I consider Gates to be "better" than most billionaires, but, I recognize that he's still a billionaire, and as such, his philanthropic endeavors are as much about him having wealth and maintaining his wealth as they are about him being a "good person".
Let me explain: it's a tax write off. Basically, billionaires often donate to charity, not because they're particularly giving, but because it reduces their taxes. They basically take the money they would otherwise pay in tax, and instead pay it to a charity that then does whatever they do with it.
By establishing a charity for himself, he can personally pay his charity the money that would otherwise go to tax, then as the charity, dictate where those funds are spent. Instead of giving the money to someone else to do with as they will, he basically pays himself, so he can dictate what happens with his money.
In turn, he pays little to no taxes, and only has to ensure the money circles around his charity somehow. That may be in the form of paying himself (or others) as a function of running the charity, or sending the money to places and people who he believes can benefit from it (or indirectly, benefit him).
It becomes a large circle jerk of money that otherwise would have gone to the government for taxes.
EDIT: before this gets any worse: he's not making money with tax write-offs. That's literally impossible. The point is to control where your money goes. Here's an example. In situation A, bill, the individual, wants a thing to happen.... Say, it's research into a new form of energy. So Bill takes $1000 from his gross income and pays someone to research that thing to make it a reality. At the end of the year, bill gets a knock on the door, it's the tax man, looking for his cut off the $1000 bill earned. His cut is 30% or $300. Now let's move to situation B. Bill wants the thing to happen, but Bill owns a charity. So Bill donates the money to his charity and gets a tax write off for it in the form of a receipt that he can submit later. As a representative of the charity, bill then pays that $1000 to people to make the thing. At the end of the year, the tax man comes calling for his $300 of bills income. Instead, bill hands the tax collector the receipt for the charitable donation he made with the $1000 of income. The tax man accepts it and leaves with nothing.
The charity is a tax shelter so that bill has more money available to spend on the things he wants to have happen. So more of his money can go towards those things without being taxed.
I hope that clears it up a bit. Jesus, there's a lot of people here that don't understand tax write-offs. There's more that simply don't understand me, or have literacy issues, and assume far too much about what I'm saying here. Yikes.
Bill’s income is near zero, his personal tax burden is probably less than yours. This charitable giving isn’t offsetting his tax liability; it’s a hobby.
I suppose if you mean traditional income, but he gets tens of billions of dollars per year in capital gains. I remember a few years ago he said "sure, I paid three billion dollars in taxes last year, but I should have paid more". I read about ten years ago that he donated $10 billion dollars to charity and his net worth still went up $9 billion. His financial holdings are so enormous that his net worth still increases regardless of giving away ridiculous sums of money. I remember Chris Rock talking about Gates a couple decades ago and he said "you can't get rid of that much money. You can't give it away fast enough to lose it", and that's a pretty accurate statement.
So imagine there exists a charitable billionaire that wants to do good. How in your eyes would a billionaire go about donating their money without drawing this same criticism?
Hasn't Gates already pledged pretty much his entire fortune to charity after he dies?
I guess the Devil's advocate argument here is would you rather trust Bill Gate's charity to spend the money or the US Government? Because from what I've seen, any time there is excess money in the US government it is not spent on social programs but on enriching government contractors and tax breaks for the wealthy.
They could use their money and influence to lobby the government in a positive direction, such as making sure taxes go toward social programs instead of killing brown people, and then simultaneously help fund that by filing their taxes fairly and paying their intended share rather than do this arcane skullfuckery to pay as little as possible. A great next step would be to lobby for tax code reform to close the arcane loopholes (and ofc massively raise taxes on anyone with an income north if $1M/yr) so that other, less charitably minded billionaires can start paying their share whether they want to or not.
So imagine there exists a charitable billionaire that wants to do good. How in your eyes would a billionaire go about donating their money without drawing this same criticism?
I'd say the answer to that, is that they should simply give significantly more than what they're currently giving. We're talking of people who could easily give away 99% of their wealth with 0 personal sacrifices. If they're giving less than 0.1%¹ instead, I just want to know why?
