effect.
I think that's an incredibly simplistic and naive view of why large public projects gobble up colossal sums of money and don't have much to show for it.
A lot of that public money somehow ends up in the private sector, usually as corporate profits.
Libertarians may want to ask themselves what happens to the private sector - aerospace, energy, R&D, infrastructure, education - when public investment stops.
I am guessing that in your mind that if a private corporation bids on a contract it should only break even? Is that it? Or perhaps - for you - even better would be - the whole thing would be done by the government. There is no private corporation?
I'm sure a similar book could be written where the political stripes are all changed. Instead of Koch, we have Soros. Instead of Musk, it would be Gates. Instead of whoever owns Sinclair Media, its Carlos Slim or Lauren Powell Jobs.
I know the book exists as I'm very familiar with the kinds of claims that get repeated in threads like this.
To me - these claims seem to fuel a conspiracy like mind set about why certain efforts or movements fail. "Because the billionares didn't want it to". "Or they bought the media and control the narrative". "Its all just a uniparty!".
If I were to replace the word billionare with the name of the first Abrahamic religion, you and I would both see that view point as low intellect nonsense. And it would be. But somehow, sub in the word billionare and then it becomes brilliant analysis for some.
Boiled down, all I'm really claiming is that some rich people spent a bunch of money on lobbying, largely in favor of making money better for buying influence and in favor of making it easier for the rich to get richer with some populist culture-war-stoking side-quests to drum up the necessary votes, and the effort was pretty successful. I don't think that's an out-there or "conspiracy like mind"ed take, especially given that's just... what happened.
Except it's not what just happened. More billionaires supported the Harris ticket than the Trump ticket. It's just that Trump's pet billionaires -- especially one in particular -- hustled harder for him.
Plus what I'm getting at started shortly pre-WWII and really started to see serious policy and "Overton window" effects in the 70s. There was a huge boom in organized pro-(big)-business and pro-rich lobbying starting in the late 30s and really taking off just after the war. I think it'd be pretty surprising if the following shifts in public perception and opinion, and in policy, just happened to align with what they were promoting by coincidence.
I don't think any of the folks pushing for deregulation of media ownership (to allow it to consolidate) and defanging anti-trust and cutting rich people's taxes and reducing government social spending or other spending that competed with potential "market solutions" or made the labor force less-desperate, or pushing anti-union policies, while promoting the view that "actually all of that is good for normal people, so you should vote for the party promoting it... also, the blacks and gays are out to get you, in case that other argument didn't convince you" had in mind getting someone like Trump, specifically, into power, though without their actions over several decades it surely wouldn't have been possible.
well, you're changing from "people only complain about some billionaires" to "people complain about all billionaires and it's just a conspiracy theory" so I'm not sure what point you're trying to get across.
maybe you could read the book to dispel your mistaken notion that it's just "billionaires bad", since it's stated (and successful) objective is to cover a specific group of highly-influential people that have worked on very specific projects in furtherance of a specific political/economic ideal that we're reaping the fruits of now in real time.
I have no doubt that a nationalized healthcare system would be bureaucratic and inefficient. But I also know our current system is worse by almost every metric and stays that way due to lobbying and, yes, propaganda against alternatives like Medicare for all.
You're correct to an extent, but "the rich" also have a point there. As a taxpayer, the level of waste and incompetence in government spending on those problems is horrifying. It doesn't have to be that way. We don't need to spend billions of dollars and decades of time just to get minor infrastructure projects completed.
That's because the ultra-wealthy control the elections via unlimited campaign contributions, "independent" group spending, lobbying, providing lucrative jobs to ex-politicians, or even running for office themselves. Both of the major political parties are corrupted by money, just in different ways, different funding sources. The news media has also been centralized, monopolized, and increasingly, owned directly by billionaires.
The public sector doesn't work because it's been sabotaged by the private sector.
Well, consider how our voting priorities would change if billionaires had less of an impact on elections? Would we be where we are today if, for example, Musk couldn't spend over a quarter billion dollars influencing the 2024 election?
I honestly don't think Musk affected 2024 to any real extent. Look at how much narrower Harris's loss was than other incumbent losses in 2024. If anything you could make the argument Musk tanked Trump's lead like Trump tanked Poilievre.
Democrats running a candidate that lost their only attempts during a competitive primary. As well as that candidate being unable to read the room and saying they'd do the same economic decisions as the unpopular _incumbent_ Biden. And they still were within 1% of votes!
It is much easier to assume that someone else funneled money somewhere on the other side and caused your side (which is always perfect and without fault) to lose.
It is absolutely disheartening and horrible to face the reality that democracy may result in outcomes you don't like, and people may have voted wrong with full knowledge and forethought.
No. Capitalism is ineffective at solving lots of problems. Particularly problems of the kind where there is universal inelastic demand, where competition makes the end arrive or product less affordable or efficient, where externalities are not priced in, and where there are single/few or a unique instance of a thing that can be used by the public.
Examples: healthcare, food and water for sustenance; insurance; pollution; parks and roadways, residential property; respectively.
I sometimes wish we actually had unregulated capitalism. Housing and healthcare would be much less terrible without legislated bottlenecks, among other areas.
Regulation never works because people can be corrupted and banks can be bailed. Regulation might look like it's protecting the little guy for PR reasons, but it will always leave a way out for the big guy. This is why inequality keeps raising.
I wish we had completely unregulated capitalism, so that middle class people would have more weapons to climb up society instead of paying the bill for everyone while drowning in debt and soulcrushing careers.
It is an interesting game-theoretic question how to spend money x (say, hundreds of billions) to maximize good.
- Should you first educate anyone who cannot read or write?
- Should you first feed anyone hungry/thirsty?
- Should you first provide shelter for all without homes?
- Should you first make peace for all without safety?
(all the way down the Maslow pyramid of needs)
How would the philanthropic billaires united ensure peace, if he had even more money? (Should one "buy" a military force that is mightier than any country's, to send out the message that every nation that started an armed conflict would regret it? Not sure if that could suppress war, but perhaps one would not feel inclined to call that "peace"...)
If I had the financial means, by gut instinct I would start out with the most vulnerable, those that can least help themselves, e.g. orphaned small children, the handicapped, the unborn.
However, in a geopolitically unstable world one could then argue it is a "waste" of resources to help people
by first feeding them when they get invaded and killed by their neighboring country soon after. But creating world peace has historically not been something that a single person - billionair or otherwise - has been able to solve.
> Should one "buy" a military force that is mightier than any country's
You'd be better off starting a clandestine agency that simply assassinates evil people. If anyone who started a war or oppressed their people was bumped off they would soon learn.
> If I had the financial means, by gut instinct I would start out with the most vulnerable, those that can least help themselves, e.g. orphaned small children, the handicapped, the unborn.
You left out expectant mothers under control of a repressive regime that demands their death sacrifice.
Mothers are vulnerable too. All that means is that two vulnerable people need care. The law in some places says that only one of them does. Anywhere that it says that, it is wrong.
Future generation will be richer and better-off than the present. Saving your charity for the future is, effectively, stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.
Also, giving now maximizes the compounding effect of your charity. Saving 100 lives today is way better than saving 10 lives every decade for the next 10 decades.
I've been reading about him giving away his fortune for 20 years. If I say I give away my fortune it's done within a week. Yet, he is still one of the richest people on earth. He's done good, but still I'm cynical about his motives.
I really like the idea of a non-profit with an end goal. It makes it much more targeted and accountable. Even providing bonuses (within reason and making it difficult to game) for completing the goal quicker would work as well.
As a guy who on numerous occasions has been in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy, why doesn’t he just write a huge check to the IRS and be done with it?
“Donating” to the IRS is an imperfect solution that scales to all billionaires. If he’s only solving for his individual wealth, he can fine tune it to more specific causes.
The fact that this must occur to address even a portion of humanitarian necessity is an indelible indication that our current government systems are incompetent likely through capture.
$108B net worth now (per chart in the article), so he will be left with paltry $1B.
Still, would be beautiful to see all megarich do the same. Keep a few yachts, mansions and planes if you give back a few small countries' worth of GDP back.
Apparently billionaires in the USA hold 4.48 trillion, 756 of them or so.
So if they all dumped their wealth and saved a billion (should be enough to retire on, even for the conservative portfolio!) we would have 3.72 trillion - it would cover the US deficit for two, maybe three years.
Or to spin this another way: Americans spend around $200B* annually on education (private spend, on top of federal/state/local education spend), so this would provide all-expenses-paid free tuition for everyone for 18 years, or more than 50 years if focusing on primary/secondary education. In that time, there might be a new crop of megarich to continue the cycle :)
([*] $50B for primary/secondary ed, $150B for higher - figures via Kagi Assistant, which I didn't double-check).
While many of us Linux and open source nerds share the sentiment you described, I seriously doubt waiters see him and remember how they murdered the competition by bundling software with Windows OS in the 90s and 2000s.
You could always buy a Linux laptop or an android tablet. Tablets and smartphones is where windows lost. Those devices far outnumber PCs. Your complaint about windows is old. You have options to not use it today.
Now he did lose my trust and that’s because of two things:
1. His association with Epstein. It is documented and quite possibly the reason for his divorce.
2. His trust made controversial deals during Covid. The poorer countries wanted the formula so that they could scale up production themselves. However, the gates foundation supported the patent on the vaccines instead and had themselves and middlemen to arbitrate price on the supply
In theory, doesn't that just distribute the value to all other Bitcoin holders? I dunno. It's hard to think about the value of something this abstract.
About time. Where the hell has this guy been? Guy makes hundreds of billions of dollars off the backs of working Americans and then leaves to donate all that American money to India in the form of public toilets under the guise of philanthropy. Meanwhile the country that made him a billionaire is literally falling to a fascist coup.
Seriously, just screw off. We needed you 3 months ago. We'll call you when it's time for your day in court at Nuremburg 2.0.
I have seriously mixed feelings about this kind of philanthropy. Yes, it is good that he's going to give his wealth away like this. I do not want to diminish his efforts in that!
But also, why collect such wealth in the first place? What was the point? Was the money really better off being hoarded by one person with the fingers crossed hope that they'll spend it altruistically someday? The existence of the wealth imbalance itself, and the general practice of wealth hoarding, are frustrating counterbalances to the good of giving it away.
There were, I think, fair reasons to do this. A patent-free "people's vaccine" may well have reached fewer people because there's got to be money in scaling up the production of something like this.
You could maybe compensate all the people and companies you put out of business by throwing your weight around in the 80s and 90s.
Maybe throw Jerry Kaplan a billion or two for fucking up his launch of the Go Communicator.
Seeing downvotes, which means you haven't been around long enough to remember all the shit Gates pulled back in the go-go 90s. ANY new technology would instantly get a press release from Microsoft saying they were working on the same thing, leaving customers and investors to wait for Microsoft's product. Which most of the time never came or was stillborn. Gates was an asshole, and he might still be, but a tidal wave of greenwashing can fix anything in the good 'ol USA. Now he's a fucking saint, right?
My (bigger) problem with his legacy is Windows on every government (or otherwise important) computer and all the botnets and compromised elections, espionage and destruction enabled by it over the years.
> Today, the list of human diseases the world has eradicated has just one entry: smallpox... I’m optimistic that, by the time the foundation shuts down, we can also add malaria and measles.
What is Gates going to do about the anti-vaxxers, especially now that they're running the US government health programs?
Many of the problems that the Gates Foundation wants to solve are effectively political. In other words, the dysfunction of governments allows these problems to fester, such that the only, temporary solution is for someone like Gates to step in. What is Gates doing to solve the fundamental political problems? The foundation is trying to do the work that governments should be doing, so what happens after Gates dies and/or his money runs out?
Gates has a scathing critique of Elon Musk, accusing Musk of killing millions of children, but that's the inevitable outcome of a system where everything depends on the whims of billionaires. Gates himself appears like a rarity among them now, with a bit of a conscience and sense of public responsibility. We may praise Gates for his philanthropy, but it would be irresponsible of us, the non-billionaires, to leave the public's welfare to chance like that, and neither should Gates, about to turn 70 years old, support a world that depends on his personal existence in that world.
It seems like he intends to give away the same way he did until now.
How is this a good idea considering that a political instability can wipe out all that effort?
Here's an idea: Give away your wealth to run unprofitable but essential "machines" like social media and news organizations to stop the vicious circle the humanity plunged in. Do it just like Musk but hand it to an independent organization that does't push for an agenda or profits.
Russians for example, pay social media personalities to push their talking points or even better they pay people who push talking points that are beneficial to them without directly agreeing on the transaction. Hijack the method, pay influencers you believe are beneficial for your causes and ideals.
It may look like just another billionaire trying to influence politics but you can make it into transparent institution. You can award prizes(monetary and honorary) like Nobel did.
Wouldn't be great if Twitter was run buy a transparent institution that releases logs, stats and full source code and doesn't need to do sketchy shit? Sure it would be imperfect but it can be beneficial, like Wikipedia for example.
Make social media into an impartial infrastructure with decades of runway and let people build the specialized things around it.
Throwing money at media just turns it into a financial arms race against other rich forces like that, with the recipients of that media (you and I) as the targets. The only way to win is not to play. Or at least support independent media, use the money to boost politicians that will advocate for and defend the free media.
From his perspective, there are millions of people dying of infectious diseases and other very treatable conditions. That's the urgent problem and the one he can solve very directly.
i think it is telling that we trust Bill Gates to give away his wealth more effectively than if the same assets were handed over to the UN or some other global health charity. why?
The one problem Gates doesn't seem willing to tackle in earnest is the billionaire problem.
i.e. Somebody close to the control of money funnels a disproportionate (based on expertise, intelligence, effort, contribution, etc.) amount to themselves. They quickly come to view this as the just natural order and view anyone who disagrees as a communist hater.
Elon Musk is the current best example. Despite spending most of his time at twitter last year, Tesla was trying to set Musk's compensation at over $100 billion[1]. For what, exactly?
Bill Gates was every bit the problem billionaire in his own time. Only a tiny proportion of billionaires ever decide to engage in significant philanthropy, much of which wouldn't be necessary if their peers weren't draining society of the capital to do it's own research and building. Some argue that billionaires can serve society by hoarding resources and then directing them intelligently in directions governments are too stupid to consider, but that argument falls flat if most billionaires never get past the hoarding stage. Gates has called on his peers to do more. Few have listened.
It's great that a few former robber barons are engaged in serious philanthropy, but it's like slapping a band-aid on a bullet wound. It would be far better to stop the shooting. Reigning in executive pay would be a solid start. How do we do that?
Sorry. But you don't get to be a billionaire working as an executive.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm all for reigning in excessive executive pay. We should do so in any case. However, what I'm trying to say is, we can reign in executive pay as much as we like, and billionaires will simply siphon that leftover money to themselves in addition to the money they currently hoover up.
Cannot ignore that his communicable disease research and treatment has been effective. But his school voucher and farming initiative have been awful. Ultimately it would have been better as general revenue to provide these services through government.
It would be more effective to use his wealth to put a president that is not a war criminal and stop making US the bully of the world. That would be a blessing for humanity
At his level, he doesn't just spend or give away a pile of money, he is somewhat like a force of nature: he controls and directs a significant portion of the money stream in the world. Think of what the Gulfstream does for air, but for money.
His story started with computers: he was among the few who built the foundation of the technocratic civilization. Computers and machinery have created a good deal of prosperity, but there is a grave problem with it: computers and machinery have been completely isolated from ethics. Research in AI is no longer guided by what's good for humanity, but by what's possible. Today this manifests in such relatively innocent crimes as disregarding copyright and data privacy when training AI. But that's a sign of a deeper disease: the isolation from ethics. If it's allowed to continue like that, in a few decades this anti-ethical AI will kill at first humanity within humans and then the civilization itself.
IMO, the biggest difference he can make now is finishing the story that he started long ago, by bringing the AI beast under the umbrella of ethical control. It won't stop it, but will significantly reduce the fall out.
And I don't care about your Gates hating, for whatever reasons you have I am just not interested the cynicism and conspiracy theories about Gates - tell it to the hand.
The thought that a _few_ benevolent billionaires will save the world was a preposterous notion in the 2000s and is still an absurd notion today.
This is nothing more than a billionaire (with a rich history of his own in destroying society) trying to buy his reputation back.
Reminds me of all of the billionaire shitheads (Walmart/Walton Family, Purdue Pharma/Sacklers, …) that buy the naming rights on education facilities, dying arts academies, and even libraries. Nothing but trying to wash away the guilt.
Our shitty family contributed to the opioid addiction en masse all in the name of profit, but hey at least you get a reduced or free tuition to pristine art academy or academic institution (if you meet criteria).
Tax the rich. End subsidies given to ultra wealthy.
One of the great tragedies of the world is that while he is arguably the philanthropist with the highest positive impact in human history, a significant part of the population seems to still think he is the literal Antichrist.
This statement is so 90s and so BOFH-centered that it is irrelevant to a level of stupidity. Gates has done a lot to prove he's not a cold-hearted mf and compared to all the bros in their prime at the moment, dude, just think of Elon or Larry Ellison, well our man Billy is really very much a bright persona.
Rationally, you're correct. But emotionally, there's a lot of people who don't understand why someone would provide a free service without an ulterior motive. Gates talks about this a bit on the Trevor Noah podcast.
Microsoft's company practices under Gates don't help, but they are far from the main issue people have with him nowadays. Most people aren't even aware of the things Microsoft did.
People think he is the antichrist because he promotes vaccines and because there are multiple quotes of him where he explains that he wants to reduce the world's population. By raising the standard of living and giving healthcare to the poor, which empirically seem to cause lower birth rates, but lots of nutjobs assume he tests weaponized vaccines or something like that. And people are distrusting of people who appear too altruistic in general, thinking it's some kind of con (and often they are right).
There is a difference between reducing the world’s population and slowing its growth rate. The highest growth rates are necessarily in areas with high mortality. People have more babies to compensate for this mortality. Improve mortality rates and the population growth naturally goes down.
Good point, "Reducing population growth" is a more accurate portrayal of what Gates actually said.
But in practice they are the same thing. Almost the entire developed world has a fertility rate below the replacement rate. Even the upper half of developing countries are below replacement rate. If you bring health care, urbanization and the economy across Africa to levels comparable to Russia or Brazil we can expect their birth rate to similarly fall below the replacement rate too.
I think the comment was referring more to the antivax/conspiracy crowd who often mix Gates in with Soros, etc. in their stories. Still plenty of those folks.
I am not saying Gates is a monster. So I am not commenting on him. I am commenting on your logic of doing supposed good and hence they becoming good.
When you look at the history of most colonial monsters you will notice is an often repeated trend. Those despicable monster amassing wealth literally on the bodies of natives and then going back home (including some to USA) and buying a "good name" (sometimes literally in the form of those fancy titles and peerages etc).
Oh by the way, Musk and Ellison from your example are benign non-beings compared to pretty much all those "monsters".
I don't know where you are from or where you are now but a lot of world sees "good deeds of good people" with great suspicion.
Agreed—I spent the 90s idolizing Jobs and despising Gates. But today I have deep respect for Gates and the way he's using his wealth as a positive force in the world. Jobs had better taste and was a more effective product leader, but I'm sorry to say that he sucked as a philanthropist. It's disappointing that he spent ANY of his mental energy at the end of his life building that dumb $100M yacht, rather than focusing on his legacy.
I’m making a stretch to find an answer, but there’s an argument to be made to putting great works of art and beauty in to the world counts as an act of bettering humanity. Look at The Vatican for an example. The patronage of that wealth concentration gave us many of mankind’s greatest achievements.
So if you consider Jobs’ boat or Apple Park or the fact that 700M people hold a literal masterpiece of design and engineering in their hands in order to send nudes and memes to each other a work of benevolence then it makes sense.
My guess would be, actually a very small number of people think he’s the antichrist. Why would anyone other than someone with decades of operating system passion even care who this guy is? They know he’s a rich guy. Big deal. I’d guess most people just live their lives and don’t care about Microsoft monopoly or FOSS or anything. The same can probably be said for his altruism—most people probably have no idea.
The antivax movement has been demonising the medical side of his foundation for decades at this point - I'd wager the folks who weren't born in the 90s are more likely to have heard about that than about the genesis of Windows
The antivax movement is a tiny number of fringe wackos. Normal people are not against normal vaccines, even if some of them had concerns about one recent one in particular.
But they were a significant force in electing the current president and his health secretary who is currently endangering whether we all get a flu and Covid booster this autumn.
16% of American adults believe that vaccines are unsafe [1]. That's 40 million people, which is not exactly a tiny number.
While concerns about the Covid-19 vaccine are highest (24%), significant numbers of people still feel that "normal" vaccines are unsafe, like MMR (9%) and flu (11%).
For many people "wealthy = evil". And "poor = good". It is easier to demonize someone that is doing better than you than to admit that maybe he is just making better choices.
Yea, his involvement with the Covid vaccine research seems to have made him a target for a large portion of the GOP/MAGA contingent. They are convinced that he wants to use the vaccine to implant a microchip in everyone and control them.
Huh? You must not hang around middle America, out here people act like Bill Gates wants to vaccinate all of Africa in order to sterilize them and also put microchips in your brain. I guarantee if I asked five random people on the street in Kansas about what they think of Bill Gates, half of them would say “oh right he’s like doing bad stuff with the Illuminati?” or something similar.
But that is not Bill Gates' fault because he hasn't been doing it in reality. I think the difference still matters. Only the restricted set of conspiracy theorists and their audience thinks otherwise.
This is true, because Trump caters to them. It isn't clear that their numbers drove this -- I think rather it is a function of their willingness to be completely loyal to him, which is what he craves.
> a significant part of the population seems to still think he is the literal Antichrist.
Beware that you don't fall into the trap of thinking the 1% of the population that makes 90% of the noise on the internet is "significant" or a representative sampling of the population. Most everyone else's views are quite boring and detached from extremism, they just don't shout their moderation on the rooftops.
