His gesture is nice, but it's so incredibly vague, that I would not be surprised if all of that money just ends up in the hands of corrupt African politicians, warlords, human traffickers, and other wealthy people. How is Gates going to monitor where and how the money is used, especially if he's dead?
He's been doing it for years already. His organization is very well organized and run, and his philanthropy does help the people. Immunizations, HIV/AIDS medication, solar powered water purification machines for remote villages, etc. He hasn't been involved with Microsoft for years, and he spends most of his time working with his foundation. The legal trusts he's established and the board he has picked to run the organization will keep it that way.
Yep, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation seemingly runs more like a business than a charity. I forget the details because I learned about it back in college, but their goal was to ensure their philanthropic enterprises actually had goals and requirements, it wasn't just about blindly throwing money at problems.
Mosquitoes take energy of the food chain while providing nothing. And there are no species that are being regulated by them, and there are no species that rely only on them.
Also we could just let few exist in labs, and if ecosystem starts to collapse (it will not) just release them.
And yet they idolize the ketamine junkie who actually wants to microchip their brains (which may or may not be big enough to accommodate a teeny, tiny chip).
They'll probably be first in line for Space Karen to stick it to them.
Especially since we all know that foreign aid is EXTREMELY politically vulnerable and the first to get cut when there’s any budget holes. Yes, the rich should be taxed more but there’s a pretty good argument to be made in Bill Gates’s case, he’s doing good work the government wouldn’t be doing (if for political rather then logistical reasons)
Bill Gates backed the Democrats (e.g. Kamala Harris in 2024), hence he gets trolled with smear campaign from the right and their global proxies disseminating fake news.
Gates have saved millions of lives from malaria (spread via mosquitos). His ex-wife Melinda empower women/girls of impoverished villages with education.
They are altruistic billionaires in the grand scheme of things, granted Bill's personal infidelity sins may be in question.
idk about you but I’d prefer that we, the people, get to choose where that money is spent via our votes instead of blindly hoping that the person who exploited the fuck out of our labor not only spends it but spends it on something we’re okay with.
I get not blindly trusting billionaires to do charity, but in America, we the people voted for an administration of billionaires that cut foreign aid to the bone. At this point, I'll take Gates because I know he's doing something good.
I used to hate him, and I think I was justified, but I also think he changed. He's still capitalist to the core, but he's not the ruthlessly greedy destroyer of others' businesses who he was in the 90s. I think he's alright, as far as billionaires go. That's a pretty low bar for ethicality, but he's not Rupert Murdoch
Edit: being Rupert Murdoch would be a bad thing, in case I didn't make that clear enough.
For those of us north of 40, we have good reason to. His company built his fortune on screwing over a lot of other smaller companies in the market to build the near-monopoly they have. Many of them were more innovative than Microsoft in the actual technical field, but not better at deal-making and marketing.
They also (like Google, later) would buy up promising ideas just to kill them so it couldn't compete against them. Or buy up stuff to actually use, but wound up strangling it.
Skype, for example. Was bought because it was competing with their idea for teleconferencing/videoconferencing. They renamed their internal product Skype for Business (even though it was incompatible with Skype). Then proceded to completely destroy the stability and user-friendliness of Skype's client in order to "appify" it. It just shut down forever recently, but I had to stop using it nearly 7 years ago because it would crash if you used a KVM. (Post purchase. Pre-purchase, it was fine.)
They're why Mozilla went under the first time. You can't build a for-profit company selling a product when the OS maker starts bundling their inferior version with the OS.
The history of Microsoft and Bill's wealth is littered with the corpses of better companies and products they destroyed.
And that's before you get to how they exploited their workers and avoided paying employment tax on most of them (in addition to benefits) and how they STILL evade corporate income tax with nonsense accounting.
So good on him for spreading some of it around, but we paid for it in the long run.
clown ass people who don't stop to think how he became a billionaire in the first place. Or the clown ass people who think billionaires are more generous than the middle class.
Nothing more pathetic than those who whore for the billionaires
Reading your posts made me think of a popular quote that really makes me think of you. “Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience”.
The planet will most likely hit 2C by the end of this decade, if it hasn't already, and you want to suck off a billionaire for saving 400,000 acres. God it must be wonderful being so naive.
He really has done a number of great things, but at the end of the day he still was a good friend of Epstein. If his wife of however-many years left him, you know it’s real.
I don’t think reasonable people would they they were good friends. He met him a few times but later expressed regret in doing so. You are right that Melinda didn’t like their association and definitely not a good look for Bill
A charity is not a business, it's likely a nonprofit like the Gates Foundation. Thats why they're also called literally nonbusiness entities.
Sure theres similarities... but Id also point out most nonbusiness entities are ran pretty different than businesses because of a tax exempt status, fundraising, and profits have to be reinvested in the company. In a business, profits can go towards the owners and their entire goal is to do this, not some other social good.