Bill Gates pays less taxes as he donates to a charity
Bill Gates runs that charity
Bill Gates then gets to decide how that charity spends his donated money
This then means that he can use what should have been tax to:
Pay himself with the charities money, as he is an employee of the charity
Lobby politicians using the charity's money
Otherwise direct the charity to work in his best interests
Which part are you disagreeing with? I guess he doesn't "make money" in the strictest sense, but it sure seems like he's exploiting the system to keep more of it
Issue is if he's paying himself with the charity's money he'd have to pay tax on that, and if he wrote that off with a donation and paid himself again then it'd reset the loop - there's no loophole there, literally, as it'd be an endless closed loop of transferring money.
Given the best interests of the US government are destabilising other countries and supporting unfair healthcare companies, and given what is known about Bill Gates' charity spending I think a higher proportion actually goes to the betterment of society than would if it went to the US government
A 501(c)(3) organization is subject to heightened restrictions on lobbying activities, A 501(c)(3) organization may engage in some lobbying, but too much lobbying activity risks loss of tax-exempt status. Lobbying may not constitute a “substantial part” of the activities of the 501(c)(3) organization. ^[source]
Otherwise direct the charity to work in his best interests
I guess you can argue that eliminating malaria is in his best interests, but it's pretty reaching. I guess nobody should do anything good if it might indirectly benefit themselves.
Fair, in this example Bill Gates isn't exactly the best one to pick. And the clarification on the lobbying rules is definitely a valuable bit of information, so thank you for adding that.
I was more trying to point out that the original comment wasn't saying that the tax break "made money". It's all about shuffling it around to avoid taxes.
At the end of the day, it allows Bill Gates (or other billionaires) to spend otherwise taxable income on whatever they deem important. Whether or not you agree with how they're spending their money is irrelevant
to spend otherwise taxable income on whatever they deem important
Yes, that's absolutely true, but the language hides the truth a bit. People don't get the nuance of what "taxable income" is.
If Bill donates a thousand dollars to charity, he saves ~$370 in taxes. That means he's still losing $630 on the deal. The government gets to effectively triple their money by allowing you to decide where it goes.
There may also be a limit of 60% of your AGI? I'm not sure how this works with billionaires.
$1 in charitable contributions does not lower your tax burden by $1, and certainly not more than $1.
If that dollar would have been taxed as capital gains, assuming 20% capital gains and 3.8% NII tax, it saves 23.8 cents meaning the $1 donation costs 76.2 cents.
If that dollar would have been taxed as normal income, assuming a marginal tax rate of 37%, it saves 37 cents meaning the $1 donation costs 63 cents.
(These two examples are not intended to be an exhaustive list.)
Charitable contributions cost money, just not as much money as they would if there wasn't a tax deduction.
I've come to the same conclusion. Every time there's a corporation or billionaire either scrapping something or giving something away, then it's "for the tax breaks".
He's not doing it for tax write-offs, he's donating billions of dollars per year because he genuinely wants to help. He crushed a lot of people to get to the top, that's indisputable, but he's genuinely trying to offset that destruction now, and he's possibly at a net positive effect on the world now. Actually, I'd say he's probably at a net positive impact on the world.
See also early-1900s philanthropists who felt there was no point having a lot of money if you did not intend to spend every last cent. Liquor was illegal and the blowjob hadn't been invented yet, so hell, why not build a bunch of pools and libraries?
Human beings can be complex enough to acquire money through evil means and still want to do good things with it. Sometimes even for good reasons! They're not robots and they're not monsters. They're just assholes.
I don’t think it took tens of thousands of years of human evolution to learn that mouth on penis feels good. My dogs figured that one out entirely on their own.
Now, it may have seen renewed popularity with modern hygiene practices, but that’s a different topic.
People who look at a billionaire and think "I need to kill him". Anything anyone with that kind of money does, is treated as the greatest evil in the entire world.