Ah yes, saving millions of kids’ lives through vaccination and virtually eradicating polio is a way to make up for … checks notes… bundling a browser into an OS and not being nice with open source.
Yes and Bill Gates is such a good guy that he even remained friends with Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein's conviction. To help children of course.
Truly a Bill Gates is a true hero looking out for all the children.
You mean aside his wife divorcing him over his relationship with Epstein and it being widely reported in the news? I guess we will never know if Epstein and Gates even knew each other.
For anyone actually curious and unaware there are plenty of new articles that talk about Gates and Epstein, it's not some hidden secret. However it's a topic those who like Gates philanthropy like to ignore and pretend it doesn't exist as can be seen in this thread.
>>You mean aside his wife divorcing him over his relationship with Epstein
She divorced him over Gates cheating, not over the relationship with Epstein - if I'm wrong please correct me.
>>like to ignore and pretend it doesn't exist
I honestly don't want to, like the other commented said "just google" - so I "just googled" and none of the articles I found suggest they had anything beyond a very superficial relationship where they met a few times. Again, if I'm wrong please correct me.
>In a 2022 interview, Melinda said, “I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no. I made that clear to him,” per Page Six, adding that she only met the child sex offender once because she “wanted to see who” he was. “I regretted it the second I walked in the door,” she went on, adding, “He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. My heart breaks for these women.”
https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/melinda-ga...
Well but that's exactly what I was asking for - thank you for posting this. I asked to be corrected and I was.
But let me quote what the article you linked says:
"claimed that Bill had met the disgraced financier on “numerous occasions.” One of those meetings allegedly lasted for hours."
Does that sound to you like they had a deep relationship of any kind? I'm just trying to form my own view on it - and that just doesn't read to me like the kind of relationship that people try to portray it as. If I met with someone "numerous times, sometimes for hours" you wouldn't immediately think we are friends or that we even share any values together, would you?
Nothing (as far as I can see, and tbh I'm not going to read past the first page of google results) suggesting that they were close friends in any meaning of the word.
Like, I don't know what kind of conclusion OP wants people to draw out of this. A lot of people were "friends" with Epstein, since he knew pretty much everyone, there are pictures of him smiling and shaking hands with lots of well known VIPs.
Which is why I asked OP for a source so we can just read about this - the whole "do your whole research" thing is just such an easy cop out because like you said "just google" doesn't really confirm anything, it's just a bunch of news articles from more or less reputable sources.
I think he is both. Maybe you need to do some evil before you can do some good, because the general evil does whatever necessary to win in competition, and that is challenging.
He would have never got the money he has if he didn't do that.
This is assuming that huge wealth inequality is a given and all we can do is pray for a rare oligarch to give some of that money back to those in need.
Edit: I think it's great that he is doing this, but I don't think it's a good system. Giving money is so hard at scale that you need to set up a corporation just to figure out how to do it, and either it's so hard that they can barely shave away at the amount they have or their MO has evolved to include preserving themselves as an entity. If that wealth were more distributed, the social distance between those in need and those with money would be less.
We don't have general system in place that would somehow prevent this. The world runs on capitalism and everyone needs food and roof. Whoever has the power to give them or take them, has the total power, and can play with the system more they have wealth. Social democracy is some sort of middle-ground but it is not enough, because it is not applied everywhere equally, and it is hard to define what is selfish and non-selfish.
Laissez-faire capitalism is not synonymous with all forms of capitalism. We could and have in the past curbed runaway wealth and power. Pretending nothing can be done is, at best, ignoring history.
We could also decide to live in a society that doesn't allow for such runaway wealth consolidation we need the robber barons' hand-outs to do good. C'est la vie.
Sure you can. You have an equitable society, and when someone inevitably tries to take more than their share (because there will always be sociopaths), you make them stop.
That works only if majority agrees that we put such system in place and enforce it globally in the world. Some could say that communism was a failed attempt for this.
Why does it have to global? Isn't that just imperialism? Why can't it be scoped to a geopolitical unit that wants it?
(I'm highly skeptical of social movements that claim to be for equality, but of course there are officials who suspiciously enjoy non-equal luxuries. Then it just looks like greedy sociopaths leveraging 'equality' PR in bad faith, as a tactic.)
There are democratic countries in Africa, for example, but people in there still seek "better life" by moving to other countries, or other countries abuse these countries, because the have the wealth do so, and on individual level, it is very hard to resist some additional comfort for life if you are below certain level. People look social media and want what others have. It is very difficult problem.
Natural resources also are not distributed equally and e.g. living longer life is a basic human need. What if some other country has the technology to save humans but they don't give it for free? Some start hoarding wealth in order to get that and it changes the political attitude in general.
And then I suppose that Steve Jobs is the Christ in this story.
You only have to look at the research output of Microsoft Research to know that it is the other way around. Kind of weird how even smart people get things mixed up.
I could understand some of the criticism for charitable work.
For instance, his foundation pushes birth control in developing nations. On the surface, it look like a just and noble cause.
But imagine how a developed nation would view an act like this on its own people from a foreign body. Imagine some wealthy Chinese national started taking out ads on American television telling Americans to have fewer children and going to poor neighborhoods in the US and handing out free contraceptives.
It's a kind of soft imperialism and social engineering that I imagine a lot of people object to. The guy can't even keep his marriage together and he's insistent on telling people half way around the world how to run their life?
Some people will always believe some dumb shit. There is no tragedy, just the regular condition of many people being ignorant.
He also did awful things in the business world when he was younger. He's no saint, either, he is just a normal, messy person. But he's done more for the poorest and neediest people in the world than most countries.
Al Capone ran a Chicago soup kitchen during the Great Depression, serving hundreds of thousands of free meals. Did this philanthropy absolve him of the harm done while acquiring the fortune which paid for the charity?
I'm not sure he's actually the philanthropist with the "highest positive impact", when looking at the "net value"
he's "extorted" a lot of money from various states by locking and price-gouging, money that would have otherwise been spent on social projects
basically he has done
Gates -> extort money -> fantastic personal wealth -> gave back to organization *he* decides to give too
while the normal path would be
Governments and people have lower spending because they don't need to give Microsoft too much cash -> governments and people decide by themselves how to spend extra money -> there are more, and more diversified, humanitarian actions
He is not the greatest. He is literally taking the playbook from Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller who amassed great wealth then gave it away. These days you have Warren Buffett or Saros doing the same.
Many in tech were along for the Bill Gates show and felt he was a negative actor to the industry in many ways. The fact that he is taking that wealth and channeling it through charity to achieve what he believes is important worries many on both sides of the political divide because of the enormous amounts of power he has.
Specifically over the foundation:
1. Influence Over Public Policy
Criticism: The foundation’s massive financial power allows it to heavily influence public health, education, and agricultural policy, sometimes without democratic oversight.
Example: In education, their support for charter schools and Common Core standards drew criticism for pushing reforms without enough input from teachers and communities.
2. Pharmaceutical and Vaccine Influence
Criticism: The foundation has been accused of favoring pharmaceutical-based solutions, sometimes at the expense of broader public health approaches.
Example: Critics argue that funding pharmaceutical companies during vaccine rollouts (especially during COVID-19) prioritized private profits over equitable global access.
3. Corporate Ties
Criticism: The foundation has invested in companies that contradict its stated goals (e.g., Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil), raising ethical questions.
Example: Investments in fossil fuel companies were seen as inconsistent with health and development goals.
4. Global South Criticism
Criticism: Some argue that Gates Foundation programs in Africa and other regions can be top-down, lacking local input, and continuing a form of “philanthropic colonialism.”
5. Agricultural Interventions
Criticism: Through the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the foundation promoted industrial farming and GMOs.
Response: Some say this undermines traditional, sustainable farming practices and increases dependence on multinational corporations for seeds and fertilizers.
6. COVID-19 Vaccine Access
Criticism: Gates opposed waiving IP rights for COVID-19 vaccines, which some argued delayed access in poorer countries.
Defense: The foundation claimed that maintaining IP was key to quality and speed, though many public health experts disagreed.
He is an interesting and unique character who achieved much but don't polish those angel wings just yet.
Yeah, and vaccines are a big reason why. He has seen the benefits of mass vaccination first hand and was a big advocate for pandemic prevention before COVID. COVID really broke a lot of people's brains.
You'd be saying the same thing about Epstein if he hadn't been caught.
What I don't understand is the comradeship I see in people competing to effusively praise oligarchs. Bill Gates fought against technological progress, fought against free and open source software, fought against antitrust, even bribed officials to push out competitors. Why would people pat each other on the back for admiring him?
Even afterwards, when he bought his redemption by showering money upon dubious nonprofits, and by creating other, even more dubious nonprofits - simply paying everyone who could possibly have a problem with him, including dozens of journalistic organizations and hundreds of individual journalists - all of his charitable efforts are still obviously ways to play with various social theories that he has, not to help people.
It takes a real psychopath to accumulate that much power, with so few principles, and then to use it to play games with people's lives. His entertainment and the entertainment of his class is endangering the world.
And I still listen to Michael Jackson, so whatever, but we know that his relationship with Epstein was pretty extensive, and what was said during his divorce (in relation to that) was alarming, as well as the fact that he immediately crumbled and gave her the farm. There's your conspiracy theory; I'm not going to be caught praising a guy for mosquito nets whom I pretty much knew hung out with Epstein for a time as intensely as anyone else did. Epstein was giving away money for elite approval, too.
What's money for if not for patronage? You can't take it with you.
Anyone with a truly global perspective will notice multiple elephant-sizes omissions from Gates' statement. The premise that deep, systemic societal issues can be addressed directly while stepping on egg-shells around political topics is laughable. In 2025, you cannot separate starving kids and poverty alleviation from global politics and the world order.
His #1 goal listed is almost offensive when you consider what is happening right now in May 2025 -- an utterly preventable scenario that he can't even mention lest it get "too political" and tar his image.
In other words, it's perfectly valid to be skeptical of his motives, which seem primarily to be around elevating his personal brand and legacy.
> No mom, child, or baby dies of a preventable cause
This goal might offend you but it doesn't offend me, and I don't think his motives (whether it's for legacy or personal brand) matter to me or the mother of a child who didn't shit itself to death because a vaccine for the rotavirus.
No billionaire will ever be a net positive to society. The wealth he accrued was literally stolen from the labour of millions of people. No token donations at the end of your life will ever remediate that situation.
I often see this sentiment whenever a billionaire is in conversation, but I don't understand. Can you elaborate on how his wealth was "stolen" from people?
The way I see it, he's wealthy because he founded a wildly successful technology company by first creating something of value (MS-DOS). Microsoft has since grown to be one of the largest companies in the world, which hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily work for in exchange for a high salary, at least for engineers.
In a capitalist society, to a rounding error, most people work out of necessity - to house, clothe, and feed their families. This creates an inherently unequal relationship between capital and labour which is exploited to accrue wealth in the hands of a very few people.
This is literal theft from the working class of the fruits of their labours.
Billionaires become billionaires because of preferential treatment by governments, not out of any kind of merit. There are lots of better things the world could have had, Linux and the software commons would be much much much better if Microsoft hadn't hired all the best software engineers to make proprietary software and if the federal government hadn't coddled it and overlooked its monopolistic practices. The Internet would be a much better place without the likes of Google and Microsoft throwing their weight around.
It's perfectly accurate to say that billionaires steal from the public, it's just that what's being stolen isn't easily quantifiable because it's effectively 'potential'. Think of the constant enshittification of everything and you get a sense for what's being stolen.
Sure. They ask him for government backdoors, to add stuff to it for military purposes. It's quid pro quo. Bill Gates gets to capture the lion's share of the wealth from his government-protected monopoly with all its anti-competitive practices and the public is left out in the cold.
>> The wealth he accrued was literally stolen from the labour of millions of people.
It's such a weird take I don't even know where to begin. Are you suggesting that all people who worked at Microsoft to make Windows and IE and all their other products had their labour "stolen" from them? If yes, can you expand on that?
What do you do for a living? Do you perform some kind of a job that you get compensated for? If yes, do you also feel like you're being stolen from?
> It's such a weird take I don't even know where to begin. Are you suggesting that all people who worked at Microsoft to make Windows and IE and all their other products had their labour "stolen" from them? If yes, can you expand on that?
>>This is just mental gymnastics on the level of "it's not murder when the military does it!".
What definition of embezzlement includes both parties willingly engaging in exchange of labour for financial compensation? I think you are right, there is mental gymnastic happening, just not where you think it is.
>>No, because it's not relevant to the discussion.
I don't even think you need to go that far - nobody who is not at least somewhat sociopathic will even become a billionaire (Buffett, that includes you) - because they'll happily step off the rat race at 10 or 100 million.
It's hard to take him seriously or consider him a good guy. While advocating for the environment, he doesn't hesitate to short tesla, an EV company (questionable nature aside).
There are two possible reasons for this (the 'why' remains -- not enough money?):
- He's admitting he doesn't care about the environmental mission, just the returns
- He thinks tesla is a fraud, but isn't saying it publicly
Well it seems obvious why anyone would (and morally should) short tesla... but let me break it down for those in the bleachers with two facts.
Musk 1: behind the presidential podium during the inauguration with the country watching twice did a salute of the enemy of the American people in WW2. And 2: controls the vast majority of tesla shares and is their current CEO.
It is patriotic to short tesla. And Bill Gates clearly cares about the future direction of this country.
What educator taught you that to short a company was to attempt to destroy it and it's mission, and to go "long" on a company was to support its mission?
I'm guessing it was Musk, and you should ask for a refund of your tuition fees.
A Google search suggests you are paroting Musk comments about Gates and shorting as if they were your own ideas.
Being the person that understands more about charity than anyone else, nobody has donated more than him in the history of charity but the radical left doesn't want you to know this. /s
I don't think I've read it written directly in this thread yet, but philanthropy ideally exists to fix gaps that public services and initiatives don't address.
It is a way of acting and holding public power outside of democratic accountability. I'm with Gates' implicit vision here, that the end-goal is for philanthropic initiatives towards a given problem to eventually not be needed.
Philanthropy is often used as a way to curry public (and government) gratitude for a rich person who deigned to direct crumbs of their wealth towards the public, which in turn one uses to amass or solidify power – again, outside of democratic structures.
By demanding that matters of public welfare be properly handled by the state, shift power back to democratic processes. As a bonus, government has an incentive to actually address issues. Performative philanthropy thrives on the continued existence of the problems they claim to address.
which part of "not only" and "but thrive" weren't relevant to his point?
We've always known that babies need nutrition, but knowledge of the role of the gut microbiome, how to develop it and ensure it is healthy is relatively new.
It’s too bad this guy turned into one of the bigger fear mongers during Covid times. He was one of the main pushers of the whole “New Normal” narrative and his doomsday prognostications did significant damage to society and generally went completely against every value he claimed to have.
But hey, people like him got a free pass to spit whatever nonsense came out of their mouth as long as it was pro-doom. Good news was never allowed and Gates was great at stirring up fear, panic and bad news.
It's 1999 over again. The whole world was panicking that all the computers would blow up over the Y2K problem. Which mostly didn't happen because we spent billions fixing the problem. Were the doomsayers wrong?
They certainly were, but you've elided the reason why. The doomsayers were predicting that we would have complete civilization collapse when the year rolled over to 2000. Vast quantities of wealth erased by bank computer errors, planes falling from the sky and killing thousands upon thousands, etc. Such extreme scenarios were never plausible. The doomsayers were wrong because there was a real problem and it did get fixed, but that problem would never have amounted to the apocalyptic event they said it was going to.
I actually do believe that he genuinely wants to give all of his money to some purposes. I mean money is just a number to him now. You definitely don't want to die with a huge pile of assets left behind.
It's just that I might not agree with the purposes he chose. But hey, he is the boss, he can do whatever he wants.
Why do you think something that is getting extensive investment from private sources needs philanthropy?
Also, billg has laid out the goals of his Foundation and what they aspire to achieve. Which one of those aspirations do you think should be replaced with "fundamental AI research"?
A lot of the Foundation money goes on disease research and preventative and curative vaccine and medicine development. All of those areas are already being transformed by AI as a tool, and a lot of that development happens as a result of philanthropic, government, and private investment.
AI as defined today is brittle. I am interested in understanding the fundamentals of learning so that systems can be learn as quickly as humans and have thier same level of robustness. Such a breakthrough would have a worldwide impact.
As far as I can tell, very few places are looking into this topic area. Jeff Hawkins group is one of the few places. I would like to get involved as this area is my passion but I can't connected to funding to do so.
Gates is betting very heavily on AI and thinks it will greatly improve health outcomes. Both for medical research and even primary care. You may not like it, but I'm sure he is offering grants for AI research. Not necessarily for training models, but for finding effective ways to apply models to achieve the foundation's goals. So, it's not a stupid question to ask at all.
AI as defined today is brittle. I am interested in understanding the fundamentals of learning so that systems can be learn as quickly as humans and have thier same level of robustness. Such a breakthrough would have a worldwide impact.
Anyone else feeling uneasy that society is increasingly dependent on a handful of ultra wealthy people's generosity for investment in certain good initiatives? We live in a time where there are individuals who have more money than many small countries, governments are cutting funding for good programs while individuals are stepping in to help. What is the point of living in a democracy if big investments depend on the mood of some billionaire?
The government has a fixed pie to allocate to various projects. Businesses, by contrast, can create more pie, from labor and raw materials that cost less than the value of the final product. So funding charitable causes with money earned from honest business is a win-win for society.
But then we can debate if Microsoft made their money honestly or not. If Microsoft exploited their monopoly, then perhaps Bill Gates stole from the rich to give to the poor...
I can totally see here the headline "While millions sleep hungry in Asia and Africa Bill Gates throws away uneaten fries after dinner at a local restaurant like its nothing"
Not to mention it's pretty difficult to give away all money. Some of it will need to pay for the administration of programs in existence after these 20 years, accountants, and of course himself - if he's still alive by then.
I don't think promises like this should be considered news. Take a look at the list of people who have signed Gates' own Giving Pledge and ask yourself if making the pledge changed their behavior at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge.
Historically, it's pretty typical that rich people don't give their money away until their death, and the Pledge itself is not a statement of intent to give the money away during their life.
Giving during your lifetime is a much, much better way of ensuring that it does what you want. It is very hard to control things from the grave, as someone administers it and can do what they want, as long as they follow the letter.
I can go on and on on how Bill Gates has done immense damage to software freedom etc and that is precisely the reason I will very much allow him to "be good" now.
Doesn't fix what he has already done, totally, but not only is he away from that now, he is doing stuff I actually respect. Absolute best case scenario.
While I agree giving away money can have negative secondary effects, destroying the money makes no sense and is positively moronic. He should just give it to his kids if he doesn't know what to do with it.
It’s like during the coronavirus, more money was given to people without related increase in real-world generated
value: result, prices increase and people who had savings can now do less with them.
It's interesting he decided to go this way rather than put it into a sustainable trust and just trickle money out indefinitely.
I suspect he believes that these causes need shock therapy. To eradicate a disease, you are better off doing it all in one go.
I also wonder if he looks at something like the Ford Foundation and realize in the long run that any charitable trust will just turn into an overstuffed political advocacy group that does little to advance his charities or even his legacy.
Was just talking with some folks last weekend about this in a different context. Open-ended foundations can easily have their missions drift and also become essentially sinecures for an executive director.
Ford Foundation is a great example of what can happen. Olin is a good example of a foundation that was set up to dissolve after some length of time.
Mission drift can sometimes go in a positive direction. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for example, functioned primarily as a tax evasion vehicle while Hughes was alive. After his death, the HHMI was in deep trouble with the IRS and sitting on an endowment of ~$5 billion. So it appointed former NIH director Donald Fredrickson to turn it into an actual research funding organization and mend relations with the tax authorities and research community.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-11-fi-2620-s...
You may know this already, but both Olin Foundations are good examples, actually. I believe the John M. Olin foundation dissolution plans were specifically in response to the Ford foundation's drift. The F. W. Olin foundation (John's Father) coincidentally dissolved in the same year, but that was due to largely accomplishing their original goal of endowing engineering buildings at colleges, and pivoting to founding a new engineering college entirely.
I don't really know the details but an organization I was/am involved with did get money from the "Olin Foundation" but didn't know specifics beyond that. Yeah, one of my fellow board members observed that Olin was pretty much the canonical example of a foundation that set itself up to be dissolved.
I've always wondered about the Gates and Buffets commitment about giving away their wealth in death. It assumes that the people of the future are more worthy of it than the people of now. Whatever poverty will exist in the future also exists now. I suspect they've thought about this too, hence the acceleration. If anything, addressing the issues now has a chance of reducing the issues in the future.
There's always something to learn from everyone. Elon reiterated one thing frequently - "We have to get to Mars soon because I don't want to be dead before it happens" (paraphrasing). If this philosophy is used for the right purpose, we can get some cool things happening sooner. Recent events also show that there are people who are not interested in being charitable at all, so it's even more of an imperative.
Many things take time. And it may be good to fund them. But outsized contributions don't necessarily make them happen that much faster.
I think the phrase is something like you can’t get a baby in a month if you have nine women.
> It assumes that the people of the future are more worthy of it than the people of now
I don't think that is the assumption. The assumption is that people will treat them well for planning to give away their money without them needing to live their life without their precious wealth.
This is a weirdly conspiratorial idea to my eyes. Not because people don't have unsavory hidden motivations that they give good excuses for, but because this doesn't really seem to confer any benefit.
The benefit of wealth is your capacity to spend it. If they don't spend it in order to give it away on a future date, they have lived their lives without it.
You can say that they are selfishly maintain optionality while they are alive, but that's a less biting critique, I guess.
> There's always something to learn from everyone. Elon reiterated one thing frequently - "We have to get to Mars soon because I don't want to be dead before it happens"
I understand the idea of learning from everyone, even those whose values I strongly disagree with.
But after learning about everything Elon has done in the public sphere, would this statement be more likely just narcissism rather than a deep and inspiring virtue?
