Lifting the lid on Bill Gates and his foundation

Is it immoral to be a billionaire?

The question was formally debated in 2019 at the renowned Oxford University forum. Writer and political analyst Anand Giridharadas lost the argument to philosophy professor Peter Singer. It wasn’t enough that Giridharadas pointed out how billionaires avoid taxes, lobby for public policies to suit their narrow interests and strangle competition so that they can continue accumulating yet more wealth — and then launder their reputations through philanthropy. No, said Singer, holding up the template of Bill Gates and the now $70bn-endowed Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, these are moral people because they and the organisation have “already saved several million lives ... perhaps more than any other living person today”.

Appropriately, “Lives Saved” is the title of the first chapter in The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire, by investigative journalist Tim Schwab. If this is central to the argument that philanthropists like Gates do good, what is the measurement? How many lives have been saved? Gates himself has veered wildly in his claims, from 6-million to a high of 122-million in a formal letter replying to investor Warren Buffett, who asked what had been achieved with the $30m he had donated to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

There is no number, says Schwab, because any claim Gates makes is unsupported. The only source is the foundation itself, which is unaccountable, opaque and utterly unresponsive to independent requests for information about its activities.

Indeed, it’s surprising to learn that the foundation has never been audited. Then again, only 200 of the 100,000 philanthropic organisations in the US alone have ever been audited. It’s one of the book’s gentler criticisms of the entire system of philanthrocapitalism.

The first chapter develops into a devastating critique of Big Pharma. Improving people’s health in general, and vaccination development and dissemination in particular, have been consistent priority themes for Gates’s philanthropy. But his power and influence are disproportionate to his judgment.

“Thank God for patent laws,” he has said, which flies in the face of fair profit and research payback periods or global humanitarian considerations. (He held firm during the pandemic despite epidemiologists, public health experts and governments pleading for Covid vaccines to be released from patent protection.)

His view of capitalism at its finest is scale, meaning giant corporate dominance. After all, profit, high prices and market ownership were how Gates built Microsoft. He hasn’t changed his philosophy, says Schwab; he applies these same tenets to philanthropy.

And because his foundation receives significant contributions from governments in Europe and North America, he plays with taxpayer money. At his own whim and without accountability, he exerts major influence over the industry’s flow of funds, shapes the direction of research, and directs where health initiatives are prioritised. Often this compromises or flatly contradicts government and public policy in many countries, especially in the global south.

So, enormously profitable companies such as GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer trumpet the benefits of collaborating with the Gates Foundation and its vaccine spin-off, Gavi, whereas Médecins Sans Frontières, the Nobel prize-winning nonprofit specialising in medical assistance in poorer countries, refuses to work with either organisation or accept their donations.       

At issue, then, is how many lives have been lost through Gates’s influence, even indirectly. About 60-million people die annually through preventable, treatable diseases. Root causes are poverty and a lack of basic medical facilities. This inequality — the political economy surrounding diagnostics, pharmaceuticals and vaccines — is the crux. Profits continue to supersede principles; Gates, by insisting that this must be so, and by his support for the system, worsens this problem.   

A coincidence confirms one of Schwab’s main points and helps me understand just how deep this runs. A day after reading the “Lives Saved” chapter, I have a consultation with a medical specialist who has practised for decades and on three continents. Unprompted, he expresses scepticism about the efficacy of many pharmaceuticals. Industry publications, including the world’s leading medical journals, need content; the source for most of it is the research sector — which, to all intents and purposes, is wholly funded by the pharmaceutical industry. So the system is rigged, he tells me. Echoing Schwab, he believes it’s near impossible to get data that isn’t compromised by the fact that it is generated by the Big Pharma marketing machine.

The halo effect

Gates’s views and philanthropy, and his foundation’s claims, are also dispersed through consumer media. I’m amazed at the list of top media groups Schwab lists as having received grant funding from the foundation. Can the credibility of The Guardian be questioned? Well, he notes that it received $3.5m to “produce regular reporting on global health and development topics”. Ergo, Global Development is one of the bookmarks heading the publication’s News web page. A search of the site for “Bill Gates” gives more than 31,000 results. Scanning the first five to six pages shows overwhelmingly complimentary headlines. Little wonder my impression of Gates and his foundation has been shaped positively.

Gates’s claims of lives saved are self-aggrandising, and his alliance with Big Pharma entrenches many of the health issues he claims to be alleviating, but the chapter about his links to convicted paedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein indicates a more sinister side to his character.

Titled “Women”, it initially seems gossipy, the innuendo amplifying circumstantial evidence about the association between the two men. But as the chapter progresses Schwab provides increasingly damning evidence.

Gates met Epstein more frequently than he has admitted, including at parties at Epstein’s residence. The author references a 2022 interview with Melinda French Gates when she said she immediately recognised something abhorrent about Epstein. So, asks Schwab, why couldn’t her husband at the time see this too, and why did he continue to engage with Epstein even after his first conviction for crimes against young women and girls?

Epstein — also extravagantly wealthy and having powerful contacts, including Nobel prize winners — introduced Gates to representatives of the International Peace Institute (IPI), a think-tank involved in selecting the Nobel peace prize. The Gates Foundation started donating millions to the IPI, transactions “co-ordinated” by Epstein. Then, in 2013, Epstein, the IPI and Gates met with Thorbjørn Jagland, former Norwegian prime minister and at the time the chair of the Nobel peace prize committee.

These connections, and the countless others Schwab details, are jaw-dropping.

Of course, the author has his own biases. Not all philanthrocapitalism is counterproductive. Capitalism’s unequal excesses can nevertheless create wealth. Neoliberal economic thinking may be flawed but the rigidity of alternatives may be worse.

So is Schwab’s book too polemical?

Pondering whether to give Gates the benefit of any doubt, relating to either the predatory business practices through which he amassed his fortune, the underlying motives for establishing his foundation, or the opaque and unaccountable way it operates, I keep returning to Gates’s relationship with Epstein.

If someone should be judged by the company they keep, it’s a singular, damning indictment. Anyone in Epstein’s ambit knew at least something of what he was doing, believes New Yorker writer and US National Public Radio host Adam Davidson, and “these men should not be celebrated on TV shows as experts on Covid or international relations, or whatever”.

In collating all the character flaws and dubious dealings of Gates as one billionaire, Schwab exposes the depths of the issue: wealth comes with power, and unseemly wealth gives excessive, hubristic power.

This is the message of The Bill Gates Problem. The book is deeply troubling because it lays bare how large and entrenched the problem is. Despite its polemic, the book’s last sentences ring true: “Billionaire philanthropy as practised by Gates preys on our cultural biases to disguise its influence. It makes us believe that a billionaire giving away his vast fortune is an unimpeachable act of charity that must be exalted, rather than a tool of power and control that must be challenged.”

* The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire by Tim Schwab (Penguin Business, 2023)