I'm not sure what you mean, since money you donate to charity is exempt from income tax. The taxes you would otherwise pay on income that you donate is refunded to you.
None of that makes sense with how taxes actually work. For every $1 donated to charity, the maximum you're getting back is 0.37 from the tax deduction. That's assuming you're in the max tax bracket. The higher your tax bracket, the cheaper it is to give to charity, but it's never better than keeping the money yourself.
There are games that can be played with charitable donations, but cash to a foundation is not really the way. The real games are played around with hard to value assets like art/jewelry where massively inflated values and weird lease terms can lead to some really questionable outcomes. For example "loaning" art to a museum and writing off the "rent" after having it appraised for some insane value.
The 0.37 you get back is the tax you paid on the income. The exercise is more about controlling where your money goes and what it goes to.
Instead of giving the money to the government, who you may not agree with, you're giving it to a cause that either directly or indirectly can benefit you, whether that cause is a direct benefit in the form of helping with a problem that is causing you trouble, or simply as a good PR move.
You spend money to get there, but now often than not you're getting a benefit from the transaction.
Billionaires and their mentality and interests are fairly well known, for the most part. Bill is a co-chair of the foundation and likely recieves many benefits from holding that position, including a salary. He can also, as chair, influence who is hired, providing stable employment for people who are in his favor, while also getting a massive boost to his public image, all while paying himself a salary. He can also direct the funds that would normally go to the government as tax, who may spend it on things he doesn't want to happen, and redirect those funds to something he would like to see happen, such as R&D into technologies (which is a nontrivial part of what the foundation funds).
For Bill, the charitable foundation is a win all the way around, except to his billion dollar bank account, which I'm certain is providing plenty of income on its own.
Quite literally he's taking money out of the hands of the government and making sure money is being funneled into things that he thinks should happen. It looks very selfless on the surface but gates is a business man, this is just his most recent endeavor.
Gates used his "charity" influence to stop poor countries from making their own vaccines. He singlehandedly did more to exacerbate the pandemic than even Donald Trump.
He fucking did! Why the downvotes? He personally lobbied governments to make sure nobody released the patents to allow cheap vaccinations in developing countries
It couldn't possibly have anything to do with his work in the eradication of polio and malaria, his efforts to provide clean drinking water to impoverished areas, and his program to create renewable cheap electricity for impoverished rural areas? Seems like that probably has a lot more to do with people's perspective of him than the fact that trumpy bois don't like him.
It just wasn't in your circle of influence before. He has been working in humanitarian aid for decades. His contributions are well known, and well documented. You can check for yourself, he has accomplished a great deal towards the things I mentioned.
Civil society organizations active in poorer nations, including Doctors Without Borders, expressed discomfort with the notion that Western-dominated groups, staffed by elite teams of experts, would be helping guide life-and-death decisions affecting people in poorer nations. Those tensions only increased when the Gates Foundation opposed efforts to waive intellectual property rights, a move that critics saw as protecting the interests of pharmaceutical giants over people living poorer nations
i remember hearing, that their argument was, that a strong profit-incentive would motive the manufacturer to increase production as well as quality. I also remember that the debate around that topic was drowned out by some weirder theories. E.g. during that time q-anon was on the rise, and some people argued, that the gates foundation was using covid to implant microchips into people or something like that
A not insignificant line of reasoning (though probably less important to people in power than the profit incentive) was also to keep the secrets of making the vaccine from bring revealed to other countries, which would apparently erode the USA's pharmaceutical research advantage. An interesting article about this from the former director of NIST is here but I don't necessarily agree with the reasoning.
Gives a really good breakdown of the role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had in the global pandemic response and how they donated more money to the WHO during that time than any member country. How they have close ties to the WHO and how they hoarded the IP rights to the COVID vaccine resulting in lower income countries not having access to the vaccine.
It wasn't "lower income countries not having access to the vaccine". It was just preventing them from making it. They can have subsidized access to high quality vaccines.