That doesn’t really matter though? The end result is we’ll get to Mars faster than we’d otherwise do.
The way things are going here on Earth (thanks in part to Musk and "Glorious Leader" Trump), we ain't makin' it to Mars before global resource wars completely cripple all our scientific aspirations, including becoming a "space-faring" species. It's all wasted effort at this point, because nobody seems willing to do what it's gonna take to ensure that humanity has any future at all.
He can have other motivations. Between 2020, 2024, Mackenzie Bezos & Laurene Powell Jobs, the deeply unimpressive philanthropy of the Buffett children, and his own divorce, a very rich philanthropist has excellent reasons to aim for the foundation being liquidated in his lifetime, and not handed off to administrators like, yes, the Ford Foundation or Harvard...
(And then, of course, given his enthusiasm for AI, there is a major question of whether 'keeping your powder dry' is a huge mistake - one way or the other.)
I'm an AI skeptic when it comes to business cases. I think AI is great at getting to average and the whole point of a business is that you're paying them to do better than average.
But I think current AI (not where it might be in a few months or years) is absolutely amazing for disadvantaged people. Access to someone who's average is so freaking cool if you don't already have it. Used correctly it's a free math tutor, a free editor for any papers you write, a free advice nurse.
This sucks in a business setting but I could see it being incredible in a charitable setting. When businesses try to replace someone great with something average it sucks. But if you're replacing something non-existent with something average, that can be life changing.
I'm an AI skeptic and I can empathize with his AI enthusiasm given the problems he's trying to address (or at least professes to be trying to address).
> a free advice nurse.
It is good for the other use cases, but it is the worst possible source of advice on subjects where the user has no expertise, and where there are serious health or safety consequences for getting it wrong.
I totally agree in situations where folks have access to an advice nurse. Always prioritize an expert over an llm.
Same goes for the others, if you have the means I think you should get a tutor or an editor as well.
However, if you’re choosing between nothing and an llm then the llm starts to become a great option.
I used to work rescue and if I had caught one of my coworkers asking an llm how to treat a patient I would have flipped.
But if I had rolled up to an incident and some Good Samaritan was trying to help out by using an llm that would be awesome!
Most first aid can be broken down very basically.
Call a professional for help. Are they breathing, is their heart beating, are they bleeding.
If you haven’t called someone that can actually save the persons life no amount of first aid will help.
Unfortunately unless something is obviously preventing breathing as someone untrained theres not a lot you can do if they aren’t breathing.
Heart beating is pretty easy, chest compressions…
Bleeding again, pressure, and a lot of it to try to prevent the bleeding.
I would want to check what an AI response is to some situations but as long as it just tackles those cases it can probably only do more good than harm.
Id be more worried some good samaritan would start cutting people to try to “get an airway” or some nonsense. That would significantly increase mortality rates…
I'd rather see a Good Samaritan being talked through CPR or whatever by a dispatcher who's trained to give that advice over the phone, rather than having a hallucinating LLM tell them to do something deadly.
I believe the situation here is more a matter of they don’t have a dispatcher to guide them.
In some rural area of Africa they came across a car crash. Two people hop out and assist while a third drives off to notify someone to send emergency help.
An on device LLM might be very useful there depending on what it says…
> The whole point of a business is that you're paying them to do better than average.
...this is a really interesting idea, but I'm not sure if it's entirely true?
If we're talking about a business's core competency, I think the assertion makes sense. You need to be better than your competition.
But businesses also need a whole lot of people to work in human resources, file taxes, and so on. (Not to mention clean bathrooms, but that's less relevant to the generative AI discussion.) I can certainly imagine how having a world-class human resource team could provide a tire manufacturer with a competitive advantage. However, if those incredible HR employees are also more expensive, it might make more sense to hire below-average people to do your HR and invest more in tire R&D.
Completely agree with this.
I think my sense is that the zeitgeist around AI (at least in business circles) is much more “The only way to ensure our continued survival is by embracing ai in all our core competencies” than “your tire company is going to have some adequate hr for a great price.”
An example that springs to mind is the arms race between tech CEOs over who can have more of their code base written by llms.
It’s amazing tech and it seems like it’s being marketed for all the wrong things based off of some future promise of super intelligence.
I really liked the article posted on here a week or two back along the lines of AI is a normal technology. Imo, the most sane narrative I’ve read about where this tech is at.
His strategy also may have changed due to recent events affecting foreign aid...
True. But remember that Gates said he could not fill the hole left by funding cuts to USAID: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/....
To be clear, I'm speculating; it does seem plausible that he is trying to slow the bleeding even if he knows full well it won't stop it.
Economies of scale could vastly benefit a lot of charity work, but few charities can attain sufficient scale to achieve that. There is an unfortunate amount of overhead and administration in charities that do not directly benefit the cause.
In that sense, I suspect targeted and planned large investments into charities with scalable plans is a lot more efficient than years of trickle donations.
The decision can be read in the larger political context. There was some controversy a while back on certain directions the Foundation took like the project on sanitation (aka the toilet challenge) and the backing of charter schools. Regardless of one's opinion of those, he is taking a stand and drawing a line in the sand.
Who manages that trust? There is not shortage of short term needs, and short term value added can compound over time. I think this is a fine approach. He's Bill Gates - his legacy is ensured regardless.
Isn't the Gates Foundation effectively a trust in itself? I'm no economist, I don't know the exact definitions but the projects they do aren't overnight or one-off donations, they need long term (financial) support and guidance; vaccination development takes years, vaccination programs with the intent to eradicate diseases like polio take generations - e.g. the vaccine was developed in the 50's, it took ~70 years to mostly eradicate the virus in humans (only 30 known new cases in 3 countries in 2022).
If you have more money than anyone else on earth, the highest leverage use of that money is going to be to fund projects that require more capital than anyone else can afford to fund and that governments are unwilling to fund. That way you know you are actually adding to the opportunity set and not just displacing someone else. The difficult part is, of course, deciding which of those projects that only you can fund will actually be a good bet, but that doesn't change the fundamental calculation. Not sure if that's Gates' strategy, but it would make sense if it was.
Actually the highest leverage would be to bribe electable politicians to get governments to be willing to fund your projects. It’s remarkably cheap apparently to do.
You could eradicate a disease by killing all the hosts. I worry that the people who want to "eradicate disease" don't actually care about long term outcomes, they just want to have their likeness cast in bronze, with a nice plaque beneath it, lauding their "oversized" achievements in life.
Anyways, the type of person who can earn a lot of money in this economy, and the type of person who can best decide how to spend it altruistically, are almost certainly not the same person. The person who earned the money certainly understand this. Yet. Here we are.
> The person who earned the money certainly understand this
Your cynicism is failing you.
The psycopaths that have accumilated all the money in the world are certain that they are the type of person who can best decide everything in the world on any topic, especially when it comes to people poorer than them - which is of course everyone.
This is the way that foundations and endowments should operate.
Too many well-intentioned organizations wind up milquetoast tax-exempt hedge funds aimed primarily at self-preservation because the received wisdom is that they should focus on building endowments and keep their withdrawal rates below 4% in order to achieve immortality.
I'm a big believer in research-driven philanthropy and mission-driven organizations. But i've seen the institutional desire for self-preservation supersede essential purposes at a few of them, with disastrous implications for their effectiveness.
The Gates foundation probably controls ~5% of the ~$2T that charitable foundations have in endowments globally. If the majority of these organizations adopted these sorts of depletion goals, their program budgets could probably more than double.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
>Too many well-intentioned organizations wind up milquetoast tax-exempt hedge funds aimed primarily at self-preservation because the received wisdom is that they should focus on building endowments and keep their withdrawal rates below 4% in order to achieve immortality.
Which charities are giving away less than 4% a year? Charitable foundations in the US are required to give away at least 5% of their endowment a year:
https://www.ncfp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/The-Five-Per...
> Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Ha ha, well here's mine. First, I'm way ahead of Mr Gates: I'm already worth almost nothing.
But if I had billions to give, I would be supporting Science Education, Democracy and Journalism. Scholarships for bright, motivated students.
With all due respect to Mr G, I don't believe any of his objectives is possible with stable, educated, science-orientated social progress. Humanity depends on it.
That could help in the long run, but you could also help people not die. Both are good causes and need funding
They fund students through grants to PIs. I suspect the amount is on the order of 100M$.
That’s like 25 research groups for 5 years, there are about two orders of magnitude more than that.
* s/with/without/
If wealth can be immortal why deplete it?
All money spent is voting for allocation of resource. Sometimes there is too much money fighting the same goods in which case it may not be a good allocation of resources. That money can sit to become more money.
At a societal level, immortal wealth is incredibly bad.
At a personal level, because wealth sitting still, having 4% pay for the overhead of maintaining the 96% and then using the pennies left doesn't accomplish much of significance.
You can always wait another year. And then another. When is it time? 50 years? 100 years? "We will maximise good by donating it all in 1000 years" is questionably not a charity at all; it's just a massive pile of money that isn't used for anyone but paying the people sitting on it.
Even if you trick-feed donations to charity over 100 years, the sums may be insufficient to reach a usable scale. - A big investment in research. - A concentrated push to vaccinate against a Disease so it goes away for good. - An infrastructure investment that lifts a community out of poverty.
These themselves produce "good over time," perhaps even faster than the money in the fund rises in value. It's a balance, but immortal trickle donations are likely quite far off to one direction of that scale.
Nobody allows money to sit. People deposit the money into banks. Due to fractional reserves, that's equivalent to loaning the money out so that others can efficiently allocate it instead. That's how money becomes more money.
Charities that aren't actually spending money to do good are just banks in disguise. Banks that don't pay out interest. Why would anyone donate even one cent to banks?
Say what you want, but I respect this a lot. Sure as hell beats giving it all to your kids.
You don't have to love Gates or everything the foundation does to recognize that putting billions toward global health and poverty is way better than setting up a dynasty or letting it sit in investments
Foundation is a way to set a dynasty! Just look at all the robber baron foundations out there.
> letting it sit in investments
I havent looked, and frankly can't be bothered [0], but I expect that even after giving away an unfathomable amount of money, the foundation and gates are probably richer (dollar net worth) than they have ever been.
It has been sat in investments, they have been giving it away, but they can't keep up with it.
[0] Turns out I could be - https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/william-h-ga...
> letting it sit in investments
Depends on investments. Arguably tech advances are more effective for alleviating hunger than direct food donations long term.
When though? When is it enough to be used for something good?
And/or when you die. We need more people trying to make the world better while they are here instead of treating the finish line like the, well, finish line.
Exactly. Look at the Walton and other families hoarding wealth by abusing tax law and lobbying to make it even worse, and the armies of advisors and attorneys parasitically helping them.
Gates is thousands of times better than most. He and Melinda have done more good for the world than all but a few handfuls of individuals. I've heard estimates his original MSFT stake would be worth over a trillion dollars now.
Among billionaires maybe he is on the good side. But in general?
Linus Torvalds did more for the world than Bill Gates, IMHO. And he didn't need to set up a system that first appropriates money in order to "be generous" later.
What diseases has Torvalds eradicated?
SCO UNIX.
What diseases has Gates eradicated? Polio has been surging back and nOPV (which Gates stands to generate a lot of personal wealth from, by the way) has been a bit of a bust. Measles is going strong, too, and Malaria seems to have been a bit of a token effort for Gates.
Polio type 2 and 3 were eradicated and overall we went from 400k cases of paralytic polio per year down to less than 1% of that.
You may want to check your numbers because polio type 2 and type 3 are both still around (in fact, cVDPV type 2 is very, very common). The GPEI website has the recent numbers, updated weekly (although with ~3 month lag).
400k to 4k is not 400k to 0. Eradication means 0. People don't get smallpox vaccines today because we hit 0. American children get ~4 doses of IPV still, despite what you are claiming as "eradication."
Reduced the number of cases by 99%*
That's amazing and I am very happy I live in a world where someone helped that many people, regardless of who you compare their accomplishments to.
Attributing that whole reduction to Gates alone is a ridiculous thing to do. He didn't even fund most of the project and the only thing he really brings to the table is money. This has been a multinational effort with literally millions of people for 3 decades. Gates mostly wrested control from them in the last decade.
If he manages to bring the project over the finish line, I will celebrate his achievement. At this point, signs point to failure of the GPEI being a near certainty. Unfortunately, we'll be back to 400k in about 10-15 years if we give up at this point.
I mean, the lifestyle of rich babies doesn't even require that much money. He can easily provide them the money to travel to a random city and buy a luxury condo and set up a food-truck business. A couple of million is enough to one day decide to pack it up and buy a farm.
Sure, but only capitalism concentrates so much wealth in such few hands
An alternative would be that company like Microsoft couldn't gain so much wealth, simply because their revenue would be capped / taxed high enough that the extra money they make goes back directly to people and governments
In this case, *everyone* gets to vote and choose for what philanthropies the amount gets used, rather than having just "one guy" deciding for himself how to spend all this money, which is prone to errors
The government spends about 10x the amount of money on foreign aid than the gates foundations entire budget ever year. Not to mention the hundreds billions spent on domestic aid every year. So your dream is already a reality.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Or, why not do both? If you are worth billions, you can give millions to your kids and give the rest to charities of your choice. Everyone wins.
This attitude of "I'd rather burn everything" feels like such a massive waste of an opportunity to leave a quality legacy behind and legitimately make the world a better place.
There's a pretty clear line between "this inheritance is enough to make you comfortable and sort you out for life" and "this inheritance will make you rich beyond your own comprehension" - there's a certain amount of money that nobody has a need for.
Raising kids to not be spoiled even with moderate amounts of wealth is hard as is...imagine being one of the richest men in the world
Don't take a dime then either. Good luck generating your own power, homeschooling your kids, and building your own roads.
[flagged]
[flagged]
So you are saying his life is miserable because he will never know the joy of giving to Bill Gates because he is giving to his children. I think you're living that life.
His foundation really does seem to do a good job with 'effective altruism'. There's a reason they're marked as secondary beneficiaries on all my accounts.
Also, as a recommendation, you guys should look into whether your employer matches charitable donations to 501Cs in any amount. I find giving a solid chunk of my discretionary budget to charity every year lends a sense of purpose to a job that wouldn't otherwise have much (at least, in the sense of helping others).
I enjoy being a dev, and I've given serious thought to simply continuing working once I reach my FIRE number and donating half of what I earn to charity. I think most charities would have more use for my money than my time, given my disability
> There's a reason they're marked as secondary beneficiaries on all my accounts.
Strictly speaking, the foundation discourages individuals from donating directly to them, mostly because the tax treatment of giving that way isn't necessarily favorable. They've set up Gates Philanthropy Partners as a 501(c)(3) charity which is aligned to the same philanthropic goals.
(Of course there's also many other worthwhile players in the broader EA space.)
I worked there and would encourage you not to do that.
It'd be smarter to see who they are giving money to (which is all public) and give directly to those orgs. The Gates foundation itself spends a lot of money on consultants, "government engagement" (aka lobbying by another name), and fancy dinners.
That's fine or maybe even noble for a family foundation, but it's probably not something individuals would want to fund.
Anecdata, but the brother of a friend was working on malaria in a SE Asian country and the Gates Foundation got interested in what they were doing, and wanted to find out more about it before possibly funding some of their work. They flew the entire team to the US, put them up in expensive hotels for a few days and flew them all back. They calculated that the cost of that was three times their annual budget. It would have made more sense to me to either (a) fly someone from the Gates Foundation to the country so they could see things first hand or (b) conduct the investigation / interviews via the internet. Given that the Foundation's people weren't in-country anyway, (b) seems like the best option all round given the environmental costs of flying.
> They flew the entire team to the US, put them up in expensive hotels for a few days and flew them all back. They calculated that the cost of that was three times their annual budget.
Are you sure about that?
Let's say every employee gets a $1000 round trip flight, plus $2000 for 4 nights in a decent hotel, a total of $3000 per head. Are you telling me that employee is paid $1000 a year or less?
The way they talked about it, the total per head was north of $5k, and they lived in an incredibly poor / cheap country. I wasn't fact-checking their figures, but they weren't the kind of person to exaggerate for effect.
Lobbying is ugly, but essential in the system we live in. You have to be pragmatic about it :(
That depends on what you are lobbying for. I don't think we have to treat all lobbying the same.
The problem is the good guys have to spend donations on lobbying because otherwise the legislators are only hearing from the bad guys. This is a story as old as time I think.
[dead]
Exactly. He doesn't need 20 years. That's just him trying to draw attention to himself.
If he was really serious about giving away his money, he could write a single check to the Red Cross || Doctors Without Borders || insert charity here and in five minutes be done with it.
The world doesn't need more vanity charities. It needs its existing charities to be better funded.
The Red Cross is not equipped to make effective use of all that money at once
Says who? They can (ethically) invest it and fund programs off a 5%-8% or better return. They can find new things to do. They can donate some of it into health research that is currently under-funded.
> They can (ethically) invest it and fund programs off a 5%-8% or better return
They can also lose or squander it. One of the Gates Foundation’s value adds is monitoring.
And with such a sum of money they would surely have to hire staff to work all that out. Can thy do that?
I’ve tried volunteering at certain orgs before, I filled out forms and literally they rejected me because they had no more staff to organise and oversee more volunteers.
If your solution is just invest it, well, the Gates Foundation may as well hang on to it (you think you can do better job than Buffet?) and setup a system to dole it out.
If the org has to find new uses for it, surely the Gates Foundation is in a better position to get that done?
I'd be more willing to give this idea credit, if the total annual budget for the ICRC ($2B) and Doctors Without Borders ($1.6B) was more than a few percent of the total amount being proposed (>$100B invested or ~$8B/yr for 20 years).
You'd require those organizations to more than double in size to use the funding provided. That's not a good plan. Bluntly, his plan is better than yours.
I've got no love for Gates, but are you just trying to draw attention to yourself? What's your agenda? You're the one making a fairly outrageous unsupported claims.
[dead]
That much wealth could probably fund every food bank in the country indefinitely, even at extremely conservative returns.
> That much wealth could probably fund every food bank in the country indefinitely
That seems like an incredibly stupid way to spend money that has been eradicating diseases and saving lives in countries where food insecurity isn’t a choice.
Do food banks lack funding? In my region they often struggle to give away food before throwing it out. Even the poor in America don’t starve.
Food insecurity is a choice in the US? I suppose yes, if you mean it's the government's choice: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/food-banks-usda-cuts-im...
> Food insecurity is a choice in the US? I suppose yes, if you mean it's the government's choice
That’s what I mean. Like the housing shortage, food insecurity is trivially solved if voters cared about it. We don’t at almost every political level.
For you (or other folks) working in tech and giving to charity, apart from corporate match, another couple pieces of advice are to consider a Donor Advised Fund. They are really easy to set up, and then you get some benefits, like the ability to "bunch" your donations (can help with tax deductions) or donate appreciated investments (like RSUs) without paying capital gains tax.
https://charityvest.org/ is a great modern DAF tool. I use it to get 1 single charity receipt at the end of the year and track my giving.
Another happy CharityVest user here. I recommend it to everyone I talk to when DAFs are remotely relevant to the conversation.
Money managing tools like Betterment also have native UI features to donate investments to charities as well
Agree on the Donor Advised Fund (I use Fidelity). If you have highly-appreciated stock, you definitely should look into a DAF. Another benefit is that it is extremely easy to donate to a charity; click and submit and you don't have to worry about paperwork and putting each donation down on your taxes.
Yep, I've considered a DAF and donating stock, but it wouldn't be eligible for my employer match.
Depends on the employer I guess. Some companies will do match even for DAF distributions (not the initial transfer obviously)
> without paying capital gains tax.
It's a funny day when you're feeling charitable, but go out of your way to avoid helping the entity that should be the ideal charitable recipient.
The state goes out of their way to encourage it.
Let's say you just won the startup lottery and you've got a significant amount of now tradable stock. Some of which was early exercised and the cost basis is effectively zero. Some of which was RSUs or non-qualified options and you owe ordinary income. And that you're way over into the top tax brackets.
If your zero cost basis stock is Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS), there's a very nice discount on federal capital gains, so you might not need to do the rest of the stuff.
Otherwise, if you donate your apprechiated zero basis stock, you get to save federal capital gains of 20% + 3.8% net investment income. Plus it offsets against your ordinary income that's 37%. So that's a 60.8% discount on being charitable for the feds. If you live in California, capital gains are regular income, so you're saving 13.3% because the capital gains go away and offsetting 13.3% on your ordinary income, so your total discount is 87.4%. In other words, your difference in cash after taxes for selling $1M of zero basis stock or donating $1M of zero basis stock is $126k.
When the government is telling you it only costs $126k to give a charity $1M, it's pretty compelling. The math used to be different, when you'd get credit for state taxes on the federal return, but that was many years ago now.
> The state goes out of their way to encourage it.
People with lots of money and power get their representatives to pass laws that reduce their taxes.
Yet people still advocate for giving these reps endless increases in taxation.
That is not their argument.
You lowering your tax rate and giving that money to charity isn't magicking more money into the world, it is just a different allocation.
The government's tax income is allocated by the masses (in theory anyway). It is fair and dispassionate.
Philanthropy / charity is picking winners and losers based on your personal whims, and for many it is about gaining social capital.
Even under ideal circumstances, the priority of a government is to serve the needs of its citizens. Sometimes, these happen to align with global needs, and sometimes not.
In order to improve global health or address other issues that impact countries beyond where you live, the government (even an idealized version without waste, corruption, or political games) might not be the most effective way to accomplish this.
Right. But taking the combined $140 billion net worth of Bill and Melinda, about 30% (or whatever 'fair' rate you want to assume) shouldn't have been theirs to give away. Let them spend the other part however they want.
What I find kind of interesting is that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet argue that they should be taxed more, but they don't do anything to further that goal aside from media soundbites and headlines. They could fund an incredible war chest for a lobbying apparatus who's sole purpose would be to create a more fair tax system. But no such thing happens.