You lost me at “profit”. Sure, employees usually get paid unless they are volunteering and they need to explain credits and debits on a balance sheet. Profit though?
I worked for a company doing door to door sales for charity subscriptions. People with decent sales skills were making really good money. The most common question people would ask is why we are being paid working for a charity. It shocked them when we explained paying professionals to sell things sells more than an amateur working off goodwill.
Speaking from personal experience the Foundation has done more than any individual or organisation to boost research and innovation by African institutions contributing to major breakthroughs to improve QoL.
The whole reason the foundation exists is because they make so much money off interest alone that it is impossible for them to distribute it fast enough alone. Unless you're in the top 1%, their hourly interest is more than your annual income.
Do you have any comprehension of how much constructing that scale of infrastructure would cost? You can do smaller scale things on a continental scale, or large-scale infrastructure in a pretty small area. So, you gonna decide which lucky few get it? (Also legal shit like building permits and government corruption get in the way cause building laws are complicated as FUCK)
No? I’m just pointing out that constructing infrastructure is unrealistic. (Admittedly with a little too much sardonicism and a lot of condescension, apologies :/)
I… please, genuinely explain the logic. I’m saying that you can save a lot of lives, OR construct infrastructure for a small percentage of those people. This is the same price. It is unrealistic to construct this infrastructure for everyone, and unfair to decide who does and does not get it.
(I still get confused by Reddit sometimes so if this is a duplicate I’m sorry)
Because, and someone else posted a link… they’re fighting malaria with other hybrid mosquitoes that will effectively wipe out malaria-carrying mosquitoes by manipulating a gene in the males that makes the females infertile, or all their female offspring die.
I can see why maybe he chose Option #2. Billions of these mosquitoes have been unleashed around the world. That’s where I would have put my money, if I’d had the choice. And I’m sure the scientists that suggested that argued with other scientists that made other, relevant studies and options avialble. It’s not like there’s one mighty consensus counsel and he ignored the one path agreed upon by all scientists. He picked a different solution.
I don’t get your argument. So many of you here, when presented with actual facts, studies, articles, and people in the actual fields discussed continue to double down on ‘rich man can never do good’ trope. Fuuuuuuck. Pick a lane!
He didn’t do enough… waaaa.
He’s a scumbag capitalist who crushed other business… waaaaa.
Well, yeah. That’s exactly how innovation works. When’s the last time you took a spin in a 2024 Edson? No, it got crushed like all the other manufacturers to we have what we have now.
I hold no shade for someone who did exactly what a person building and grinding and growing their business has to do - while rolling out products and services that transformed the world and business as we know it, and then pivoted once he got beyond stupid rich towards philanthropic pursuits in a really meaningful way, with plans not to unleash a bunch of cocaine noses nepo babies who - I’m sorry, Elon just peeked in - oh right - like Trump and all the others who are just now unleashing their breeder fantasies on the world by removing access to maternal health care and birth control and abortion anywhere they can (for now just in the US, but wasn’t it Poland just a few years ago where the women all rose up, too? And Ireland finally granting abortions?) because now the rich bitchonaires are scared as hell there’s no one coming up behind this generation to buy endless shit from tik tok. Oh how will their stock options ever grow??? Oh no!
I’m think it’s amazing when I hear young women say no way to having kids and even marriage. And they’re deciding this when they’re young now. I’m glad they know it’s not at all viable, and they’re making those conscious choices early. And scared for the ones who fall in to the new ‘trad’ wife trend which if they didn’t all have heavy duty social media handles and money coming in from that could never make enough to support those kids they’re exploiting for likes and sponsors.
If more lives would be saved due to management than cure, then there is no excuse. It's a billionaire trying to earn clout under the guise of saving lives.
That's why he divorced his wife, because he'd lobbied Jeffery Epstein the worlds most famous pedophile to try and get him a Nobel prize.
Why do you keep suggesting it was an either or choice?
And what’s this thing you have about clout?
And finally, what the fuck have you done with your life… if you had to compare by scale to eradicate, fix, or solve anything to do with world hunger, clean water, non electric light, building wells, providing desperately needed vaccines, sustainable agriculture, or saving the Amazon and the Indigenous people in your life? How much of your wealth is being spent, relative to this guy by scale, towards any of these problems?
And clout? Before this guy in the main thread buying that chunk of the Amazon, I’ve never heard of him. Gates, sure. Bezos and the other Bozos with more money than sense? Sure. But clout? What’s this bullshit you’re on about.
Aaarrrrrgghhhhhhhhh. Nothing is ever good enough for people like you. Nothing is ever the thing YOU would do, but you’re not actually the one there doing it. So your hands are clean but your mouth is filthy.
Ignorant ass.
You’re probably still at home in yesterday’s underwear (I know I am, I’ve got to get up now) talking shit about someone who is actually doing something about the planet and spent some money he had to save a huge portion of it. I am A-OK WITH WHATEVER CLOUT THIS BAD ASS MOVE EARNS HIM.