India wanted to manufacturer the vaccine in less than ideal factories. That would have hurt or killed some of the people who took it, and the vaccine would have been blamed. This is the literal reason why they said "no". They fucking invented the vaccine. They would know.
We joke, but Epstein masqueraded as a wealthy investor/entrepreneur for like two or three decades before he was caught, so him merely having some one's contact written down doesn't mean much. In fact, Bill Gates has never been shown to have visited the island at any point, and Epstein was very invested in the Gates Foundation charity work such as loaning his plane for high profile individuals to fly to charity sites across Africa.
There's evidence that Gates knew what was going on at Epstein's parties, didn't participate, but still choose to stay silent. Gates had enough power and wealth that he didn't need to worry about retaliation either.
While I thought the same at the time, since then I've adopted a more nuanced view. My guess is that she was planning to divorce him for a while and just used an opportune moment to actually do it. Some rumors that can be explained away are not something that would end a healthy marriage.
I always thought it was more to do with the fact that their youngest son had just turned 18. So he was probably moving out of the house to college. There is a big culture here in the US to "stick it out for the kids until they move out" mentality. So I just thought that is what they were doing.
One of the reasons mosquito populations are out of control is that we've killed off a lot of their predators. No mosquito anywhere is a keystone species, and you would only need to wipe out the vector species. Other, less harmful species of mosquito would fill in nicely with less competition.
At least, that's the theory. Previous theories included introducing mosquitofish to eat the larvae, but that backfired because the moquitofish are aggressive and don't eat as many mosquitos as local predators driven off by the mosquitofish.
Bats eat tbem, but they won't go extinct without mosquitos as food. There also aren't enough bats currently to keep the mosquito populations under control due to other factors preventing abat population boom.
I gotcha, I thought you were saying that bats would suffer if the mosquitoes were eliminated.
Yes, anything we do to improve bat populations would be good for a variety of reasons. But I doubt that any one bat species would make a dent in the specific mosquitoes that act as vectors for disease. Plus, if you start introducing bat species to non-native habitats, you run the risk of repeating the mosquitofish catastrophe.
Even with issues like polio where he's supposedly doing good, he does lots of harm from my understanding. Probably not though malice, but being a know-it-all who uses their money to shape policy, the end result is still the same. Having a tech billionaire in charge of medical policy has caused many more people to suffer from polio as a result than would have without his meddling. And that's the problem with billionaire: even if they try to be good, they're no dieties and giving that much power to unaccountable individuals means they can accidentally cause lots of harm. And often the have perverse incentives (see Bill Gates and all he's done to hurt education in the US, for example).
On the education thing, this AP article doesn't go too heavily into policy details but does cover the extent of Gates' influence on the American education system.
Or were you talking about the controversies surrounding the Foundation's handling of certain diseases? Here's one from PBS that's arguably the most neutral I could find outlining criticisms regarding joint efforts between the Gates Foundation, WHO, and various governments/orgs on eradicating polio and issues with their strategies.
Maybe, but that's clearly not his intention as he has showed many times.
Take for example case covid
In April 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gates was criticized for suggesting that pharmaceutical companies should hold onto patents for COVID-19 vaccines. The criticism came due to the possibility of this preventing poorer nations from obtaining adequate vaccines. Tara Van Ho of the University of Essex stated, "Gates speaks as if all the lives being lost in India are inevitable but eventually the West will help when in reality the US & UK are holding their feet on the neck of developing states by refusing to break [intellectual property rights] protections. It's disgusting."
Gates is opposed to the TRIPS waiver. Bloomberg News reported him as saying he argued that Oxford University should not give away the rights to its COVID-19 information, as it had announced, but instead sell it to a single industry partner, as it did. His views on the value of legal monopolies in medicine have been linked to his views on legal monopolies in software
Yeah obviously. I'm not saying an evil person cannot do good things, Hitler was responsible for VW Beetle - objectively one of the most beautiful cars in human history. We just can't call Hitler a good person because of that one thing
No, it's pretty black and white with Billionaires. None of them have changed the world NEARLY as much as literally any figure from history. At all.