Some government programs are good, but if it went to the US government then Trump could cancel them. (Unless the courts stop it.)
It seems fortunate that some charitable funds aren't subject to that risk. They have other risks, but they seem lower.
In an imperfect world, government funding alone seems insufficiency diversified. That's too much power in one place.
Charitable funds fall victim to the same fundamental issue, leadership is more interested in benefiting themselves than putting the money towards the aims of the charity. In general I donate to places local to me. I'd much rather see a bench at a local park than hold on to some hope that my money does something meaningful to a large international charity organization.
I think what it comes down to is that there's no general rule. There are a lot of organizations you could give money to and it all depends on what it is.
> You lowering your tax rate and giving that money to charity isn't magicking more money into the world, it is just a different allocation.
This is only ever true if you assume that government tax spending is 100% efficient, with nary a fraction of a cent being wasted. I don't think that's a safe assumption.
No. The assumption is that charity and government have roughly equivalent efficiency. Both government and charities have (wildly varying) overhead and government agencies may enjoy economies of scale that charities do not. Yet another area of the world that contains a surprising amount of detail.
Explains why there is a non-profit writing sudo in Rust recently featured on HN.
If that entity used my tax dollars wisely (looking at nordic countries), yes I agree paying taxes is superior. I have no interest in contributing more towards our 1T/yr defense budget or subsidizing oil and gas.
The sovereign wealth funds of the Nordic countries weren't built with tax dollars, but rather with oil revenue. We could do the same thing here if there were political appetite for holding energy companies responsible and the wealth they produce as belonging to the people living on the land the resources are coming out of.
We're doing better now than we were 50 years ago, but the Nords are light years ahead.
The oil fund isn't a Nordic Thing™, it's norwegian. We in the rest of the nordics don't even have (significant amounts of) oil.
Yes, Denmark, Sweden and Finland combined don't even have 20% of the Norwegian fund. Norway is basically the Saudi Arabia of Europe.
Norway is basically anything but the Saudi Arabia of Europe. The ONLY thing that is similar is that they both have oil and natural gas in their territory.
It's a gross comparison.
Well they do both have monarchs! Though the royal palace in Oslo is a public park. As I was strolling the park, to my surprise I attended a quick fanfare as the king left his palace and his driver (I presume) almost ran over a dumb kid that darted in front of the royal sedan. then at the end of the royal avenue, at the foot of the most glorious mathematician sculpture, the royal sedan turned a corner directly into rush hour traffic, which his highness had to endure just like the rest of us commoners.
What a lovely anecdote, I've been to the royal park in Oslo once and it's gorgeous! As an Austrian, I personally prefer to look at my royals in the catacombs of St. Stephens Cathedral though ;)
I was 100% of the impression that GP was comparing petroleum resources, and explicitly not climate, traditional dress, or human rights.
Flew straight past me somehow, that's on me!
How they spend their oil resources is also quite different. :)
Grass is always greener on the other side. Trust me there is plenty of waste of tax money in the nordics too. Recent example. Every month the govt pays 4 million dollars for a healthcare journaling system that is not used (because it does not work). And that is just the on going cost (even more was spent building it).
Or a school admin system built for 100 million dollars and crap. They even spent a lot of money trying to prevent a open source client that solved a lot of the issues they had.
Maybe in absolute money it is less than the US. But remember US also have a lot more people.
So, there is a limit to these deductions, meaning, the government is still usually getting the lion's share of most people's taxes (and, generally, I think 50% of your income is the max you can deduct).
I think there is value to letting people allocate some percentage of their income directly to causes they are passionate about. Even if you assume the government is efficient and not bloated, and benevolent, this lets people contribute to causes without waiting for political consensus, or to smaller causes that would not be on the government's radar (yet) or ever. It's more pluralistic. It lets smaller causes bloom. It keeps me civically engaged.
On a personal note, I do take issue with the amounts spent on "defense" (which is often bombing people or threatening to directly or indirectly), and would rather help folks than bomb other folks.
Perhaps the government 'should' be the ideal charitable entity; but it most definitely is not.
The waste, fraud, and abuse that runs rampant throughout the government tells us that the powerful often use taxpayer dollars as their own slush fund.
Sure the government does much to relieve the suffering of people around the globe; but it could do far more with substantially less.
> The waste, fraud, and abuse that runs rampant throughout the government tells us that the powerful often use taxpayer dollars as their own slush fund.
I don't know that it's worse than any other institution? At least voters can remove the corrupt, and they are prosecuted. Are you saying these uber-wealthy and CEOs aren't just as corrupt or worse?
What I am saying is that I have a choice whether my money goes to a corporation or to a charity. I don't get to choose whether I pay taxes or not.
More often than not, corruption in government does not result in the perpetrator being prosecuted or even removed from office.
I am amazed at all the people who are so sure that corporations and/or wealthy investors are corrupt, but give big government a pass. As if the same types of people don't run both.
> but give big government a pass.
Its probably not so much that government gets a pass as much as government is the organization that, by virtue of being a citizen, they own and control, so when things go wrong it is their own fault, and they really don't want to accept blame for their own faults. They would have to ask "How did I manage to fuck this up?", which is a hard question for most people to ask themselves.
When it is distinctly someone else's organization it's much easier to throw pointless shade to make one feel better about their own failings.
> I am amazed at all the people who are so sure that corporations and/or wealthy investors are corrupt, but give big government a pass.
Where do you find these people? I've never met them. It seems like everyone complains about government waste and corruption - even when it's not happening!
> Sure the government does much to relieve the suffering of people around the globe;
If we're talking specifically about the U.S. government, I suspect its decisions cause more suffering globally than they alleviate, though of course there are open philosophical questions inherent in any attempt to quantify suffering.
It's OK to do both and who is this ideal charitable recipient you are talking about? You mean the one that takes your money and does whatever it wants with it?
[flagged]
That assumes a lot about the current administration.
Assumes a lot about every administration. I don't see how anyone can look at what the US Government has done and failed to do over the last decades and call it the ideal charitable recipient. Even when it's doing the right things, it wastes enormous amounts of money to do so and the primary beneficiary is one of the wealthiest populations in the world.
Of course, you wouldn't expect them to be the ideal charity; they are explicitly not a charity. Anyone who is actually trying to be a charity should have little trouble using funds more charitably than any government in the world.
Presumably the current administration is what has made the day funny (in a sad way).
It might be surprising, but there are charitable people outside of USA too. I do consider paying taxes the best way to help those in need, but I don't live in the US personally.
It assumes a lot about future administrations too. When Obama was in office I complained a lot about the Executive branch consolidating power and using executive orders, and the Democrats were fine with it because he was a "good" administration.
But guess what? If you give too much power to a position, people who want to abuse the power will try to get themselves there.
I wasn't upset that Obama was consolidating power because I thought Obama would abuse it. I'm upset that he consolidated power and then left it to whoever would come next, and then has the gall to be surprised that consolidating power under the Executive would undermine the power of the Legislature the moment a President who was willing to abuse said power was sworn in.
We're cooked because of the fucking team sports. Both parties have had the chance to reign in the Executive and neither has the balls to use it against their own guy
Obama didn't "consolidate power", he issued fewer EO than Bush (276 vs. 291). Trump has issued 142 just within these 100 days.
Number of EOs issued is a poor measure of centralization of power. Most exercise of executive power these days don't even require an EO, just a decree from one of the executive agencies. And looking at Trump vs Obama is myopic. This process has been going on continuously since at least the FDR admin.
No, it was not. If you look at the EOs by president, they were fairly stable or even trending down until Trump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_...
Even in qualitative terms, the "consolidation" was incorrect. Congress abdicated its responsibilities, and the Federal agencies picked up the slack. They're not controlled _centrally_, it's not like Obama was ordering agencies to write particular rules.
We now see what the central consolidated control actually looks like.
The state is never going to be as agile as private people engaging on topics they are passionate about on their private time.
When it comes to funding various "public good" efforts, we don't need agility. We need fairness and at least some kind of public influence over what gets funded.
The problem with leaving everything to private charity is that only the wealthy people and churches doing the donating dictate what counts as "public good" without you and I having any say over it. We luck out when the donor has good intentions and chooses to donate to an organization doing good, and we have no say when the donor has evil intentions and chooses to donate elsewhere. Allowing a small handful of rich donors to decide what counts as a good cause is not ideal.
> The problem with leaving everything to private charity is that only the wealthy people and churches doing the donating dictate what counts as "public good" without you and I having any say over it. We luck out when the donor has good intentions ...
It is problematic even with good intentions.
People don't have time, expertise or usually even the motive to systematically examine ROI. They or someone they know has a 'good cause' and they support it. For example, endowments at their alma mater - likely a school for wealthy kids, new buildings for the hospital (that serves wealthy people), new research in diseases that are problems for the wealthy, etc.
They can't know without talking to people who have experience with poverty, for example, and those aren't the people coming to dinner tonight.
> The problem with leaving everything to private charity is that the wealthy people doing the donating dictate what counts as "public good" without you and I having any say over it.
The thing about public goods is that people tend to agree pretty closely about what they are. The wealthiest person in the world benefits from, e.g. clean air just as much as you do. You should be a lot more worried about wealthy folks who don't donate to charity and just spend the money on big luxury yachts and the like, because these folks are essentially free-riding on everyone else.
> The thing about public goods is that people tend to agree pretty closely about what they are.
Is there some data that shows that?
> The wealthiest person in the world benefits from, e.g. clean air just as much as you do.
We can find public goods in common for many groups, but that's actually a bad example. Wealthy people care about clean air in their neighborhood; pollution is therefore concentrated in poor areas. They don't site the new incerator (or drug treatment facility) on the Upper East Side of Manhatten.
Many needs are specific to poverty. For example, wealthy people are not subject to malaria; they are no illiterate; they don't need toilets or labor rights; they can afford college for their kids regardless of tuition; they have unlimited access to safe, fresh, healthy food. They don't need more available and less expensive health care, so they donate to cancer research and high-tech therapy and not to the medical clinic in the poor neighborhood.
Given (at least the USA's) increasingly polarized population, I don't think it's at all true that people agree closely about what should be funded, and I'll admit that fact makes my argument weaker: The danger of a particular wealthy person "donating to evil" is similar to the danger that the majority of the country votes to "fund evil."
I also agree that wealthy folks spending their wealth on luxury yachts while the public suffers is also something to worry about. Who knew? Gargantuan wealth inequalities are mostly downside for everyone but the wealthy!
Shouldn't we be a lot more worried about how political polarization might impact government choices, compared to private sector ones? Private actors who spend their own money have to pay for their own choices and are accountable to themselves in a way that political operatives fundamentally don't. I see a lot more potential for 'evil' on the political/state actor side.
Yeah but it's not either or. And people are always want to contribute to their pet causes. Go tell someone who's sibling died of cancer or whatever that they shouldn't donate to cancer research because the state should do it. Like yes it should but however much they do you may have personal reasons to want to do more. So private charity is always going to be a thing in parallel to public works.
A group of people engaging in topics they are passionate about in their private time is what a state is. Perhaps what you are trying to say is that you only want to help out your friends?
I'm trying to reconcile how https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM is 'helping out your friends.' See, we can all create straw-men. It's not very useful for discourse. The vast majority of us want what is best for humanity, but we have different views on how to deliver it.
You can fund the people (government) or you can fund specific people whim whom you have an intimate trust (friends). The only other choices are to fund yourself or nobody, neither of which are applicable here. Not sure why that is so hard to reconcile.
You are framing it as a binary "you either fund the government or only your friends." You really believe there is no in between? You are framing this as if you're on some high ground and we either have to agree with your opinion or we are selfish. There are other ways to advance humanity than your opinions. Government is not some benevolent entity. The supposition that it is has no basis in data from present reality or history. As one example, see marxist/communist governments killing their own people as the leading cause of death in the 20th century.
> Government is not some benevolent entity.
Of course not. It's quite literally just the people. If you cannot trust the people with your charitable donations, but still wish to donate to a person, then you're going to have to narrow that down to the specific person you can trust (i.e. your friends). There is no in-between.
There is a major important nuance. It is just some people, who happen to control the government (ie: use of force) to achieve their ends. "The people" are diverse and have different opinions, and the "government" represents a small portion of them. I've certainly donated to charitable organizations that are not my friends, but have a proven track record of effectively using money for specific goals. The government rarely meets this criteria.
Yeah, no. A government is not "a group of people engaging in topics they are passionate about." A government is an entity with authority to tell you what you have to do, and if you don't do it, eventually people with guns will show up at your door and take you to jail.
That's a very narrow aspect of government, and one that I have hardly ever encountered. Law-abiding people don't do it because of government coercion but because they believe in being cooperative members of their community and don't want to hurt others.
Another, much larger aspect of government, especially democratic, is people getting together and doing things as a community that can't be done individually.
"I have not encountered something" != "it does not exist." The logical conclusion to defying a government is people with guns showing up to put you in cuffs and take you to jail. Even over something as piddling as a littering fine or parking ticket . . . watch what eventually happens if you refuse to pay it.
People getting together and doing things as a community does not require a government. We can and should do that of our own free will. That's not to say governments aren't needed. But labeling them as "people getting together and doing things as a community" ignores their ability to enforce their laws, including the sanctioned use of violence or the threat of violence to coerce people into obeying or to punish them.
> The logical conclusion to defying a government is people with guns showing up to put you in cuffs and take you to jail. Even over something as piddling as a littering fine or parking ticket . . . watch what eventually happens if you refuse to pay it.
That may be logical, but it doesn't happen. I've had unpaid parking tickets for long periods and nobody showed up at all, much less with guns. Where do you live that they jail you for it, much less go out and find you? Your local government must be very well-funded to have resources for that, not to mention having a fascist attitude - how popular is that with constituents?
> People getting together and doing things as a community does not require a government.
It depends - many times it is the most or only effective way. It has decision-making mechanisms - including elected representatives, hearings, experts - and executive mechanisms including employees, equipment, contract managers, processes, institutional information such as maps of infrastructure, and loads of experience. Imagine some neighbors in NYC trying to put in just a new streetlight.
> But labeling them as "people getting together and doing things as a community" ignores their ability to enforce their laws, including the sanctioned use of violence or the threat of violence to coerce people into obeying or to punish them.
It doesn't ignore it, but your prior comment repeats the Internet trope that that's what goverment is - a coercive mechanism with guns. That's only one narrow aspect - the great majority of what government does, and how society works, has nothing to do with that. It's for the outlaws, not for the great majority.
> People getting together and doing things as a community does not require a government.
That may be true, but government (at least a democratic one) is just people getting together and doing things, so if you already have one you can save the effort of the community trying to organize a second community on top of the community they already have for no good reason.
> But labeling them as "people getting together and doing things as a community" ignores their ability to enforce their laws, including the sanctioned use of violence or the threat of violence to coerce people into obeying or to punish them.
That literally tells of people getting together and doing things. These are not magical powers. They are simply community action. I suppose it highlights that people getting together and doing things isn't all sunshine and rainbows, despite your apparent dream for a world where there is only happiness, but such is reality.
I expect the aversion is that those who wish to donate to charity only want their friends, not entire communities, to benefit. The "trouble" with a community at large is that everyone is able to participate, whether you like them or not. That's not to say that a community cannot see a charitable benefit indirectly, but the key point is that they want to keep the primary benefit away from strangers.
There are plenty of such organisations. Some are legal, some are not.
The government is the only one with a legal monopoly on violence; it redistributes resources in the society and it's not run by incorruptible angels but by fallible human beings - human beings who were put there thanks to investments of millions of dollars.
It's a recipe for disaster.
> It's a recipe for disaster.
Government is a recipe for disaster? Democratic government has worked for centuries without disaster.
> it's not run by incorruptible angels but by fallible human beings - human beings who were put there thanks to investments of millions of dollars.
Yes, that is the trick of every human endeavor, the great ones and the failures. It depends on you and me - let's make it happen.
> A government is an entity with authority to tell you what you have to do
If it is authoritarian, perhaps, but even that is still a matter of a group of people. Most seem to believe that government should be democratic. You may not find yourself in a democratic state, but that would only continue to contribute to what makes the day funny. Perhaps you didn't read the entire thread and are posting this without understanding the full context under which it is taking place?
No, all governments have the authority to tell people what to do. Some governments operate within a legal framework that limits that authority in many ways, but if an organization has no authority over the people who live in a given area then it isn't a government.
> all governments have the authority to tell people what to do.
But, again, that government is the very people we're talking about, at least as far as a democracy goes. Although even in the case of an authoritarian government, the individual authority is only as strong as the people are willing to go along with recognizing it, so it is not really that much different. No magic here, just people.
Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority on the minority.
It's nothing to be proud of.
What you can be proud of is in REDUCING dictatorship, by removing power in centralised entities and giving it back to the individuals.
> Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority on the minority.
It is not - that would be some theoretical pure democracy, also called 'mob rule'. Democracy, as the word is actually used, requires universal human rights which protect the minority. For example, freedom of speech means the majority can't control the minority's speech, whether they like it or not.
Democracy also includes separation of powers, usually between legislature, executive, and judicial, which prevents the concentration of power.
> It's nothing to be proud of.
It's only something to be proud of if we make it that way.
You can donate directly the pay down the debt: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/government/public-debt-report...
Supporting government programs at the same time as you insist money could be better used elsewhere (at charities) is somewhat amusing.
[dead]
>I enjoy being a dev ... I think most charities would have more use for my money than my time, given my disability
You could be massively wrong about that. Many charities are desparate for IT help. I am a developer and volunteer at a charity. I have done some IT stuff for them (mostly setting up some Airtable databases) and it has been (modesty aside) transformative for them.
It seems his foundation already has significant funding. I would give to other charities, focusing on high impact work in specific regions or domains that knight not be as popular.
>His foundation really does seem to do a good job with 'effective altruism'
Can you provide some sources for this? I'm by no means an expert in this area, but my city happened to receive some of his modified A. Aegypti since 2017 and it didn't make the people here happy, at all. Though I don't even think there's a comprehensive study on how much good or harm came from it.
[flagged]
What a completely unhelpful comment: for all you know they are infertile. Having children shouldn't be done for such selfish reasons as mere personal fulfillment. I care about the kind of life a hypothetical human offspring would have (which is why I choose not to have any currently). Creating a family is a really weird solution to bring up.
But your rage is valid, I think it is just misplaced. The above commenter to you could perhaps be more effective in their decision making regarding filling their existential void. But family planning is a rash and presumptuous 'solution' to filling that need.
[flagged]
> There's a reason they're marked as secondary beneficiaries on all my accounts.
That's just insane. Bill Gates is absolutely not a good guy but you cannot be convinced to that given how much you idealize him. Have children. I would have replied to the sibling comment saying the same but comments become unreplyable once they get enough downvotes.
I have to disagree. I am an ordo amoris enjoyer and cannot agree with Gates giving a red cent to overseas causes until we fix things like drug treatment, cancer treatment, and cures for neurodegenerative diseases.
He’s of course within his rights to ignore this but I am within mine to remind everyone to please help your friend, your neighbor, your town, state, and country before you look further afield.
> I am within mine to remind everyone to please help your friend, your neighbor, your town, state, and country before you look further afield.
Nah. We have memberships in families, neighborhoods, friend groups, local areas, cultural groups, nations, and the whole world. And problems at any of these levels can grow to the point where they affect us, too. And places where the needs are most acute and broad stand the greatest chances of developing to not be as acute of problems anymore and indeed to offer value to the overall world community through trade.
Indeed, the extreme version of what you're saying is why so many only give to their church communities which are insular and isolated. Or to just retain everything.
70% of my giving is domestic, but I think it's nuts to ignore the rest of the world. Yes, things improved in distant lands maybe are harder for me to see and have less of a direct impact on those around me; so discount their benefit some, but that marginal benefit is so much larger...
You have to weigh that against the fact that you are much more able to figure out how to actually do what's needed at levels where you see things firsthand. At least, that's been my experience; it's much more realistic to start a nonprofit that can make a real difference locally, then perhaps scale with time, than it is to found something with a global mission, lacking global context on how things manifest around the world.
More importantly, I'm not a utilitarian, and do not subscribe to "effective altruism" or other utilitarian philosophies. At the end of the day it's Gates' money to do with as he wishes and it's my internet account to argue against that as I wish.
Sure, but even when you apply discount rates due to uncertainty of efficacy and distance of effects, the numbers can still be big.
At this point, I spend substantially my entire life in local service (I am a schoolteacher and I give away 6 figures locally annually). I still don't think it would maximize my effective impact to ignore the rest of my country or the rest of the world.
As someone who grew up in a Christian faith tradition that said Jesus Christ died for the sins of all of us and that we are all made in God's image, I find this position so bizarre. If we are all children of God, why should I prioritize the well being of a single stranger in Ohio over twenty strangers in Kenya? I can understand an argument for prioritizing one's family, especially if you are a parent, or even one's immediate community, but while I personally love America, the vast majority of Americans are as distant from me as anyone else in the globe.
This is a pretty common question that's raised: how can we square this with loving our fellow man?
The short answer is Christianity isn't a utilitarian belief system. While God loves everyone equally, he puts some of us closer together in love: family, friends, neighbors, countrymen. This incurs a greater obligation, plus we ought to love more those who are closer to us.
Sadly, a lot of Christian faiths teach dogma before the underlying reasoning or take a Bible-only approach which I find to be incredibly incomplete. In case your upbringing didn't include much theological reading, I would strongly recommend Civitas Dei and Summa Theologiae; the latter is less explicitly relevant to its definition but probably a better book overall.
I think you are going too far in telling other people that their religious beliefs are wrong, and that you know better (unless you are God yourself).
I really don't see how anything I wrote was that controversial; he's free to disagree and pursue his own beliefs, obviously. Everything someone says that's not wrapped up in formal logic or statistics is implicitly opinion; the fact that I find repeatedly saying so tedious and ridiculous doesn't mean I'm asserting I am somehow an arbiter of the One True Faith.
