New Book Takes a Skeptical Look at Bill Gates’s Philanthropic Evolution

Who is Bill Gates? Admiring portrayals of a tech genius and innovative philanthropist are giving way to a new crop of books that take a sterner look at the founder of Microsoft and the $77 billion foundation that bears his name. Last year saw the publication of The Bill Gates Problem by Tim Schwab, and next year we’ll have House of Gates by Nicholas Kulish. Slotted in between is Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World, a far-from-complimentary assessment of the man and his influence by New York Times finance editor Anupreeta Das.

Large parts of Das’s book depict Gates as a capitalist untouchable, whose success as a nerd and aspiration to be a savior has turned him into a king, ascending the throne on an avalanche of untaxable money. Das’s analysis includes his 2021 divorce from Melinda French Gates, which she argues was sealed by his marital infidelity and his questionable relationship with disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Das also has lots to say about the Gates Foundation. She notes its annual budget of $8.3 billion dwarfs that of national and global foundations and exceeds the annual budget of the World Health Organization. Such size enables it as a private actor to have greater policy influence, especially in public health, than most nation states. The Chronicle emailed with Das about her book, out this week.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Like Robert Reich’s book Just Giving and Tim Schwab’s book The Bill Gates Problem, you argue that Bill Gates’s philanthropy, due its power and influence, represents a perversion of democracy. Why is this analysis gaining traction?

I wouldn’t say that I argue that Gates’s philanthropy is antidemocratic, the way Reich does. Rather, my goal was to address the criticisms leveled at the Gates Foundation, which include the idea that it is a “perversion of democracy,” to borrow your term. I also take up critiques of the foundation’s philanthropy as being neocolonial, too reliant on Western expertise, too top-down, too technocratic, etc. These studies of the foundation have become numerous because of its size and influence in global health, which can end up determining much of the agenda and set priorities of what should be done in X,Y, or Z situations.

You are among several journalists who report that Gates turned to philanthropy after the 1998 Microsoft antitrust ruling. What did Gates want from the nonprofit sector and for himself?

Based on my reporting, I think Gates was just sick of the antitrust trial and focus, and both wanted to, and was advised to, step away from the role of CEO of Microsoft. That certainly hastened his move to philanthropy. I think he saw that his money could be put to use to address certain problems, and he got into it, and began to build this enormous foundation.

What do you consider to be the Gates Foundation’s greatest successes?
I think the foundation would say its work in public health, including its drive to eradicate polio — which the world has come very close to — and its work in vaccines would be among its biggest successes. It has also sought to sponsor innovative solutions to problems of the global south, although the successes of those are harder to determine.

What do you consider to be the Gates Foundation’s greatest failures?
In general, the fields of global health and development follow a one-step forward, two-steps back pattern, and so many of its projects haven’t had the results they might have expected. It has learned a lot from its early days, to accommodate the voices of people on the ground, to pay attention to cultural context, etc. But too often, the foundation gets criticized for picking something it wants to address, delivering models of what success would look like, and then holding grantees to those performance measures. That could skew priorities by directing money to certain areas that the foundation deems important.

What do you make of Warren Buffett’s recent decision not to give the remainder of his fortune — worth more than $100 billion — to the Gates Foundation, after providing it $39 billion between 2006 and 2023?
It’s a bunch of things, as I write in my book. Buffett decided that the foundation didn’t need any more money, they had done a lot of work, much of it good, but he was also not a fan of the big operating costs of the foundation. At the same time, his kids’ foundations and his family one had scaled up a fair bit, and he thought his kids could handle the distribution of the Berkshire fortune that remained upon his death. I think Buffett also wanted to make clear to the Gates Foundation’s trustees and others, and more broadly to the world, that they shouldn’t count on his money coming in for years and years — given that he’s 93. There had been a longstanding assumption inside the foundation that they would always get his money, even though he had always said it was a lifetime pledge.

Why is the Giving Pledge losing favor?
Because it’s been hard to understand what it has achieved. Every year, you have a handful of billionaires sign the pledge, but beyond that, it’s still up to each individual or family to decide what to do with their money, when to do it, or even whether to do it at all. It’s a moral commitment, not a legally binding one, so it’s hard to figure out if there’s anything quantifiable. I think people get irked partly because there’s a sense that it was free publicity for billionaires talking about their noble intentions without any way to hold them to it.

Do you think catalytic philanthropy and the pursuit of data-driven targets and causes, much advanced by Gates and his foundation, will become less influential in U.S. philanthropy?
Actually, I think it will become even stronger, because if you look at the new generation of philanthropists, etc., a lot of them come from tech or finance backgrounds, with a return-on-investment and data-driven mentality. So this investment-based approach, this idea that where my dollar can have the most catalytic effect, is very much going to be in favor.

How might Melinda French Gates’s philanthropy differ from her ex-husband’s and from the approaches of the Gates Foundation?
I don’t expect her approach to be that much different, it’s just that her focus is much narrower, on women’s rights and gender equality. She also runs Pivotal as a for-profit LLC, which gives her a lot more flexibility to decide how to direct her resources. I see that she’s now doing sit-downs and interviews with other influential women, building her “soft power” if you will. It’s very high-profile, very visible.