No billionaire has earned their billions for the simple fact that a person cannot produce that much wealth on their own. They MUST steal from others to get that rich. It literally HAS to be the case, because there is no physical way they generated that wealth themselves.
Still probably a net positive, though. Hell, he could kill 110 Million people added to every sars-cov-2 death combined and still be net positive. Good person? Debatably no. Best billionaire? Yeah.
Covid19 has killed less than 8 Million people total, and you can argue in good faith that Bill Gates would be responsible for some of those deaths by advocating for full commercialization of the vaccine.
Yeah, it's a lot, but compared to a random estimate from The Guardian of 122 Million lives saved by the Gates Foundation... yeah.
Now, I realize some people would say saving any number of lives wouldn't justify murder, but anybody who says Bill Gates is anything other than a net positive impact on the world is out of their fucking head.
I would pay 130 billion to save 122 Million lives. That's only 1066 USD per life saved. You must be greedy af if you think that's a bad deal.
That's not how stocks work. He hasn't taken 130 Bn USD. Most of his 129.2 Bn net worth is unrealized gains in the form of shares of companies such as Microsoft, meaning when or if it ever becomes income he will likely donate that as well, in fact he has promised to do so on many occasions. To date, Bill has donated 59 Bn USD to charities, the vast majority of his income.
Okay I take that as you did not read the article, but only the misleading title, if you claim that Bill and Melinda saved 122m infants...
The article says that infant deaths (0-5yo) have halved from 1990 to 2015. From 1990 to 2000 the number already gone from 12 million down to around 9.5 million yearly. This is when Bill and Melinda Foundation was founded and they started pouring money on vaccinations which is good of course.
So yes, they've certainly done a part in reducing infant death rates, but they're only a small part of it. And most of the money invested wasn't even theirs, but donation from Warren Buffet who actually donated away most of his wealth.
The reason is that there just isn't an ethical way to accrue a billion dollars. Stealing from workers labour is an inherent part of becoming a billionaire. Plus, usually some other exploitation too, like fucking others over with patents.
Doing charity with a small fraction of your obscene wealth after this isn't any kind of moral absolution.
Hardly anyone is all good or all bad. But with any billionaire ever, the bad will always outweigh the good because of what monumental injustice was necessary to collect a billion dollars.
I don't really agree but even if so, there still are degrees of wrong doing. Gates has helped to eradicate disease but to many in this thread that means literally nothing because of their binary thinking
I'm not saying Wozniak didn't get fucked by their dealings or that CEO to Worker pay rate is justifiable, but they're a lot better off than most. Wozniak is working as a US treasury and defence contractor and he likes to sell uncut pages of bills to strangers for fun, man is worth at least 120 Million USD.
Ah, shit, you're right. Yeah I've never even heard of a disgruntled Microsoft programmer, I guess Paul Allen? But he still got 60-40 split with Gates even after Allen left to deal with cancer. Then there is Charles Simonyi who is also quite affluent after moving on to bigger and better things.
Yeah I really fumbled on that one, Woz was with Apple not Microsoft. Can you name anybody who worked at Microsoft before 1990 who didn't become wildly successful?
I mean, if you can name them, it's probably because they were successful, right?
Microsoft is not a paragon of good employee treatment btw. As others pointed out, they had their asses sued to pieces for trying to maintain employees as contractors because it allowed them to save money by not paying benefits.
This might be the pot calling the kettle black, but absence of evidence is not evidence. My lack of information on a group of tech entrepreneurs who existed over 40 years ago doesn't prove anything, and neither does your lack of ability to present such information.
Honestly that doesn't sound all that bad. They even chose temporary staffing agencies that already paid benefits. The lawsuit was basically over whether recurring temp workers could utilize the stock-option plans that permanent employees got. The worst part about this case is that it went on for 8 years before Microsoft settled it.