We all act as we think best. I can try to change how others think. That's about the start and end of it.
[dead]
A dollar will help someone abroad much more than the same dollar will in the US though.
A single cent? I think you vastly underestimate how little a dollar does in the US, and how much it does outside.
Moreover, insisting on going all-in on medical research before doing any immediate lifesaving sounds to me like a gross perversion of what should be, in its most simple case, an urging to make sure your kids are clothed and fed before donating to the food bank. Surely ordo does not make it unvirtuous to save a drowning foreigner even if your kids would miss a meal for it.
I’m under the impression that Aquinas says outright that it makes sense to make exceptions to the general ordering to aid those in grave need that are “low” in the order, and stuff like mosquito nets are a prototypical example of this imo. Lives saved, families preserved, terribly unjust suffering averted, etc for literal pennies on the dollar.
I don't think any individual should have the power to unilaterally choose where to deploy billions of dollars, but your vision is equally myopic. Nothing about being a US citizen gives you any moral priority over any other person.
> help your friend, your neighbor, your town, state, and country before you look further afield
Many of my friends and family don't live on my neighborhood, town, state or country. They live in the world. Consider broadening up your social circle a little bit. Our lives don't have to be limited to where a horse can travel to any more.
Sure, the world has changed. But rightly-ordered love isn't about geographical layout, it's about the natural order of community and social structure. That has changed but "mosquito nets in zimbabwe" being on the way outer end of a right ordering of love hasn't.
I think the world has changed more than you think.
You are assuming that I don't have friends or family in Zimbabwe. Which is true in this particular case. But it might as well not. As I said I have friends and family in several countries.
> I am an ordo amoris enjoyer
You seem to think this phrase implies a prescription that people ought to donate first to their adjacents (unambiguously enough to be worth including without a definition).
I'll note that, given how many sources seem to contravene that interpretation, the probability that your use of this term did not come downstream from Vice President Vance has dropped precipitously. Which might be useful information for anyone looking to diversify their information diet.
Not physical adjacents, no. If your brother lives two thousand miles away you should still focus on him more than your neighbor.
I'm unsure what Vance has to do with this. My belief comes from my religious upbringing and (in this case) Saints Augustine and Aquinas. Vance is not a spiritual leader or theologian of any sort.
I think I absorbed much of this when I was pretty young - I had sort of settled on this way of thinking before ever picking up Civitas Dei - but reading and writing on it during my schooling helped me understand why.
It's his money. He can give it to North Korea or China if he wants. Entitled and selfish.
Actually, no he can't. OFAC will absolutely destroy him if he does. I have a remote job and I am even explicitly banned from doing any work for my company while I am in China or a bunch of other countries.
Giving it to North Korea used to be associated with risks, but things are changing fast these days.
Oh it's you again, you're the guy echoing specific contemporary political figures, and dressing up American isolationism in rhetoric. In the other thread you were claiming that America subsidises Europe's healthcare by paying for its defence.
Funny how when I specifically share opinions that you specifically dislike, you sling mud about "echoing". Of course, everyone else's opinions are well-founded and of their own mind. Mine, on the other hand, are downloaded straight into my head from a daily Fox News broadcast. You can tell by how my opinions aren't your opinions, and therefore must be those of some Bad Guy or not Real Opinions.
Get a life dawg.
> opinions that you specifically dislike
You’re only sharing one opinion (America should isolate), and you’re presenting it as a fact (you refer to being „correct”).
I think you’re projecting the dislike towards your opinion. If I see American electoral politics seep into HN, I’ll call it out, as dictated by my intellectual curiosity.
I actually have the opposite position on this. 1st world countries already have the funds and economy to pursue exactly what you describe. Just they lack the political will. I don’t care to subsidise that intentional lack of investment.
I would much rather give to charities focusing on countries that don’t have the economy/ability to fix their basic issues.
Why should some arbitrary border be drawn? And if we don't take care of the world, who will? I think that's an abdication of the most serious responsibilities.
If you were to live very close to the border of, say, Canada or Mexico, would you support giving financial support to alleviate suffering in those countries?
That depends. Generally nation is a big part of how one defines rightly-ordered love. But if, say, I lived near the border, regularly went down to Mexico, had friends or colleagues there, then probably so. but more focused on alleviating their suffering than that of the country or state.
I think he wants Gates to focus his philanthropy on the Seattle region before expanding the scope of his giving to all of Washington. That could probably consume Gates' entire fortune, so the question of what to do next is irrelevant.
You clearly have never actually looked at effective altruism and what it tries to be. You would otherwise know that your values are diametrically opposed to the values of that movement and said values are neither right nor wrong, they're personal.
Of course I have. I am well aware that my values are diametrically opposed to it at a first-principles level; I find utilitarianism to be an incredibly hollow worldview that fails on many grounds, not least of which are the teleological (disordered love is no virtue.)
I don't have to argue from the first principles of the EA crowd. Everyone believes in something and I believe they are wrong; your epistemic relativism makes no sense to me. Borderline absurdist.
fwiw I'm not an EA and I generally agree with you. It's fine to believe they're wrong, but it's an entirely different thing to tell other people they should think they're wrong.
Isn't that how most disagreements shake out at one level or another, once you strip away enough of the garnish? I am by nature either blunt or an asshole, depending on whom you ask, and may have come across more as the latter here, but the core message is about the same as most disagreements: "I believe my position is right because ABC, your position is wrong because DEF, you should believe mine instead."
did you even read the article? He talks about how he has/will continue to invest significant resources into alzheimers research.
Sure I did. I'm aware his giving isn't just mosquito nets. That doesn't mean I believe the money is being directed correctly.
If your position is "it's his money so none of us should comment", I'd expect equal pushback on people saying "wow I really agree with how he's spending it."
This is just cruel nativism, a rejection of humanity except for the in group you happened to be born in. I hope everyone rejects this sociopathic outlook on the world.
And Gates is investing in Alzheimer's research FYI.
Reducing rightly-ordered love to "cruel nativism" is an incredibly uncharitable representation. I'd urge you to do some reading in comparative religion. Although I'm a Christian, I've found it instructive to spend some time going through other religions' texts, other philosophies, because dismissing them as backward or wrong does nobody any good. Learning more makes my conversations more productive and helps me better understand my own beliefs.
[dead]
My issue with Gates is that he wants to fight climate change, yet he's personally an environmental disaster with his yachts and jets. I'm not saying he has to live like a monk to be credible, and maybe his foundation is doing a good job (never looked into it), but either he's an hypocrite, or I disagree with him on how to fight climate change.
I think it's pretty clearly hypocritical, but also if his actions are (far) more than offsetting his own emissions and impact, it's still a net positive.
Of course, he could choose to not live a super-high consumption lifestyle in addition to his climate philanthopy, but if I had to take one or the other, I'd rather him continue throwing money at climate work than take fewer private jet rides.
How do we measure if something is a net positive or negative when we're talking about global-level decisions?
This has always been the sticking point for me when it comes to supporting large charities.
But... he could easily do both. This is why I have such a hard time taking anything said about climate change seriously from the likes of Gore, Gates, and celebrities. They don’t practice what they preach.
And it’s not like we’re talking about some huge sacrifices here. Go from a 50K sqft house to a “modest” 10k sqft one. Don’t sail around on personal yachts. Fly commercial. Use Zoom. Simple stuff that would give them a lot more credibility. As it is, it’s a whole lot of “do as I say, not as I do.”
I think it matters how it's done. If someone has super high consumption but also invests in clean energy to save the climate that's cool by be. If someone has super high consumption but also invests money into lobbying to deny the lower classes access to consumption as a means of saving the climate I would resent that person.
My issue is, he wants to fight climate change… then tries to spend $200bn in less than 20 years. This afflux of money creates a spike of consumerism, then a sudden dip after that. Consultants in foundations will scramble to spend that money for sure, and they themselves will buy private jets for that.
The way to fight climate change is to keep people at a low level of consumption, and spend his own money very slowly, very scarcely. And keep people with small cars, no Cadillac for any consultant.
While it might be hypocritical it doesn't matter whatsoever what he does with his personal life if his foundation is pouring billions into making the world a better place.
Helping people out of poverty is really bad for the environment too but I don't think we should be complaining when someone does that.
On a global scale his yacht(s?) and private jets are nothing, and if it helps him do good by establishing/maintaining relationships with the right people they're an "investment" into a stopping climate change.
A bit of a naive take as opposed to yours.
I'll ask the same question I've asked elsewhere because "I want to believe:" How do you measure how much someone has made the world a better place? Especially when so much of their actions, their consequences, and their second and third order effects are either unknowable or papered over by PR campaigns.
You can't really measure how much good someone has done, but their foundation has been going for 25 years and as mentioned in the article they've donated 100billion dollars to something already.
If anyone deserves a bit of good faith it'd be the Gates family, it's probably not all pretty and perfect but I am convinced they're doing a lot of good.
You'll have to ask someone else about proof, but I imagine someone would've leaked something within these 25 years if they were running a tax evasion scheme or something else fishy.
So without hard proof I repeat: Let Bill have his toys, it's a piss in the bucket on a global scale and the donated 100 billion dollars will have offset that in some way or another many times over.
Let's just say my "sniff test" says good, and while not always right I think I am here and that's good enough for me.
I don't think you can. I think the best we have is intention and Gates seems to have good intentions to me.
If his net effect on the climate is positive then you are only arguing that he could be even more efficient at it - but you are not in position to do that without knowing all his personal context. Outside you can only judge the net result - which is not a bad one.
Being a hypocrite is a fairly minor sin, and doesn't take away from the good he does. I could make a long list of worse qualities Bill Gates possesses, but I'll still acknowledge the good.
Serious question: how bad is the footprint of Gate's yachts and jets and similar luxury stuff? I genuinely have no idea.
I mean, having more than one of either already seems ridiculously wasteful to me, and I don't care if that's standard billionaire lifestyle.
It's all about virtue signaling. All he cares about is if people someday decide to "eat the rich" he won't be the first one on the menu.
This is a silly way to interpret someone donating over $100B to charity.
The thing that's always made me skeptical of Gates and any other enormous foundations is that they operate at such a high level and with such enormous budgets that they basically exist in the same "amoral" world of nation states and corporations, but yet they face none of the scrutiny or criticism that those entities face.
How do you judge the actions of someone when those actions are powerful enough to move markets, take down regimes, and change people's lives for generations?
We take them at their word and assume that everything they do is well-intentioned and good and has zero negative impact or secondary effects, but is that really the case?
To me it seems like the only charity that can be trusted is a small-scale one that acts locally and with lots of transparency.
Why would they have to be perfect to deserve donations? A "small-scale charity that acts locally with lots of transparency" may be great, or it may be terribly inefficient in their real-world ability to improve the well-being of the people they are supposed to benefit. And either choice would be better than not donating anything to anybody.
May be great or may be terrible applies to both the small and the the nation-state sized charity right?
Maybe my judgement or efficiency is bad when I try to help my neighbor. Okay, whoopsie. Now apply that margin of error to a foundation whose decisions impact millions of people and possibly entire societies, possibly for generations. The unintended or possibly negative effects can be enormous and long-lasting.
Small-scale local charities are fine, but they are by definition _local_.
And even the poorest parts of the US are doing much better than a lot of poor countries in Africa and Asia.
Yes they're local, but its not like there's a limit to how many local charities there can be in the world.
Operating at a huge scale requires you to lump people together into groups and make assumptions about who they are and what they deserve, as you've done in your example. To me that sounds antithetical to the concept of charity. And even with the best intentions, if you mess up, you're messing up a huge scale.
I can't reasonably be expected to assess which local charities in Chad are even real. I don't think there are _any_, in fact.
Charity just means helping someone. Do you think no one in Chad needs or is offering help? And if you don't know anyone in Chad who's in need of charity then...why do you want to do charity in Chad?
It seems that our notion of charity has been warped in such a way that it somehow doesn't count unless it's some enormous large-scale mission carried about by Charity, Inc for the benefit of some group of people far away. It's all very abstract, and that just creates room for fraud or exploitation.
Paying off a local person's debts or putting their child through college will probably be far more impactful and meaningful than sending your money off to some giant organization.
Have to disagree about the 'effective' part. Gates seems to have had a knack for massive inefficiencies and negative externalities in every way that he has impacted the world. Think of how many man-hours (measured in human lifetimes) have been wasted due to the shortcomings of various MicroSoft programs. Weigh that against his health initiatives in the third world. Or the impact of dimming the sun by depositing massive quantities of particles in the atmosphere: the resources consumed and carbon emissions that placing them would entail, and of course the intended effect, which is to impede human progress as measured by the Kardashev scale. Everything starts to look much more efficient if this is taken as the goal, though.
Helping to cure polio doesn't outweigh imagined future harms by George engineering that didn't happen yet?
He's not curing polio, though. His polio program is spreading it because they use a live virus, and a low percentage of the population is getting it. People are now getting paralytic polio from others who got the vaccine.
This is just one example of the Kreuger-Dunning that permeates all aspects of the Gates Foundation. His interventions have been mainly disasters, distorted public policy, and gobbled up biotech IP in the process. He controls the money spicket and is very petty and cocksure about what is "right." Researchers and public policy experts who disagree with his ideas get cut off.
Governments should set public health policy and manage the needs of their people, not billionaires, biotech companies, or NGOs.
There are issues with the oral vaccines, but what you're saying is completely untrue. The total number of paralyzed kids has gone down dramatically as a result of the work Gates has done. By any metric, this is a good thing
> He's not curing polio, though. His polio program is spreading it because they use a live virus
Wow. Just wow. Where the heck do you get this garbage from?
OPV unfortunately does cause paralytic polio disease indirectly by infecting unvaccinated people. It's worth it IMO because the total number of paralyzed people has decreased, but in the long term we have to switch to IPV to completely eliminate polio. This will take decades and many billions of dollars though.
Yes, it's called cVDPV. It's caused by the virus in the live vaccine "unweakening" itself, and it's typically happening in people with weakened immune systems (e.g. from chronic malnutrition). It's not causing unvaccinated people to get infected, per se.
Most cases are mild, and on average there are about 300-400 cases per _year_ for the entire world.
But it's absolutely heinous to accuse Gates of deliberately infecting people with the live virus. The weakened vaccine has been the standard for polio vaccination for the last 80 years. There is simply no alternative for it for places like DRC or Chad. Inactivated vaccines require refrigeration and injections, and this is not feasible.
We're >.< this close to eradicating polio: https://polioeradication.org/wild-poliovirus-count/ - there are only two countries with the wild virus. A little bit more, and we can actually stop vaccinating from polio altogether.
I largely agree, but there is essentially no possibility of ever eradicating polio with the current OPV strategy.
If you stop vaccinating, cVDPV will spread person to person. Some people carry virus for decades and it can become infectious at any time, many years after they were first vaccinated or infected. There will sparse but significant episodes until all humans who were vaccinated with OPV (or infected with the wild virus) have died.
but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it! It's ok if we don't eradicate the virus. The point is to prevent children from being paralyzed, and it works for that.
Unfortunately, if you look at the situation with type 2, you will see what happens when OPV stops too early (and type 2 is a much less aggressive disease than type 1). In a perfect world, OPV cessation happens in most healthy communities rather soon, while the people who are in need of a much stronger vaccine continue to get OPV.
Also, Gates's pet project of a novel OPV has been shown to have caused a few confirmed cases of VAPP now, so it seems that project won't save OPV.
Essentially the best hope for eradicating polio within 20 years seems to be giving out a lot of OPV to places like Afghanistan and the DRC and forcing the local warlord to give it to the kids who need it (the latter has generally been a total failure of the Gates project). Once OPV gets wild-type and cVDPV outbreaks under control, a global switch to IPV seems safe to prevent future outbreaks. But, to get there, it seems a very aggressive OPV campaign is necessary compared to where we are now. It may take a militarized organization to do this, also, given the fact that you necessarily have to deal with tribal warlords. Shame we don't have USAID any more...
We aren't going to do that because it seems we generally aren't capable of doing that. So we're likely stuck with a decent amount of polio for a long time.
cVDPV outbreaks die out on their own, and the newer vaccines are designed to be less likely to escape.
People also don't carry the virus for decades. That's a myth. People with a weakened immune system can get infected with polio even after a childhood vaccination, so that's probably where this myth comes from.
It's not a myth at all, off the top of my head I know of at least two cases studies including the study that led to the discovery that remdesivir may treat polio
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10022663/
Immunocompromised hosts can shed infectious polio for their entire lives.
These outbreaks sometimes die on their own, but there's no reason to believe they wouldn't spread widely if we completely stopped vaccinating
Plus, he wouldn't touch a project he couldn't make a profit from somehow.
People don't change much.
How does he profit from giving away all of his money?
Dig deep enough and there's always a kickback, some business he's involved in that profits one way or the other.
Do you have any examples?
No, I don't collect these things, I prefer to spend as little time as possible thinking about Bill Gates.
But everything you could possibly want to know is a Google search away.
I tried to find something but couldn't find any evidence that he's received a kickback for any charity
Yup, the Gates worship is incredibly sad.
I don't get how it happened, it's like an epidemic on this site.
It's not like it takes a lot of effort to find out the truth about that scumbag.
Forgive me if I find it somewhat difficult to take seriously an argument by a person judging progress on the Kardashev scale...
You could pick some slightly less sci-fi measures like "number of trivially preventable deaths from diseases for which we have vaccines", for example.
I don't see his post as an attempt to self-promote as some commenters here have made. To what purpose? He's already known to most adults, already rich beyond anyone could possibly dream to be. And it sounds like from the post that he already had this path planned albeit several decades after his death.
I think accelerating that timeline is a good thing as I think he will be better than anyone who came after to direct how the funds as applied.
It looks like he’s been focused on building his public image over the past few years, perhaps aiming for a Nobel Prize.
Last time he pledged to give away half his wealth over x years didn't it basically tripple during that period?
MSFT is up 18x during that time and the S&P 500 is up 5x during that time. His investments are some mixture of MSFT and other things, so we might say he would have been up around 10x if he'd given no money away.
Since his net worth is only up 3x, that means he gave away about 70% of his wealth.
He won't have given away 70% of his wealth. If he gave away a dollar at the beginning that is 10 dollars that dollar didn't turn into etc.
AFAIK he didn't give it all away in one lump sum at the start.
He said he would do it over 5 years. MSFT was up roughly 2x not 18x
However long he took, he has ~70% less wealth than he would have had if he didn't do it. If it took him longer, that only means he gave the wealth after it had more time to appreciate.
The end goal isn't for him to be poor-ish but to do something supposedly useful with the money he has today.
Maybe it’ll triple again and he’ll throw in a cure for cancer(s) or Alzheimer’s.
He does mention existing support for programs related to Alzheimer's research in the article.
Same thing happened to Buffet.
It's part of the strategy. He endowed a giant philanthropic org. You can leverage an endowment by investing it aggressively and spending the proceeds to keep the fund running indefinitely. What he is now announcing is a pivot to start spending principal so the endowment starts to shrink until it hits zero.
It seems weird to write this, but:
In the billionaire’s defense, he probably didn’t plan on us as a society deciding to shoveling money at his class as quickly as we possibly could.
You really think his team didn’t plan on or even help lobby for that?
Did it triple because the assets he owns tripled in value?
In which case he didn't actually charitably give away any of those assets I'd assume?
Gates seems like a real embodiment of "Effective Altruism".
1. Get a bunch of money by any means necessary.
2. Donate/invest in altruistic causes.
Unfortunately, most people that use effective altruism to justify themselves hoarding wealth seem to forget the second part.
I was talking about this with a friend recently -- Romans flaunted their wealth by improving shared social infrastructure (open market spaces, parks, etc), and the robber barons of the 19th century flaunted their wealth by building cultural institutions (eg Carnegie libraries).
It seems like most "effective altruists" want to do things that help "humanity" but don't help "people" -- so developing technology to explore the stars is on the table, but fighting poverty is not.
> It seems like most "effective altruists" want to do things that help "humanity" but don't help "people" -- so developing technology to explore the stars is on the table, but fighting poverty is not.
You seem to have very weird ideas about how EA funding works in practice. Long-termism is flashy and peculiar so it gets a lot of excess visibility, but "fighting poverty" tends to get the bulk of EA money, and the most controversial cause that still gets real sizeable funding seems to be animal welfare.
Well all we in HN-adjacent spaces hear about is the EA people getting rich so they can build a RoccoBasilisc-countering super weapon or something.
That's the e/acc folks actually. Different acronym.
> developing technology to explore the stars is on the table, but fighting poverty is not.
Weird that you have that impression, since most EA-related organizations (GiveWell, Effective Altruism Foundation, etc) are heavily focused on donating to charities that address poverty or malaria in Africa
> by any means necessary
This implies that they got rich by pillaging instead of countless people voluntarily giving them money in exchange for what they offered.
They got rich by cheating, stealing, and breaking the law. They were even convicted of it[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
> by any means necessary.
While I agree this is technically accurate, it implies there was something imoral about how he got his money. He created the most popular modern OS and a myriad of other technical innovations. It would be almost impossible to create more positive good in the world through his charitable donations than Microsoft
This is such a whitewash of Microsoft's history. There's a reason Microsoft is a convicted monopolist - they used brutally unfair tactics to push out competitors, including open source ones. Have we all forgotten the IE winter when browser innovation stopped for almost a decade thanks to Microsoft killing Netscape in the crib?
Microsoft is not an ethical company - a pattern that has continued today with their user-hostile decisions.
Gates was so hated during the early growth days of Microsoft, that he literally got pied in the face.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK6SS8CXYZo
> 1. Get a bunch of money by any means necessary.
This assumes the money would not have been better spent by giving it to the workers of the company that generated it in the first place.
Microsoft’s first 10,000 employees became phenomenally wealthy at the IPO. That’s far more of a worker paradise than any startup unicorn you’ll see today.
>While I respect anyone’s decision to spend their days playing pickleball, that life isn’t quite for me—at least not full time. I’m lucky to wake up every day energized to go to work
Bit of an unfair comparison though.. Most people dont retire from a job where you're literally handing people money.
That said, I'm a huge fan Bill's work post-microsoft :)
He did a good job at cleaning up his public image, no doubt that cost quite a fortune.
Still the same greedy asshole though.
[dead]
>The Gates Foundation’s mission remains rooted in the idea that where you are born should not determine your opportunities.
Arguably he's already done so much for billions of people. Had typing on computers not became the main way businesses communicate , anyone with bad, handwriting would be stuck in menial work.
When I was growing up in the 90s my hand writing was so bad it was assumed I would never amount to anything.
Then computers completely take over all aspects of business in the early 2000s. No one is writing TPS reports by hand.
All of a sudden my horrible handwriting doesn't matter. It's still really bad. But I've made 6 figures for well over a decade, along with an amazing year at about 200k.
None of this would of been possible without Gates. I also owe the creator of Android Andy Rubin. It's been a while ( and it might of been one of the other co founders), but I was able to thank Rubin. His response was something like "Well, we still need to get building applications working on Android."
I've also been able to thank( on this forum) Brendan Eich, the inventor of my first programming language, JavaScript. Amazingly humble for someone who helped create trillions in wealth.
Apart of me thinks Gates could still lead some innovation in computing. I hope somehow he's still coding under a pseudonym perhaps, and occasionally answering tech questions.
His gift to us has been this amazing industry.
Pretty much everything you named is simply first-to-the-market horror-show from design perspective.
Javascript? Check.
Android? Check.
Windows? Again, capturing market via transitioning from DOS.
They did focus on many important things like having exceptional backwards compatibility (transitioning from DOS, etc), and kernel team does a decent job usually, but none of this is necessarily attributable to Gates and it's simply what you have to do to capture a market/platform.
I don't know if this is genuine sentiment you're expressing or just naivety, but people that can glaze this hard this easily usually go very far in life. I'll give you that, I wish I could do this.
I agree with this. We had multiple windowing environments, all arguably superior in various ways, and we had multiple office suites, all with better technology than the Microsoft versions. Then I wonder how much worse off are we because Windows and Office came to predominate instead of one of the others? How much rent seeking has gone into building Gates' fortune? How much has been lost financially by innocent users to Windows security vulnerabilities?
On the handwriting thing, I see a general decline in my children's handwriting because they spend so much time typing. That bothers me personally, since I appreciate good handwriting, and I would think it spills over into other fine-motor skills tasks.
>I don't know if this is genuine sentiment you're expressing or just naivety, but people that can glaze this hard this easily usually go very far in life. I'll give you that, I wish I could do this.
Ohh it's 100% genuine, I went from living on food stamps, multiple evictions to 200k at my peak. Making a bit less now , but I'm still very comfortable.
Ultimately these technologies made computing and programming extremely easy and cheap. You can make a lot of money using your Windows PC to code Android apps in JavaScript.
I'm a not tech purist, if it works it works. Yes better OSes and languages exist, but they weren't really accessible to me. I still suggest most new programmers start with JavaScript or Python so you don't get too bogged down with boilerplate and type systems.
> When I was growing up in the 90s my hand writing was so bad it was assumed I would never amount to anything.
I'm curious where you grew up? I am high school class of 1992. I skipped third grade, where a lot of penmanship is taught. We had a computer lab in Junior High (so late 1980s), I had a PC Clone at home that we bought in 1985. I'd turn in writing assignments printed on my epson dot matrix printer. To my knowledge, my appalling handwriting was never considered by anyone.
This feels like one of those threats teachers use to reinforce something they don't have any other strong argument to support... while reminding you that it will end up "on your permanent record."
What an exaggeration. We had typewriters before the 90s. Apple, Commodore, and Atari arguably had an earlier influence than Gates.
Gates (who I admire) did not invent the computer terminal, the word processor or the spreadsheet.
In no way would I want to downplay Gates' effect on the industry (though I personally think it was much more in the 80s and early 90s than in the heyday of the 2000s) I think people would have built computers without him, and its possible that we would have been better off overall in a world where the Amiga won, not the IBM PC, or the Mac, etc.
Gates is more notable for NOT Netscaping or Sunning or Lotus-123ing his company than for any particular decision.
I don't see computers being widely adapted without Microsoft deciding to essentially give Windows away to OEMs.
Of course this was anti competitive, but it was a massive net good.
The point is computers became extremely cheap. We're at the point where you can get a used laptop for 100$, install Linux on it and write code to your hearts content. The only thing limiting you is your own skill set.
I don't think computers become affordable without Microsoft
> I don't see computers being widely adapted without Microsoft deciding to essentially give Windows away to OEMs.
I'm not sure how making the OEMs pay for a license on all the computers they sold (and report on those numbers), regardless of what was installed is 'essentially giving away'. Yes, the OEM price was a lot lower than the retail price, but OEM versions came without direct support, and at least for large OEMs, without all of the trappings of retail (wholesalers/distributors/cross marketing expenses/shelf rental/etc)
> When I was growing up in the 90s my hand writing was so bad it was assumed I would never amount to anything.
I dunno, my 3rd grade teacher in the 80s said of my handwriting "We've done all we can do. He'll have a secretary, so it'll be ok"
Sadly, I never had a secretary; but my terrible handwriting hasn't been a major deterrent to getting things done.
I feel like if, in the counterfactual where people continued writing things by hand, as an adult you thought your handwriting was holding you back, you could probably improve it? It’s not an innate property of a human, it’s a practiced skill. And as a child there is not a good incentive structure to make kids who aren’t for some reason perfectionistic learn to write really well.
> None of this would have been possible without Gates.
Though he and his company did a lot to change the prevalence of typing, if he or Microsoft didn’t come along, someone else would have led the computing revolution with probability 1.
They didn't even lead — everything they did was unoriginal.
Is this satire? Bill Gates didn’t invent computers, he just started the company that won the PC revolution, very talented and intelligent, but also well placed and lucky.
And greedy/ruthless.
Why would bad handwriting be a barrier to success? I'm asking honestly. After all it's a trope that doctors have terrible handwriting, and typewriters and word processors have been around for ages. Also, talking from experience bad handwriting can easily be improved by paying a bit more attention to what you are doing and some practise.
Bill Gates is rich in part because his company screwed over so many people. Sure they made some products that people wanted and needed, but they also shipped some real crap and behaved like arseholes. It's good that he's giving it all away; it would have been better if he had less because his company was more ethical.
Something like Robin Hood in the final analysis?
No criticism of the man, but I think he may fail in this part of his goal
> People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that "he died rich" will not be one of them.
It's easy to forget how absurdly wealthy the very richest in society are. Say he started this initiative on his 70th birthday and he's spreading his giving fairly lineraly over the next 20 years but dies just 1 day short of his 90th birthday, he'd still have about $13,698,630 to his name. I think most would consider someone with that money to their name rich.
99% of 100B puts him with 1B in wealth remaining in 20 years. Bill will die extremely wealthy by any measure.
That would put him in the ranks of Marissa Mayer, Sundar Pichai, Sheryl Sandberg, Reid Hoffman, Palmer Luckey, Tim Cook, Evan Spiegel.
If Bill Gates gave away 10% every year of the wealth he has, after 20 years, he would have remaining 12%.
He should dedicate the remaining 12% to venture capital for all of the businesses he crushed and the people who suffered, for “boiling the tech space” and killing the innovation. The least he can do.
And the rest of the rich crooks should do the same dedicating their wealth to reversing the harm that they caused.
Related:
Bill Gates pledges 99% of his fortune to Gates Foundation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43926212 - May 2025
So he’s going to selflessly donate it to himself to save himself from taxes? What a hero.
> So he’s going to selflessly donate it to himself to save himself from taxes? What a hero.
You don't really "save yourself from taxes" by donating money to charity.
Option A: sell stock for $100, pay taxes of $20, spend $80 on yourself Option B: donate stock of $100 to charity, and spend $0 on yourself
Which of these options leaves Gates with more money in his pocket to spend on himself?
Giving money away doesn't save you from taxes on your income; you just forego the income entirely. The money is gone. It's no longer yours. Why would you be paying taxes on it?
>You don't really "save yourself from taxes" by donating money to charity.
That's not really true if you have sufficiently appreciated assets and are in a high tax bracket. You can donate those appreciated assets and collect an annuity from some percentage of the face value donation and basically be shielded from any capital gains.
See e.g. https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/guidance/philanthropy/cha...
I'm sure there are other mechanisms as well.
The exact same logic applies to any deductible expense, and yet people think they can buy a business vehicle "for free" because it is deductible.
IDK why this is so hard to understand.
People get confused between deductions and credits, mostly?
Gates has been advocating for higher taxes to people like him for a while.
Look at outcomes, not words and ambitions.
>Look at outcomes, not words and ambitions.
Does Gates have the power to change tax code? "Look at outcomes" makes more sense when it's something you have at least a moderate amount of control over.
It's possible this is not Gates' preferred outcome
What control does he have over that outcome that he has not already exercised?
With that kind of money, he can outlobby an awful lot of people.
There is nothing inconsistent about wanting a society’s tax structure to change, but also not sacrificing yourself (which the donations kind of are).
I want X rules, but I will play by whatever rules exist at the time.
If he'd be serious about it, he'd spend 0.01% of his fortune to buy politicians (he just has to bid more than the fossil industry etc) and have them change the tax code.
Is anyone stopping him, et al, from just paying more? There's an option for that on US tax forms (though I'm guessing tax returns for billionaires are a little more complex than what a Form 1040 can handle).
It's not hypocritical to advocate for everyone like you to pay higher taxes, while not unilaterally paying higher taxes in the meantime.
I would expect that he wants all billionaires to pay more taxes, not only himself.
People suggest this often whenever a rich person says they should pay more taxes but unless I can specifically say I want my extra taxes to go to a specific government agency or office, I have no idea why I would do this. Just so Boeing can get a larger contract with my extra taxes? At that point I would just donate directly to causes that support what I want instead of dealing with the middle man.
You can give to state and local governments and get a federal tax deduction [1], per 26 U.S. Code § 170 (c) (1)
> (1) A State, a possession of the United States, or any political subdivision of any of the foregoing, or the United States or the District of Columbia, but only if the contribution or gift is made for exclusively public purposes.
But not if you make a gift to federal agency (unless that's listed somewhere else)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/170
> Though I'm guessing tax returns for billionaires are a little more complex than what a Form 1040 can handle
Even billionaires file a 1040. They just file a whole lot of other forms with it.
But at the end of the day, it all rolls up to the same 1040 that you and I use. :)
If I were him I wouldn't, for fear it would go to our 1T/yr defense budget, or perhaps some narcissists 'birthday parade'
The interest alone on the US debt is $1 trillion a year. He’s giving away $200 billion in the same time the US will spend $20 trillion in interest.
You can only write off ~ 67% of your income in through charitable deductions IIRC. Of course, I suppose if donating shares of appreciated stock that doesn't quite apply the same way.
Yeah, it would be going through stocks.
Not “to” but “through”. What am I missing?
It must be exhausting to spend your days being pathetically cynical about every little thing.
People are cynical for a reason
Yes, because it's a very convenient way to feel better than other people when you're insecure about your own accomplishments.
It is heartwarming to see him continuing to give away most of his wealth even if he's left with a billion or more at the end, and I wish other uber-rich would follow suit.
How much power is concentrated in the hands of individuals... It's great that Gates is choosing to use that power philanthropically, but it also raises questions about the long-term role of private wealth in solving public problems.
When the government doesn't do it, private parties have to; when there's a significant percentage of the population voting for "small government" parties, more responsibility goes to (wealthy) individuals.
When the government doesn't do it, it's because wealthy individuals have already bought the government. And have invested huge amounts of money into bamboozling the population into voting against their own interests.
> private parties have to
No they don't. It can also be that neither the government nor private parties give.
Making it an either/or often makes space for the individual to make excuses for why they don't share because out there somewhere there exists some government program that vaguely looks like charity.
If the government do it, because they are lobbied not to, so that private parties (with lobbyists) can, there is potential moral hazard.
[dead]
+1
This is great, but what about the rich people who don't give? Won't they just continue to get more and more power?
The scales are tipped and this is not sustainable. Gary Stevenson is a bit extreme, but he's not wrong about centralization and it's dangers!
His letter basically says this, explicitly stating that government is needed for things like eradicating Polio.
He talks about this in today's NY Times interview and he is pretty unsparing against Elon Musk in particular for his role in killing USAID. Says he is directly complicit in killing children while at the same time, he is technically still a signatory of the Giving Pledge.
Wow, he lays it out pretty bluntly:
> the world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/magazine/bill-gates-found...
[dead]
[flagged]
Well, it's not as if the public sector is solving many problems these days. We seem to have decided, collectively, that we'd rather have more problems.
At least that's what we've been voting for.
The public sector has many problems, but they do pick up the tab when disaster strikes.
> We seem to have decided, collectively, that we'd rather have more problems.
... because a faction of the rich decided they wanted the poors to believe government can't do anything useful, and launched an ongoing decades-long propaganda campaign to that effect.
I think that's an incredibly simplistic and naive view of why large public projects gobble up colossal sums of money and don't have much to show for it.
That's a non sequitur, so... OK.
A lot of that public money somehow ends up in the private sector, usually as corporate profits.
Libertarians may want to ask themselves what happens to the private sector - aerospace, energy, R&D, infrastructure, education - when public investment stops.
I am guessing that in your mind that if a private corporation bids on a contract it should only break even? Is that it? Or perhaps - for you - even better would be - the whole thing would be done by the government. There is no private corporation?
It's not as naive as you're painting it to be:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book)
I'm sure a similar book could be written where the political stripes are all changed. Instead of Koch, we have Soros. Instead of Musk, it would be Gates. Instead of whoever owns Sinclair Media, its Carlos Slim or Lauren Powell Jobs.
And? I would welcome that. This isn't team sports where I'm rooting for my favorite billionaire.
That said, this book actually exists.
I know the book exists as I'm very familiar with the kinds of claims that get repeated in threads like this.
To me - these claims seem to fuel a conspiracy like mind set about why certain efforts or movements fail. "Because the billionares didn't want it to". "Or they bought the media and control the narrative". "Its all just a uniparty!".
If I were to replace the word billionare with the name of the first Abrahamic religion, you and I would both see that view point as low intellect nonsense. And it would be. But somehow, sub in the word billionare and then it becomes brilliant analysis for some.
Boiled down, all I'm really claiming is that some rich people spent a bunch of money on lobbying, largely in favor of making money better for buying influence and in favor of making it easier for the rich to get richer with some populist culture-war-stoking side-quests to drum up the necessary votes, and the effort was pretty successful. I don't think that's an out-there or "conspiracy like mind"ed take, especially given that's just... what happened.
Except it's not what just happened. More billionaires supported the Harris ticket than the Trump ticket. It's just that Trump's pet billionaires -- especially one in particular -- hustled harder for him.
i don't want to speak for GP but they did say "a faction of the rich" and not "all billionaires"
again, i dont think this is a matter of political party. it's a matter of capital interference in politics.
Plus what I'm getting at started shortly pre-WWII and really started to see serious policy and "Overton window" effects in the 70s. There was a huge boom in organized pro-(big)-business and pro-rich lobbying starting in the late 30s and really taking off just after the war. I think it'd be pretty surprising if the following shifts in public perception and opinion, and in policy, just happened to align with what they were promoting by coincidence.
I don't think any of the folks pushing for deregulation of media ownership (to allow it to consolidate) and defanging anti-trust and cutting rich people's taxes and reducing government social spending or other spending that competed with potential "market solutions" or made the labor force less-desperate, or pushing anti-union policies, while promoting the view that "actually all of that is good for normal people, so you should vote for the party promoting it... also, the blacks and gays are out to get you, in case that other argument didn't convince you" had in mind getting someone like Trump, specifically, into power, though without their actions over several decades it surely wouldn't have been possible.
well, you're changing from "people only complain about some billionaires" to "people complain about all billionaires and it's just a conspiracy theory" so I'm not sure what point you're trying to get across.
maybe you could read the book to dispel your mistaken notion that it's just "billionaires bad", since it's stated (and successful) objective is to cover a specific group of highly-influential people that have worked on very specific projects in furtherance of a specific political/economic ideal that we're reaping the fruits of now in real time.
Can both things be true?
I have no doubt that a nationalized healthcare system would be bureaucratic and inefficient. But I also know our current system is worse by almost every metric and stays that way due to lobbying and, yes, propaganda against alternatives like Medicare for all.
You're correct to an extent, but "the rich" also have a point there. As a taxpayer, the level of waste and incompetence in government spending on those problems is horrifying. It doesn't have to be that way. We don't need to spend billions of dollars and decades of time just to get minor infrastructure projects completed.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/...
That's because the ultra-wealthy control the elections via unlimited campaign contributions, "independent" group spending, lobbying, providing lucrative jobs to ex-politicians, or even running for office themselves. Both of the major political parties are corrupted by money, just in different ways, different funding sources. The news media has also been centralized, monopolized, and increasingly, owned directly by billionaires.
The public sector doesn't work because it's been sabotaged by the private sector.
How can it when it's a thankless job that other psychopathic politicians will rally the people you're trying to help against you?
Well, consider how our voting priorities would change if billionaires had less of an impact on elections? Would we be where we are today if, for example, Musk couldn't spend over a quarter billion dollars influencing the 2024 election?
the rich have always impacted elections through advertisements, campaigns donations, etc.
I honestly don't think Musk affected 2024 to any real extent. Look at how much narrower Harris's loss was than other incumbent losses in 2024. If anything you could make the argument Musk tanked Trump's lead like Trump tanked Poilievre.
Democrats running a candidate that lost their only attempts during a competitive primary. As well as that candidate being unable to read the room and saying they'd do the same economic decisions as the unpopular _incumbent_ Biden. And they still were within 1% of votes!
It is much easier to assume that someone else funneled money somewhere on the other side and caused your side (which is always perfect and without fault) to lose.
It is absolutely disheartening and horrible to face the reality that democracy may result in outcomes you don't like, and people may have voted wrong with full knowledge and forethought.
If there's a problem to solve, there is a business opportunity. What do you propose instead?
No. Capitalism is ineffective at solving lots of problems. Particularly problems of the kind where there is universal inelastic demand, where competition makes the end arrive or product less affordable or efficient, where externalities are not priced in, and where there are single/few or a unique instance of a thing that can be used by the public.
Examples: healthcare, food and water for sustenance; insurance; pollution; parks and roadways, residential property; respectively.
You didn’t answer the question. I get it, you think capitalism is bad. What do you propose instead?
Regulated capitalism, where cases of market failure are addressed.
I sometimes wish we actually had unregulated capitalism. Housing and healthcare would be much less terrible without legislated bottlenecks, among other areas.
On the evidence of what exactly?
American healthcare is literally what you get with unregulated capitalism. Your statement makes no sense.
The Chinese model, got it.
Regulation never works because people can be corrupted and banks can be bailed. Regulation might look like it's protecting the little guy for PR reasons, but it will always leave a way out for the big guy. This is why inequality keeps raising.
I wish we had completely unregulated capitalism, so that middle class people would have more weapons to climb up society instead of paying the bill for everyone while drowning in debt and soulcrushing careers.
Can he do something to make up for taking away MacBasic?
https://www.folklore.org/MacBasic.html
It is an interesting game-theoretic question how to spend money x (say, hundreds of billions) to maximize good.
- Should you first educate anyone who cannot read or write?
- Should you first feed anyone hungry/thirsty?
- Should you first provide shelter for all without homes?
- Should you first make peace for all without safety?
(all the way down the Maslow pyramid of needs)
How would the philanthropic billaires united ensure peace, if he had even more money? (Should one "buy" a military force that is mightier than any country's, to send out the message that every nation that started an armed conflict would regret it? Not sure if that could suppress war, but perhaps one would not feel inclined to call that "peace"...)
If I had the financial means, by gut instinct I would start out with the most vulnerable, those that can least help themselves, e.g. orphaned small children, the handicapped, the unborn.
However, in a geopolitically unstable world one could then argue it is a "waste" of resources to help people by first feeding them when they get invaded and killed by their neighboring country soon after. But creating world peace has historically not been something that a single person - billionair or otherwise - has been able to solve.
> Should one "buy" a military force that is mightier than any country's
You'd be better off starting a clandestine agency that simply assassinates evil people. If anyone who started a war or oppressed their people was bumped off they would soon learn.
> If I had the financial means, by gut instinct I would start out with the most vulnerable, those that can least help themselves, e.g. orphaned small children, the handicapped, the unborn.
You left out expectant mothers under control of a repressive regime that demands their death sacrifice.
Mothers are vulnerable too. All that means is that two vulnerable people need care. The law in some places says that only one of them does. Anywhere that it says that, it is wrong.
Surely the people with these knee-jerk reactions lead lives that would hold up under similar scrutiny :)
Bravo!
Future generation will be richer and better-off than the present. Saving your charity for the future is, effectively, stealing from the poor and giving to the rich.
Also, giving now maximizes the compounding effect of your charity. Saving 100 lives today is way better than saving 10 lives every decade for the next 10 decades.
I've been reading about him giving away his fortune for 20 years. If I say I give away my fortune it's done within a week. Yet, he is still one of the richest people on earth. He's done good, but still I'm cynical about his motives.
What do you believe are his motives?
You can’t spend 2 hundred billion dollars in “weeks”. Haven’t you seen Brewster’s Millions?
I really like the idea of a non-profit with an end goal. It makes it much more targeted and accountable. Even providing bonuses (within reason and making it difficult to game) for completing the goal quicker would work as well.
Good, I hope they distribute it in ways that last, and have lasting positive impact.