In January, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Microsoft's appeal of a lower-court ruling that as many as 10,000 workers hired on a temporary basis should have been allowed to take part in the stock-option plan that the company offers its permanent employees. The case was filed by the Seattle law firm of Bendich, Stobaugh and Strong PC.
Pilla noted that Microsoft changed its policies for temporary employees earlier this year. It now has a 12-month limit on temporary employment, after which workers have to take a 100-day hiatus, Pilla said, adding that the average length of a temporary employee's time at Microsoft has dropped to just 10 months. The company also tries to use temporary employment agencies that already pay benefits to the workers.
Despite the settlement, Pilla reiterated Microsoft's contention that it didn't set a formal policy aimed at keeping temporary workers on as virtually permanent employees in order to avoid having to pay benefits and Social Security taxes.
"I don't think you can look at it as a broad policy," he said. "A lot of times, it just happened. [Temporary workers] moved from project to project." But he added that Microsoft executives eventually "did recognize that" and moved to institute the new requirements for temporary workers.
The article you linked claims it was never a corporate policy, plus I mean, I've never heard of a corporation that gives temporary workers stock-option plans. I agree it would have been a lot cooler of MS to just have more permanent roles available, though. Would have also saved them the lawsuit and settlement.
So you, with a straight face, are claiming that companies always write down and distribute policy to govern their intentional unethical behavior?
You are ignorant about this. I happened to work for a company that changed their practices as a result of this lawsuit (or maybe a later one? if so, further proves the point which you're jumping over). That company let about 8 contractors go that I know of, and replaced them with about 3-4 permanent hires. Kind of shows you how much money they were saving by hiring people as "temps" which they intended to renew indefinitely until it was no longer convenient for them. They, like MS, required contractors to report in person during specific hours for work. Something you legally cannot do with contractors. They got scared of a lawsuit so they stopped. They admitted that was the reason to me and referenced MS by name.
Believe what you want, this isn't actually debatable though...
I feel like you're getting a little off track with the personal anecdotes. We're discussing if Bill Gates is a bad person, if Microsoft is comparatively evil, and I don't think you've really established that.
I do think that taxes should disallow the existence of billionaires, though, so maybe we agree on that?
Right, when an entire industry shifted after they got into trouble for doing that, it was just my anecdote...
Yeah the conversation went off the rails because you took it there. You're wrong about most things but instead of conceding or going away, you just keep moving goalposts. Bye.
Lol, as if. Computing industry limitations are still dictated by Hardware, which has advanced at the same rate it would have without Windows. Plus, the vast majority of servers run Linux, anyways, so all he did was be one of three or four firms that helped bring computing into people's homes when otherwise it would have required more technical skills than anybody had in that time period.
It's so funny that the socialist rethoric doesn't even crumble here when talking about big tech. Who are Microsoft's poor exploited workers exactly? Last I checked, developers in big tech make bank. It's the customers that get fucked.
THE TERM "exploitation" often conjures up images of workers laboring in sweatshops for 12 hours or more per day, for pennies an hour, driven by a merciless overseer. This is contrasted to the ideal of a "fair wage day's wage for a fair day's work"--the supposedly "normal" situation under capitalism in which workers receive a decent wage, enough for a "middle class" standard of living, health insurance and security in their retirement.
Sweatshops are horrific examples of exploitation that persist to this day. But Karl Marx had a broader and more scientific definition of exploitation: the forced appropriation of the unpaid labor of workers. Under this definition, all working-class people are exploited.
I don't know when the last time you checked is, but I don't think it's funny that as early as 1996 Microsoft was successfully sued for nearly 100m for abusing workers as "permatemps". That isn't counting their practices of forcing their staff to work extreme hours, avoiding to pay benefits, and just doing just about anything they could to avoid giving their employees a way of "making bank".
"In 1996, a class action lawsuit was brought against Microsoft representing thousands of current and former employees that had been classified as temporary and freelance. The monetary value of the suit was determined by how much the misclassified employees could have made if they had been correctly classified and been able to participate in Microsoft's employee stock purchase plan. The case was decided on the basis that the temporary employees had had their jobs defined by Microsoft, worked alongside regular employees doing the same work, and worked for long terms (years, in many cases)."