Nice! And with what he will be left he could, if he deploys it also during 20y, help 1200 people per month. With 1k daily give aways.
https://ayudaefectiva.org/simula
Or with 10k daily, 310k monthly, adjusted by historical inflation it’s 100 million during 20 years.
That’s 3 million people helped.
I've been getting email for 3 decades about Bill Gates giving away his money like this.
The only less beneficial way I can think of to use his money would be to turn it all into cash and set it on fire to lower the money supply.
As a guy who on numerous occasions has been in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy, why doesn’t he just write a huge check to the IRS and be done with it?
At least that would make him consistent.
“Donating” to the IRS is an imperfect solution that scales to all billionaires. If he’s only solving for his individual wealth, he can fine tune it to more specific causes.
The fact that this must occur to address even a portion of humanitarian necessity is an indelible indication that our current government systems are incompetent likely through capture.
Where do I sign up?
$108B net worth now (per chart in the article), so he will be left with paltry $1B.
Still, would be beautiful to see all megarich do the same. Keep a few yachts, mansions and planes if you give back a few small countries' worth of GDP back.
Apparently billionaires in the USA hold 4.48 trillion, 756 of them or so.
So if they all dumped their wealth and saved a billion (should be enough to retire on, even for the conservative portfolio!) we would have 3.72 trillion - it would cover the US deficit for two, maybe three years.
Or to spin this another way: Americans spend around $200B* annually on education (private spend, on top of federal/state/local education spend), so this would provide all-expenses-paid free tuition for everyone for 18 years, or more than 50 years if focusing on primary/secondary education. In that time, there might be a new crop of megarich to continue the cycle :)
([*] $50B for primary/secondary ed, $150B for higher - figures via Kagi Assistant, which I didn't double-check).
Bill Gates has done more harm to software and innovation than anyone in history.
He's a bad dude, and the only reason he does all this is so that waiters don't spit in his food at fancy restaurants.
The world suffers under the crippling weight of proprietary M$ Windoze everywhere, and we're far worse off because of it.
Want to help, donate money to support Free Software projects with strong copyleft licenses.
While many of us Linux and open source nerds share the sentiment you described, I seriously doubt waiters see him and remember how they murdered the competition by bundling software with Windows OS in the 90s and 2000s.
Unless those waiters are unemployed local tech workers who aged out.
Wrong crowd, but upvoted nonetheless.
You could always buy a Linux laptop or an android tablet. Tablets and smartphones is where windows lost. Those devices far outnumber PCs. Your complaint about windows is old. You have options to not use it today.
Now he did lose my trust and that’s because of two things:
1. His association with Epstein. It is documented and quite possibly the reason for his divorce.
2. His trust made controversial deals during Covid. The poorer countries wanted the formula so that they could scale up production themselves. However, the gates foundation supported the patent on the vaccines instead and had themselves and middlemen to arbitrate price on the supply
It _feels_ like none of this works without functioning governments
>There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people.
You can't hold onto it regardless.
The best you can do is choose who gets it.
> You can't hold onto it regardless.
I can, I can take my bitcoin private keys with me when I die. He could do the same if he wanted to.
Even that doesn't hold onto it. It just inflates the value of the remaining stash, and effectively "donates" it to all other holders.
Of course, if the keys are later found, then you crash everyone out.
Nobody magically knows why coins don’t move. Could just be generational savings.
You don’t hold onto it. It’s just lost when you die.
Heaven has no bitcoin ATMs.
You can’t know the unknown.
In theory, doesn't that just distribute the value to all other Bitcoin holders? I dunno. It's hard to think about the value of something this abstract.
About time. Where the hell has this guy been? Guy makes hundreds of billions of dollars off the backs of working Americans and then leaves to donate all that American money to India in the form of public toilets under the guise of philanthropy. Meanwhile the country that made him a billionaire is literally falling to a fascist coup.
Seriously, just screw off. We needed you 3 months ago. We'll call you when it's time for your day in court at Nuremburg 2.0.
Amazing to see how much wealth he was still gaining these past years.
This giving will have a huge impact. It sure is needed at the moment!
"Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion." https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/30/18203911/davos-...
Thank you Mr. Gates, for everything your foundation has accomplished.
I have seriously mixed feelings about this kind of philanthropy. Yes, it is good that he's going to give his wealth away like this. I do not want to diminish his efforts in that!
But also, why collect such wealth in the first place? What was the point? Was the money really better off being hoarded by one person with the fingers crossed hope that they'll spend it altruistically someday? The existence of the wealth imbalance itself, and the general practice of wealth hoarding, are frustrating counterbalances to the good of giving it away.
Remember when Gates refused to lift IP restrictions on the COVID vaccine
https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bi...
There were, I think, fair reasons to do this. A patent-free "people's vaccine" may well have reached fewer people because there's got to be money in scaling up the production of something like this.
It also conveniently benefits him greatly.
How? Guy doesn’t need anything. He’s never played the greedy billionaire part.
Vaccine IP is also a moving target. You need experts to work at it non-stop. Covid-19 mutates every three months.
He’s also buying up a lot of farm land in US…
Oh man, I shouldn’t have deleted that email from Bill Gates offering me four million dollars that ended up in my spam folder.
I am glad to see this approach by Gates, but relying on billionaires to do the right thing is not a reliable strategy for society.
You could maybe compensate all the people and companies you put out of business by throwing your weight around in the 80s and 90s.
Maybe throw Jerry Kaplan a billion or two for fucking up his launch of the Go Communicator.
Seeing downvotes, which means you haven't been around long enough to remember all the shit Gates pulled back in the go-go 90s. ANY new technology would instantly get a press release from Microsoft saying they were working on the same thing, leaving customers and investors to wait for Microsoft's product. Which most of the time never came or was stillborn. Gates was an asshole, and he might still be, but a tidal wave of greenwashing can fix anything in the good 'ol USA. Now he's a fucking saint, right?
My (bigger) problem with his legacy is Windows on every government (or otherwise important) computer and all the botnets and compromised elections, espionage and destruction enabled by it over the years.
That’s a people problem. Not a Bill Gates problem.
Any system will eventually attract corrupt people.
> Today, the list of human diseases the world has eradicated has just one entry: smallpox... I’m optimistic that, by the time the foundation shuts down, we can also add malaria and measles.
What is Gates going to do about the anti-vaxxers, especially now that they're running the US government health programs?
Many of the problems that the Gates Foundation wants to solve are effectively political. In other words, the dysfunction of governments allows these problems to fester, such that the only, temporary solution is for someone like Gates to step in. What is Gates doing to solve the fundamental political problems? The foundation is trying to do the work that governments should be doing, so what happens after Gates dies and/or his money runs out?
Gates has a scathing critique of Elon Musk, accusing Musk of killing millions of children, but that's the inevitable outcome of a system where everything depends on the whims of billionaires. Gates himself appears like a rarity among them now, with a bit of a conscience and sense of public responsibility. We may praise Gates for his philanthropy, but it would be irresponsible of us, the non-billionaires, to leave the public's welfare to chance like that, and neither should Gates, about to turn 70 years old, support a world that depends on his personal existence in that world.
I’ll take a million, thanks.
Not all of his wealth is so clean as it looks.
The competition against Linux was often nasty. Governments often got a bad deal. Think Munich and Linux.
And I still remember ugly stories about licensing of windows and Africa. This was not necessary Billy who did it, but he profited from the corruption.
Admire Linus. Admire Richard Stallmann. Don't admire Bill.
I am not sure why this gets downvoted. Just google it.
https://www.lioness.co/post/microsoft-is-using-illegal-bribe...
It seems like he intends to give away the same way he did until now.
How is this a good idea considering that a political instability can wipe out all that effort?
Here's an idea: Give away your wealth to run unprofitable but essential "machines" like social media and news organizations to stop the vicious circle the humanity plunged in. Do it just like Musk but hand it to an independent organization that does't push for an agenda or profits.
Russians for example, pay social media personalities to push their talking points or even better they pay people who push talking points that are beneficial to them without directly agreeing on the transaction. Hijack the method, pay influencers you believe are beneficial for your causes and ideals.
It may look like just another billionaire trying to influence politics but you can make it into transparent institution. You can award prizes(monetary and honorary) like Nobel did.
Wouldn't be great if Twitter was run buy a transparent institution that releases logs, stats and full source code and doesn't need to do sketchy shit? Sure it would be imperfect but it can be beneficial, like Wikipedia for example.
Make social media into an impartial infrastructure with decades of runway and let people build the specialized things around it.
Throwing money at media just turns it into a financial arms race against other rich forces like that, with the recipients of that media (you and I) as the targets. The only way to win is not to play. Or at least support independent media, use the money to boost politicians that will advocate for and defend the free media.
From his perspective, there are millions of people dying of infectious diseases and other very treatable conditions. That's the urgent problem and the one he can solve very directly.
True but he also says that Trump policies might kill millions:
https://www.ft.com/content/bdd9bb89-ac3c-4043-9ca4-bc7efbd41...
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
He seems to agree that politics are just as consequential
My body is ready
i think it is telling that we trust Bill Gates to give away his wealth more effectively than if the same assets were handed over to the UN or some other global health charity. why?
The one problem Gates doesn't seem willing to tackle in earnest is the billionaire problem.
i.e. Somebody close to the control of money funnels a disproportionate (based on expertise, intelligence, effort, contribution, etc.) amount to themselves. They quickly come to view this as the just natural order and view anyone who disagrees as a communist hater.
Elon Musk is the current best example. Despite spending most of his time at twitter last year, Tesla was trying to set Musk's compensation at over $100 billion[1]. For what, exactly?
Bill Gates was every bit the problem billionaire in his own time. Only a tiny proportion of billionaires ever decide to engage in significant philanthropy, much of which wouldn't be necessary if their peers weren't draining society of the capital to do it's own research and building. Some argue that billionaires can serve society by hoarding resources and then directing them intelligently in directions governments are too stupid to consider, but that argument falls flat if most billionaires never get past the hoarding stage. Gates has called on his peers to do more. Few have listened.
It's great that a few former robber barons are engaged in serious philanthropy, but it's like slapping a band-aid on a bullet wound. It would be far better to stop the shooting. Reigning in executive pay would be a solid start. How do we do that?
[1]https://www.investopedia.com/elon-musks-multi-billion-dollar...
Sorry. But you don't get to be a billionaire working as an executive.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm all for reigning in excessive executive pay. We should do so in any case. However, what I'm trying to say is, we can reign in executive pay as much as we like, and billionaires will simply siphon that leftover money to themselves in addition to the money they currently hoover up.
I try not to spare a thought to what the true person or character is when they have the means to buy their reputation a hundred times over.
Every billionaire running these are just doing tax avoidalnce at the highest levels i assume?
You think that they hate paying the government money so much that they.... give it all away instead? Yeah, that's some brilliant tax avoidance.
Aren't those donations the equivalent of buying out foreign governments through these?
Seems like that to me
they ''''give'''' it to their own foundation, controlled by their heirs....
In a democracy, they would give it indirectly through taxes. That should teach you something about both their goals and the world we're living in.
Yes, https://youtu.be/KO3-xkVACgE?si=suWJxu_TCPq37V6W
Cannot ignore that his communicable disease research and treatment has been effective. But his school voucher and farming initiative have been awful. Ultimately it would have been better as general revenue to provide these services through government.
hey at least they’re doing things.
i guess
tbh seems a lot of this setup is also good ole corruption with a legal veneer of goodwill wrapping
Bullshit. He's not donating. He's investing.
It would be more effective to use his wealth to put a president that is not a war criminal and stop making US the bully of the world. That would be a blessing for humanity
What would you do with so much money?
At his level, he doesn't just spend or give away a pile of money, he is somewhat like a force of nature: he controls and directs a significant portion of the money stream in the world. Think of what the Gulfstream does for air, but for money.
His story started with computers: he was among the few who built the foundation of the technocratic civilization. Computers and machinery have created a good deal of prosperity, but there is a grave problem with it: computers and machinery have been completely isolated from ethics. Research in AI is no longer guided by what's good for humanity, but by what's possible. Today this manifests in such relatively innocent crimes as disregarding copyright and data privacy when training AI. But that's a sign of a deeper disease: the isolation from ethics. If it's allowed to continue like that, in a few decades this anti-ethical AI will kill at first humanity within humans and then the civilization itself.
IMO, the biggest difference he can make now is finishing the story that he started long ago, by bringing the AI beast under the umbrella of ethical control. It won't stop it, but will significantly reduce the fall out.
The only billionaire worthy of deep respect.
And I don't care about your Gates hating, for whatever reasons you have I am just not interested the cynicism and conspiracy theories about Gates - tell it to the hand.
high-fives the hand
The thought that a _few_ benevolent billionaires will save the world was a preposterous notion in the 2000s and is still an absurd notion today.
This is nothing more than a billionaire (with a rich history of his own in destroying society) trying to buy his reputation back.
Reminds me of all of the billionaire shitheads (Walmart/Walton Family, Purdue Pharma/Sacklers, …) that buy the naming rights on education facilities, dying arts academies, and even libraries. Nothing but trying to wash away the guilt.
Our shitty family contributed to the opioid addiction en masse all in the name of profit, but hey at least you get a reduced or free tuition to pristine art academy or academic institution (if you meet criteria).
Tax the rich. End subsidies given to ultra wealthy.
One of the great tragedies of the world is that while he is arguably the philanthropist with the highest positive impact in human history, a significant part of the population seems to still think he is the literal Antichrist.
This statement is so 90s and so BOFH-centered that it is irrelevant to a level of stupidity. Gates has done a lot to prove he's not a cold-hearted mf and compared to all the bros in their prime at the moment, dude, just think of Elon or Larry Ellison, well our man Billy is really very much a bright persona.
Rationally, you're correct. But emotionally, there's a lot of people who don't understand why someone would provide a free service without an ulterior motive. Gates talks about this a bit on the Trevor Noah podcast.
Microsoft's company practices under Gates don't help, but they are far from the main issue people have with him nowadays. Most people aren't even aware of the things Microsoft did.
People think he is the antichrist because he promotes vaccines and because there are multiple quotes of him where he explains that he wants to reduce the world's population. By raising the standard of living and giving healthcare to the poor, which empirically seem to cause lower birth rates, but lots of nutjobs assume he tests weaponized vaccines or something like that. And people are distrusting of people who appear too altruistic in general, thinking it's some kind of con (and often they are right).
There is a difference between reducing the world’s population and slowing its growth rate. The highest growth rates are necessarily in areas with high mortality. People have more babies to compensate for this mortality. Improve mortality rates and the population growth naturally goes down.
Good point, "Reducing population growth" is a more accurate portrayal of what Gates actually said.
But in practice they are the same thing. Almost the entire developed world has a fertility rate below the replacement rate. Even the upper half of developing countries are below replacement rate. If you bring health care, urbanization and the economy across Africa to levels comparable to Russia or Brazil we can expect their birth rate to similarly fall below the replacement rate too.
Well, here's something else he's saying as of like - today
https://www.politico.eu/article/elon-musk-to-blame-for-world...
I think the comment was referring more to the antivax/conspiracy crowd who often mix Gates in with Soros, etc. in their stories. Still plenty of those folks.
> irrelevant to a level of stupidity
Is that ever?
I am not saying Gates is a monster. So I am not commenting on him. I am commenting on your logic of doing supposed good and hence they becoming good.
When you look at the history of most colonial monsters you will notice is an often repeated trend. Those despicable monster amassing wealth literally on the bodies of natives and then going back home (including some to USA) and buying a "good name" (sometimes literally in the form of those fancy titles and peerages etc).
Oh by the way, Musk and Ellison from your example are benign non-beings compared to pretty much all those "monsters".
I don't know where you are from or where you are now but a lot of world sees "good deeds of good people" with great suspicion.
Agreed—I spent the 90s idolizing Jobs and despising Gates. But today I have deep respect for Gates and the way he's using his wealth as a positive force in the world. Jobs had better taste and was a more effective product leader, but I'm sorry to say that he sucked as a philanthropist. It's disappointing that he spent ANY of his mental energy at the end of his life building that dumb $100M yacht, rather than focusing on his legacy.
Better taste? How so, and why does that matter when we're talking about moral character?
I’m making a stretch to find an answer, but there’s an argument to be made to putting great works of art and beauty in to the world counts as an act of bettering humanity. Look at The Vatican for an example. The patronage of that wealth concentration gave us many of mankind’s greatest achievements.
So if you consider Jobs’ boat or Apple Park or the fact that 700M people hold a literal masterpiece of design and engineering in their hands in order to send nudes and memes to each other a work of benevolence then it makes sense.
It has nothing to do with moral character—just an opinion about Steve Jobs's strengths. Note that taste is subjective.
The impression I get is that he's just cold hearted but directing it towards charity. Not in an evil sense although perhaps it's lucky.
People like the bill gates of the 90s don't just disappear
My guess would be, actually a very small number of people think he’s the antichrist. Why would anyone other than someone with decades of operating system passion even care who this guy is? They know he’s a rich guy. Big deal. I’d guess most people just live their lives and don’t care about Microsoft monopoly or FOSS or anything. The same can probably be said for his altruism—most people probably have no idea.
The antivax movement has been demonising the medical side of his foundation for decades at this point - I'd wager the folks who weren't born in the 90s are more likely to have heard about that than about the genesis of Windows
The antivax movement is a tiny number of fringe wackos. Normal people are not against normal vaccines, even if some of them had concerns about one recent one in particular.
Tiny fringe whackos yes.
But they were a significant force in electing the current president and his health secretary who is currently endangering whether we all get a flu and Covid booster this autumn.
16% of American adults believe that vaccines are unsafe [1]. That's 40 million people, which is not exactly a tiny number.
While concerns about the Covid-19 vaccine are highest (24%), significant numbers of people still feel that "normal" vaccines are unsafe, like MMR (9%) and flu (11%).
[1] https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/vaccine-confiden...
For many people "wealthy = evil". And "poor = good". It is easier to demonize someone that is doing better than you than to admit that maybe he is just making better choices.
The poor can be anything. A wealthy person could have worked hard for it. A wealthy person could have also exploited others in order to get wealthy.
Virtually all (meaning systemically) very wealthy people had to exploit others to get to their very wealthy state.
Yea, his involvement with the Covid vaccine research seems to have made him a target for a large portion of the GOP/MAGA contingent. They are convinced that he wants to use the vaccine to implant a microchip in everyone and control them.
Huh? You must not hang around middle America, out here people act like Bill Gates wants to vaccinate all of Africa in order to sterilize them and also put microchips in your brain. I guarantee if I asked five random people on the street in Kansas about what they think of Bill Gates, half of them would say “oh right he’s like doing bad stuff with the Illuminati?” or something similar.
But that is not Bill Gates' fault because he hasn't been doing it in reality. I think the difference still matters. Only the restricted set of conspiracy theorists and their audience thinks otherwise.
That ‘restricted set’ is incredibly powerful politically at the moment.
This is true, because Trump caters to them. It isn't clear that their numbers drove this -- I think rather it is a function of their willingness to be completely loyal to him, which is what he craves.
Let’s not Trumpwash history. There are critiques of Bill Gates philanthropy which have no link to anything Trump or his supporters have ever said.
> a significant part of the population seems to still think he is the literal Antichrist.
Beware that you don't fall into the trap of thinking the 1% of the population that makes 90% of the noise on the internet is "significant" or a representative sampling of the population. Most everyone else's views are quite boring and detached from extremism, they just don't shout their moderation on the rooftops.
A lot of people genuinely believe that all rich people are evil, and that they somehow have stolen their wealth.
That people can create wealth is alien to most people!
They think wealth is money, which leads to a zero sum belief system. That is, if Bill has $200B, he must have taken it from the rest of us.
a significant part of Americans are dumb as bricks
He is literally buying indulgence for his earlier sins.
Ah yes, saving millions of kids’ lives through vaccination and virtually eradicating polio is a way to make up for … checks notes… bundling a browser into an OS and not being nice with open source.
Some grass is in need of touching.
More like making up for enabling genocide through critical support for the Israeli and US militaries.
Yes and Bill Gates is such a good guy that he even remained friends with Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein's conviction. To help children of course. Truly a Bill Gates is a true hero looking out for all the children.
Do you have any details on the exact nature of their relationship, so we can read up on it?
You mean aside his wife divorcing him over his relationship with Epstein and it being widely reported in the news? I guess we will never know if Epstein and Gates even knew each other.
For anyone actually curious and unaware there are plenty of new articles that talk about Gates and Epstein, it's not some hidden secret. However it's a topic those who like Gates philanthropy like to ignore and pretend it doesn't exist as can be seen in this thread.
>>You mean aside his wife divorcing him over his relationship with Epstein
She divorced him over Gates cheating, not over the relationship with Epstein - if I'm wrong please correct me.
>>like to ignore and pretend it doesn't exist
I honestly don't want to, like the other commented said "just google" - so I "just googled" and none of the articles I found suggest they had anything beyond a very superficial relationship where they met a few times. Again, if I'm wrong please correct me.
Yeah, sure. Just cheating.
>In a 2022 interview, Melinda said, “I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no. I made that clear to him,” per Page Six, adding that she only met the child sex offender once because she “wanted to see who” he was. “I regretted it the second I walked in the door,” she went on, adding, “He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. My heart breaks for these women.” https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/melinda-ga...
If you just Google what Bill Gates later said then of course you will find how he only met a few times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
Well but that's exactly what I was asking for - thank you for posting this. I asked to be corrected and I was.
But let me quote what the article you linked says:
"claimed that Bill had met the disgraced financier on “numerous occasions.” One of those meetings allegedly lasted for hours."
Does that sound to you like they had a deep relationship of any kind? I'm just trying to form my own view on it - and that just doesn't read to me like the kind of relationship that people try to portray it as. If I met with someone "numerous times, sometimes for hours" you wouldn't immediately think we are friends or that we even share any values together, would you?
>> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
I can't access that without a sub, you'll have to give me the jist or some quotes.
Bro you're on Hacker News and you don't know how to get past a NY Times paywall. Embarrassing, though unsurprising given your blue-pilled beliefs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250505081209/https://www.nytim...
What do you mean by blue pilled beliefs?
And thank you for the archive link, I didn't know you could do it this way. If this surprises you then I'd link to link you this:
https://xkcd.com/1053/
Not OP, but this information is easily available by Googling ‘Bill Gates Epstein’. I’m not trying to be snarky. It’s just a widely covered news story.
So I googled exactly that, and what comes up is mostly about Epstein trying to extort gates:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/may/21/jeffrey-epst...
Gates addressing their relationship:
https://people.com/bill-gates-addresses-jeffrey-epstein-frie... https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/business/bill-gates-regrets-j...
Articles saying that they met "sometimes for a few hours":
https://pagesix.com/2025/04/15/celebrity-news/melinda-gates-...
Etc etc.
Nothing (as far as I can see, and tbh I'm not going to read past the first page of google results) suggesting that they were close friends in any meaning of the word.
Like, I don't know what kind of conclusion OP wants people to draw out of this. A lot of people were "friends" with Epstein, since he knew pretty much everyone, there are pictures of him smiling and shaking hands with lots of well known VIPs.
Which is why I asked OP for a source so we can just read about this - the whole "do your whole research" thing is just such an easy cop out because like you said "just google" doesn't really confirm anything, it's just a bunch of news articles from more or less reputable sources.
This is the first result for me:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
"Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past".
Can't he be both?
I think he is both. Maybe you need to do some evil before you can do some good, because the general evil does whatever necessary to win in competition, and that is challenging. He would have never got the money he has if he didn't do that.
This is assuming that huge wealth inequality is a given and all we can do is pray for a rare oligarch to give some of that money back to those in need.
Edit: I think it's great that he is doing this, but I don't think it's a good system. Giving money is so hard at scale that you need to set up a corporation just to figure out how to do it, and either it's so hard that they can barely shave away at the amount they have or their MO has evolved to include preserving themselves as an entity. If that wealth were more distributed, the social distance between those in need and those with money would be less.
We don't have general system in place that would somehow prevent this. The world runs on capitalism and everyone needs food and roof. Whoever has the power to give them or take them, has the total power, and can play with the system more they have wealth. Social democracy is some sort of middle-ground but it is not enough, because it is not applied everywhere equally, and it is hard to define what is selfish and non-selfish.
Laissez-faire capitalism is not synonymous with all forms of capitalism. We could and have in the past curbed runaway wealth and power. Pretending nothing can be done is, at best, ignoring history.
Absolutely something should be done. We just haven't found the method yet and we should keep looking for it.
[dead]
We could also decide to live in a society that doesn't allow for such runaway wealth consolidation we need the robber barons' hand-outs to do good. C'est la vie.
We could, but we haven't yet figured it out how to.
Heavy progressive taxes and subsidized services would go a long way.
Sure you can. You have an equitable society, and when someone inevitably tries to take more than their share (because there will always be sociopaths), you make them stop.
That works only if majority agrees that we put such system in place and enforce it globally in the world. Some could say that communism was a failed attempt for this.
Why does it have to global? Isn't that just imperialism? Why can't it be scoped to a geopolitical unit that wants it?
(I'm highly skeptical of social movements that claim to be for equality, but of course there are officials who suspiciously enjoy non-equal luxuries. Then it just looks like greedy sociopaths leveraging 'equality' PR in bad faith, as a tactic.)
There are democratic countries in Africa, for example, but people in there still seek "better life" by moving to other countries, or other countries abuse these countries, because the have the wealth do so, and on individual level, it is very hard to resist some additional comfort for life if you are below certain level. People look social media and want what others have. It is very difficult problem.
Natural resources also are not distributed equally and e.g. living longer life is a basic human need. What if some other country has the technology to save humans but they don't give it for free? Some start hoarding wealth in order to get that and it changes the political attitude in general.
> still think he is the literal Antichrist.
And then I suppose that Steve Jobs is the Christ in this story.
You only have to look at the research output of Microsoft Research to know that it is the other way around. Kind of weird how even smart people get things mixed up.
What research?
https://www.nature.com/nature-index/institution-outputs/gene...
I could understand some of the criticism for charitable work.
For instance, his foundation pushes birth control in developing nations. On the surface, it look like a just and noble cause.
But imagine how a developed nation would view an act like this on its own people from a foreign body. Imagine some wealthy Chinese national started taking out ads on American television telling Americans to have fewer children and going to poor neighborhoods in the US and handing out free contraceptives.
It's a kind of soft imperialism and social engineering that I imagine a lot of people object to. The guy can't even keep his marriage together and he's insistent on telling people half way around the world how to run their life?
Some people will always believe some dumb shit. There is no tragedy, just the regular condition of many people being ignorant.
He also did awful things in the business world when he was younger. He's no saint, either, he is just a normal, messy person. But he's done more for the poorest and neediest people in the world than most countries.
Al Capone ran a Chicago soup kitchen during the Great Depression, serving hundreds of thousands of free meals. Did this philanthropy absolve him of the harm done while acquiring the fortune which paid for the charity?
I'm not sure he's actually the philanthropist with the "highest positive impact", when looking at the "net value"
he's "extorted" a lot of money from various states by locking and price-gouging, money that would have otherwise been spent on social projects
basically he has done
Gates -> extort money -> fantastic personal wealth -> gave back to organization *he* decides to give too
while the normal path would be
Governments and people have lower spending because they don't need to give Microsoft too much cash -> governments and people decide by themselves how to spend extra money -> there are more, and more diversified, humanitarian actions
Because, not despite. Let no good deed go unpunished.
Are we talking about Bill putting 5G chips in our vaccines, or are we talking about Bill Gates the total asshole[1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Treatment_of_collea...
I didn't realize Xerox had so many employees.
He is not the greatest. He is literally taking the playbook from Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller who amassed great wealth then gave it away. These days you have Warren Buffett or Saros doing the same.
Many in tech were along for the Bill Gates show and felt he was a negative actor to the industry in many ways. The fact that he is taking that wealth and channeling it through charity to achieve what he believes is important worries many on both sides of the political divide because of the enormous amounts of power he has.
Specifically over the foundation: 1. Influence Over Public Policy Criticism: The foundation’s massive financial power allows it to heavily influence public health, education, and agricultural policy, sometimes without democratic oversight.
Example: In education, their support for charter schools and Common Core standards drew criticism for pushing reforms without enough input from teachers and communities.
2. Pharmaceutical and Vaccine Influence Criticism: The foundation has been accused of favoring pharmaceutical-based solutions, sometimes at the expense of broader public health approaches.
Example: Critics argue that funding pharmaceutical companies during vaccine rollouts (especially during COVID-19) prioritized private profits over equitable global access.
3. Corporate Ties Criticism: The foundation has invested in companies that contradict its stated goals (e.g., Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil), raising ethical questions.
Example: Investments in fossil fuel companies were seen as inconsistent with health and development goals.
4. Global South Criticism Criticism: Some argue that Gates Foundation programs in Africa and other regions can be top-down, lacking local input, and continuing a form of “philanthropic colonialism.”
5. Agricultural Interventions Criticism: Through the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), the foundation promoted industrial farming and GMOs.
Response: Some say this undermines traditional, sustainable farming practices and increases dependence on multinational corporations for seeds and fertilizers.
6. COVID-19 Vaccine Access Criticism: Gates opposed waiving IP rights for COVID-19 vaccines, which some argued delayed access in poorer countries.
Defense: The foundation claimed that maintaining IP was key to quality and speed, though many public health experts disagreed.
He is an interesting and unique character who achieved much but don't polish those angel wings just yet.
Yeah, and vaccines are a big reason why. He has seen the benefits of mass vaccination first hand and was a big advocate for pandemic prevention before COVID. COVID really broke a lot of people's brains.
Benefits like less people in Africa and more resources for the ruling class?
You'd be saying the same thing about Epstein if he hadn't been caught.
What I don't understand is the comradeship I see in people competing to effusively praise oligarchs. Bill Gates fought against technological progress, fought against free and open source software, fought against antitrust, even bribed officials to push out competitors. Why would people pat each other on the back for admiring him?
Even afterwards, when he bought his redemption by showering money upon dubious nonprofits, and by creating other, even more dubious nonprofits - simply paying everyone who could possibly have a problem with him, including dozens of journalistic organizations and hundreds of individual journalists - all of his charitable efforts are still obviously ways to play with various social theories that he has, not to help people.
It takes a real psychopath to accumulate that much power, with so few principles, and then to use it to play games with people's lives. His entertainment and the entertainment of his class is endangering the world.
And I still listen to Michael Jackson, so whatever, but we know that his relationship with Epstein was pretty extensive, and what was said during his divorce (in relation to that) was alarming, as well as the fact that he immediately crumbled and gave her the farm. There's your conspiracy theory; I'm not going to be caught praising a guy for mosquito nets whom I pretty much knew hung out with Epstein for a time as intensely as anyone else did. Epstein was giving away money for elite approval, too.
What's money for if not for patronage? You can't take it with you.
Anyone with a truly global perspective will notice multiple elephant-sizes omissions from Gates' statement. The premise that deep, systemic societal issues can be addressed directly while stepping on egg-shells around political topics is laughable. In 2025, you cannot separate starving kids and poverty alleviation from global politics and the world order.
His #1 goal listed is almost offensive when you consider what is happening right now in May 2025 -- an utterly preventable scenario that he can't even mention lest it get "too political" and tar his image.
In other words, it's perfectly valid to be skeptical of his motives, which seem primarily to be around elevating his personal brand and legacy.
> No mom, child, or baby dies of a preventable cause
This goal might offend you but it doesn't offend me, and I don't think his motives (whether it's for legacy or personal brand) matter to me or the mother of a child who didn't shit itself to death because a vaccine for the rotavirus.
No billionaire will ever be a net positive to society. The wealth he accrued was literally stolen from the labour of millions of people. No token donations at the end of your life will ever remediate that situation.
I often see this sentiment whenever a billionaire is in conversation, but I don't understand. Can you elaborate on how his wealth was "stolen" from people?
The way I see it, he's wealthy because he founded a wildly successful technology company by first creating something of value (MS-DOS). Microsoft has since grown to be one of the largest companies in the world, which hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily work for in exchange for a high salary, at least for engineers.
In a capitalist society, to a rounding error, most people work out of necessity - to house, clothe, and feed their families. This creates an inherently unequal relationship between capital and labour which is exploited to accrue wealth in the hands of a very few people.
This is literal theft from the working class of the fruits of their labours.
Billionaires become billionaires because of preferential treatment by governments, not out of any kind of merit. There are lots of better things the world could have had, Linux and the software commons would be much much much better if Microsoft hadn't hired all the best software engineers to make proprietary software and if the federal government hadn't coddled it and overlooked its monopolistic practices. The Internet would be a much better place without the likes of Google and Microsoft throwing their weight around.
It's perfectly accurate to say that billionaires steal from the public, it's just that what's being stolen isn't easily quantifiable because it's effectively 'potential'. Think of the constant enshittification of everything and you get a sense for what's being stolen.
Why did Bill Gates get preferential treatment for his operating system over others like Steve Jobs or Vinod Khosla? Government connections?
Sure. They ask him for government backdoors, to add stuff to it for military purposes. It's quid pro quo. Bill Gates gets to capture the lion's share of the wealth from his government-protected monopoly with all its anti-competitive practices and the public is left out in the cold.
So other OS's like Sun and MacOS refused to put in backdoors, and that's why Bill Gates is richer?
Correct. When billionaires gain money, they gain it personally. When several billionaires start losing money, it's a recession.
>> The wealth he accrued was literally stolen from the labour of millions of people.
It's such a weird take I don't even know where to begin. Are you suggesting that all people who worked at Microsoft to make Windows and IE and all their other products had their labour "stolen" from them? If yes, can you expand on that?
What do you do for a living? Do you perform some kind of a job that you get compensated for? If yes, do you also feel like you're being stolen from?
> It's such a weird take I don't even know where to begin. Are you suggesting that all people who worked at Microsoft to make Windows and IE and all their other products had their labour "stolen" from them? If yes, can you expand on that?
We have a metric for the difference between what you charge for something and what you paid to provide it, it's called net income. Here's Microsoft's: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/net...
Elsewhere, we tend to call that embezzlement.
That's not embezzlement by any definition of the word.
>>What do you do for a living? Do you perform some kind of a job that you get compensated for? If yes, do you also feel like you're being stolen from?
Care to reply to this?
> That's not embezzlement by any definition of the word.
This is just mental gymnastics on the level of "it's not murder when the military does it!".
> Care to reply to this?
No, because it's not relevant to the discussion.
>>This is just mental gymnastics on the level of "it's not murder when the military does it!".
What definition of embezzlement includes both parties willingly engaging in exchange of labour for financial compensation? I think you are right, there is mental gymnastic happening, just not where you think it is.
>>No, because it's not relevant to the discussion.
How so?
I don't even think you need to go that far - nobody who is not at least somewhat sociopathic will even become a billionaire (Buffett, that includes you) - because they'll happily step off the rat race at 10 or 100 million.
It's hard to take him seriously or consider him a good guy. While advocating for the environment, he doesn't hesitate to short tesla, an EV company (questionable nature aside).
There are two possible reasons for this (the 'why' remains -- not enough money?):
- He's admitting he doesn't care about the environmental mission, just the returns
- He thinks tesla is a fraud, but isn't saying it publicly
Either way, it's sus, so it's tough to trust him.
Well it seems obvious why anyone would (and morally should) short tesla... but let me break it down for those in the bleachers with two facts.
Musk 1: behind the presidential podium during the inauguration with the country watching twice did a salute of the enemy of the American people in WW2. And 2: controls the vast majority of tesla shares and is their current CEO.
It is patriotic to short tesla. And Bill Gates clearly cares about the future direction of this country.
What educator taught you that to short a company was to attempt to destroy it and it's mission, and to go "long" on a company was to support its mission?
I'm guessing it was Musk, and you should ask for a refund of your tuition fees.
A Google search suggests you are paroting Musk comments about Gates and shorting as if they were your own ideas.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
He might say he did it, and just pretend. Probably hire a bot army to spread it further.
He'd say he does, and I'm sure he and all the other rich people use the philanthropy tax loophole to avoid paying much of it.
Being the person that understands more about charity than anyone else, nobody has donated more than him in the history of charity but the radical left doesn't want you to know this. /s
I am not sure this is serious though ...
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Thank you, ChatGPT, but these are all obvious questions to ask, and more valuable would be some answers.
I don't think I've read it written directly in this thread yet, but philanthropy ideally exists to fix gaps that public services and initiatives don't address.
It is a way of acting and holding public power outside of democratic accountability. I'm with Gates' implicit vision here, that the end-goal is for philanthropic initiatives towards a given problem to eventually not be needed.
Philanthropy is often used as a way to curry public (and government) gratitude for a rich person who deigned to direct crumbs of their wealth towards the public, which in turn one uses to amass or solidify power – again, outside of democratic structures.
By demanding that matters of public welfare be properly handled by the state, shift power back to democratic processes. As a bonus, government has an incentive to actually address issues. Performative philanthropy thrives on the continued existence of the problems they claim to address.
Does OpenAI deliberately splatter em dashes everywhere by default to give us false confidence for how easy it is to detect AI text?
> We now understand the essential role nutrition—and especially the gut microbiome—plays in not only helping kids survive but thrive.
Glad we finally know now that babies need nutrition.
which part of "not only" and "but thrive" weren't relevant to his point?
We've always known that babies need nutrition, but knowledge of the role of the gut microbiome, how to develop it and ensure it is healthy is relatively new.
We have known well before the gates foundation descended their giant pile of gold coin that nutrition was required for children to thrive.
It’s too bad this guy turned into one of the bigger fear mongers during Covid times. He was one of the main pushers of the whole “New Normal” narrative and his doomsday prognostications did significant damage to society and generally went completely against every value he claimed to have.
But hey, people like him got a free pass to spit whatever nonsense came out of their mouth as long as it was pro-doom. Good news was never allowed and Gates was great at stirring up fear, panic and bad news.
It's 1999 over again. The whole world was panicking that all the computers would blow up over the Y2K problem. Which mostly didn't happen because we spent billions fixing the problem. Were the doomsayers wrong?
> Were the doomsayers wrong?
They certainly were, but you've elided the reason why. The doomsayers were predicting that we would have complete civilization collapse when the year rolled over to 2000. Vast quantities of wealth erased by bank computer errors, planes falling from the sky and killing thousands upon thousands, etc. Such extreme scenarios were never plausible. The doomsayers were wrong because there was a real problem and it did get fixed, but that problem would never have amounted to the apocalyptic event they said it was going to.
The website is fast, Gates knows how to make a website !
I actually do believe that he genuinely wants to give all of his money to some purposes. I mean money is just a number to him now. You definitely don't want to die with a huge pile of assets left behind.
It's just that I might not agree with the purposes he chose. But hey, he is the boss, he can do whatever he wants.
Use to admire Gates, and good on him for doing what he is doing.
For me now, this statement by Larry Page resonates better:
“You know, if I were to get hit by a bus today, I should leave all of it to Elon Musk.”
He's almost 70. Pretty optimistic of him to think he's still got 20 years.
High 80s is doable with the best care in the world and no chronic health issues.
And his dad lived for 94 years
How can u get some of this funding to do fundamental AI research?
Why do you think something that is getting extensive investment from private sources needs philanthropy?
Also, billg has laid out the goals of his Foundation and what they aspire to achieve. Which one of those aspirations do you think should be replaced with "fundamental AI research"?
A lot of the Foundation money goes on disease research and preventative and curative vaccine and medicine development. All of those areas are already being transformed by AI as a tool, and a lot of that development happens as a result of philanthropic, government, and private investment.
AI as defined today is brittle. I am interested in understanding the fundamentals of learning so that systems can be learn as quickly as humans and have thier same level of robustness. Such a breakthrough would have a worldwide impact.
As far as I can tell, very few places are looking into this topic area. Jeff Hawkins group is one of the few places. I would like to get involved as this area is my passion but I can't connected to funding to do so.
AI is already heavily funded / invested in by many companies, how much more is needed?
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/how-we-work/grant-appl...
Aren't there more important issues than tossing more money into that particular furnace? Touch some grass man.
Gates is betting very heavily on AI and thinks it will greatly improve health outcomes. Both for medical research and even primary care. You may not like it, but I'm sure he is offering grants for AI research. Not necessarily for training models, but for finding effective ways to apply models to achieve the foundation's goals. So, it's not a stupid question to ask at all.
AI as defined today is brittle. I am interested in understanding the fundamentals of learning so that systems can be learn as quickly as humans and have thier same level of robustness. Such a breakthrough would have a worldwide impact.
Good on him for giving away his fortune.
Anyone else feeling uneasy that society is increasingly dependent on a handful of ultra wealthy people's generosity for investment in certain good initiatives? We live in a time where there are individuals who have more money than many small countries, governments are cutting funding for good programs while individuals are stepping in to help. What is the point of living in a democracy if big investments depend on the mood of some billionaire?
The government has a fixed pie to allocate to various projects. Businesses, by contrast, can create more pie, from labor and raw materials that cost less than the value of the final product. So funding charitable causes with money earned from honest business is a win-win for society.
But then we can debate if Microsoft made their money honestly or not. If Microsoft exploited their monopoly, then perhaps Bill Gates stole from the rich to give to the poor...
It's a noble goal.
But the track record of the rich does not inspire confidence that this is the route our society should take in reclaiming these assets.
Look at me! Look at me! I give money! Look at me while I'm doing it!
"virtually" wonder why it needs to be qualified like this.
"all his wealth" would mean ALL of his wealth, which is unrealistic.
Saying "99.999%" of my wealth invites critics later on when he donates "99.98%".
Substitute "virtually" by "almost" and it's the same. It's just style.
Because keyboard-warrior pedants will moan if he bought himself a $200K Porsche (0.0001% of that $200B) or even just a dinner for his kids...
I can totally see here the headline "While millions sleep hungry in Asia and Africa Bill Gates throws away uneaten fries after dinner at a local restaurant like its nothing"
Because there will probably be enough left at the end that for most would be wealthy beyond their richest dreams.
It's hard to get by with only 1.08 billion dollars…
Not that I think giving away most of his money isn't admirable. But I think he'll still qualify for "he died rich".
Because "20 years to give away all my wealth" would be misleading? He plans to retain some of his wealth.
Not to mention it's pretty difficult to give away all money. Some of it will need to pay for the administration of programs in existence after these 20 years, accountants, and of course himself - if he's still alive by then.
Maybe because he promised his kids a few million, or fail to give it away on his terms, and he doesn't want to be nagged about it.
I don't think promises like this should be considered news. Take a look at the list of people who have signed Gates' own Giving Pledge and ask yourself if making the pledge changed their behavior at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge.
Historically, it's pretty typical that rich people don't give their money away until their death, and the Pledge itself is not a statement of intent to give the money away during their life.
Giving during your lifetime is a much, much better way of ensuring that it does what you want. It is very hard to control things from the grave, as someone administers it and can do what they want, as long as they follow the letter.
How brave, giving all your money away by the time you will die. When you’ve got absolutely no skin in the game.
Why not just do it now? Why did you act so evil for decades? You don’t just get to “be good” now
I can go on and on on how Bill Gates has done immense damage to software freedom etc and that is precisely the reason I will very much allow him to "be good" now.
Doesn't fix what he has already done, totally, but not only is he away from that now, he is doing stuff I actually respect. Absolute best case scenario.
It could have an unintended effect.
Injecting this money may create inflation and accidentally increase poverty as more money becomes freely available and circulating.
Could be in some way better to just destroy it ?
While I agree giving away money can have negative secondary effects, destroying the money makes no sense and is positively moronic. He should just give it to his kids if he doesn't know what to do with it.
It’s like during the coronavirus, more money was given to people without related increase in real-world generated value: result, prices increase and people who had savings can now do less with them.