The reason is that there just isn't an ethical way to accrue a billion dollars. Stealing from workers labour is an inherent part of becoming a billionaire. Plus, usually some other exploitation too, like fucking others over with patents.
I would agree that there is no ethical way to become a billionaire, but I think that lacks context and scale.
Most billionaires make their fortunes from exploiting the labour and material wealth of the global south. Gates made his fortune by bullying the rest of silicon valley in the 90s, leading to the monopolistic tech market we know and hate today.
This is unethical in that scope, but when compared to global exploitation of other billionaires in the same tax bracket.... it's the best we could realistically hope for. Gates has essentially been unethical in the realm of wealthy 1rst world nations, all while directing a significant part of his wealth to improve material conditions in the places most billionaires extract wealth from.
Doing charity with a small fraction of your obscene wealth after this isn't any kind of moral absolution.
I mean 50 billion dollars is not just a small fraction of his wealth, and he's literally cured diseases that have killed millions of people over time.
Moral absolution isnt something that can be weighed and measured, it's subject to ethical belief systems that are not uniform across people or cultures.
Who gives a shit about whether "Bill Gates can set himself apart as a billionaire?" That's a moot point because he shouldn't have become a billionaire to begin with.
Of course you'll claim I'm sucking off billionaires when the reality is all I'm saying is a very simple and undeniable truth. You can't think clearly when you have to categorize everything as good or evil.
It literally doesn't matter to you that bill gates has saved thousands of lives because he's also been shitty. That's fucked up.
No, he can be taxed to millionaire status. Then we can democratically decide who the money is used to help. He no doubt got to where he is because he benefitted from the help of the US.
Who gives a fuck whether some other rich sociopath would've done better?
What you should be asking is why important shit like this should be left to the whims of a single private citizen with too much power instead of handled by government. The notion that Bill fucking Gates is some kind of savior übermensch who somehow knows better than the entire voting public how to spend the money is fucking ludicrous.
His company has also doomed some billions of people to using Excel, but on the other hand some number of millions of people get the pleasure of using Excel
He helped championed one of the Covid vaccines, but also forced the private ownership and profit of it. Something the scientists working on it didn't want to do. This in an stark contrast to the polio vaccine, which was free and who's lead scientist referred the idea as "trying to own sunlight".
This is true. It was said by Jonas Salk, who was attributed with the creation of the injectable vaccine in the 1950s that was greenlit for widespread use.
The injectable vaccine is a non-sterilizing vaccine (meaning you still get the disease, but your body can fight it off effectively - which is most vaccines). The injection vaccine was replaced by a sterilizing vaccine (where your bodily systems can kill the virus before you become contagious, and in many cases, before symptoms). The sterilizing vaccine, used to this day, is basically a magic potion that you drink. It kills the polio virus in your gut, which is the ingress method for polio.
From what I've seen, Salk didn't live to see the success of his vaccine; but he's a hero in my mind.
My late father was a polio survivor. He was permanently disabled as a result of the disease. He lost something like 70% of the use of his right (?) leg (could have been his left). He was still ambulatory, and could walk, but often needed to use his stronger leg when climbing stairs because his disabled leg was too weak to lift him up the stairs. He walked with a limp... And he was lucky. Post-polio survivors frequently had much more severe disabilities. I saw him struggle with the effects of it my entire life, and given he only had a relatively mild disability, I consider anyone who developed a poliovirus vaccine to be a hero of humanity, and anyone who refuses that vaccine to be an ignorant fool.
Salk's comments are just icing on that hero status for me.
Gonna take a few downvotes and agree with you. Dude donates so much to the world health organization he beats all other COUNTRIES except for the US. If all billionaires were like him, the world would be a much better place.
He and Buffet have been making a lot of progress towards affordable, renewable energy in poverty stricken and rural areas. So Buffet might be alright too.