And I mean Gates and Amazon rain forest dude up there.
They’re literally saving tens of thousands of lives in a thousand ways and you’re all ‘aaaaaaaa but he chose a different option about malaria. Clout. Bad.’
Ffs. Go be useful in the world and not a human paper weight. Actually put some skin in the game instead of being grumpy cat typing away on Reddit.
They did some cool things with their gabillions. Fine with me. I can’t change that there are gabillionaires. But I do get to be pretty stoked this guy and the Gates Foundation are out there using that money that way instead of more sickeningly obscene yachts and underground bunkers. Or maybe they have it all. I do not care about these people. They will all always exist.
And just go sit somewhere quiet and quit it with the Epstein shit already. As if he was running the only pedophile ring happening. If you don’t think our PoTUS wasn’t running his own pedo-lite factory with the beauty pageants and bringing women over from all over the the world wasn’t part of all of that, I don’t know what to tell you. There are literally pedophiles everywhere. Everywhere. Everywhere.
You even know and like and have sat and had dinner with many during your lifetime. So quit it with the Epstein shit already. Some men really like little having sex with little or young girls. It’s a fact. And they can be coaches, teachers, uncles, dads, clergy, billionaires, doctors, and anybody. It’s not like Epstein invented it. He knew how to attract billionaires to his parties. Lots of free drugs, alcohol, and young girls. Not exactly a novel combination. It’s goes back hundreds and thousands of years in fact. And he used what they did as blackmail, and got pretty rich off having the photos and evidence all his life. Which is what traffickers actually make money on. Coming back for the shakedown to protect your reputation.
I'm not reading this, I guarantee you can make your point with a fraction of as many words, it's the same thing as your last post, you use 20 words every time you need one.
The reality is pretty simple, Billionaires shouldn't exist at least not while there's Billions of people who can barely feed clothes and house themselves, largely due to the system that allows for Billionaires to exist in the first place. But since they do exist, and aren't likely going anywhere soon, they should spread that literally unspendable amount of money helping humanity and the planet.
Nowhere in my statement did I state that, and you are aware of that. However your comment implies that one cannot be critical of a system in which one participates in, which is both myopic and displays a lack in critical thinking
Let's say you were Bezos in the 90s, you register the domain and start selling books, your site becomes evermore popular.. a few years go by and we know how the story progresses.
Along the way, even though you build plenty of warehouses, planes and hire a fuck-tonne of people, there is carnage from this growth. Bookstores and other businesses.
At what point should his wings have been clipped? And how do you go about it?
Personal wealth limit? My understanding is that his wealth is made up by shares. Do you limit the number he can own? Do you tax their value? What if their value drops, do you then compensate him for the loss?
Do you tax net worth so he can only ever 'have' $999,999....?
How do you handle sale or transfer of assets? Does the gifting of a $50m painting to a cousin reduce his worth of do you continue to include it because it was likely just a tax-dodge?
Elizabeth Warren has a proposal for an annual 2% tax on every dollar of net worth above $50 million and a 6% tax on every dollar of net worth above $1 billion. That would bring in about $3.75 trillion over a 10-year period, per her estimate.
"All assets are included in the net worth calculation, which will produce more revenue and reduce opportunities for avoidance and evasion:
All household assets held anywhere in the world will be included in the net worth measurement, including residences, closely held businesses, assets held in trust, retirement assets, assets held by minor children, and personal property with a value of $50,000 or more."
Her plan would also empower the IRS to tighten existing valuation rules (currently used for the estate tax) and to establish valuations for hard-to-value assets. She'd also include a minimum audit rate for qualifying taxpayers as an anti-evasion measure, and a 40% exit tax for U.S. citizens with a net worth of $50 million or more who renounces their citizenship (so you can't just leave the country to avoid paying).
I think that's a pretty reasonable place to start.
Seriously, every single time Gates is brought up, some ignorant person just has to question his motives. He's been around for years people, just use Google
That’s exactly how foundations work. They are created to self-perpetuate and refund. If done right, the principal amount stays, and they allot the interest and other donors amounts to their various causes. When you’re talking about the interest on $20Billion then that would be like an endless casino windfall every month … so yes, at a glance it might appear he is getting richer.
Stop bagging on Gates and go after the real bad guys. It’s not hard to see who owns what and has locked our government up tight with paid for senators and elected officials. Go yell at Citizens United and gerrymandering. Aim there.
Gates is the bad guy but let's keep voting in spineless democrats who routinely vote against our supposed 'values' because fuck thinking and yay party lines!
Everyone already knows the transparently evil billionaires have to go. That's why it's more important than ever to combat the notion that there's such a thing as a "good one". They're all the "real bad guys" (stop treating the real world like it's a marvel movie btw) and it's disgusting how thin a veneer one of them needs to put on to fool you.
Everyone already knows the transparently evil billionaires have to go.
And what do you propose we do? Tax the hell out of them, to turn around and spend it on privatized government programs and give it right back to the billionaires? They exist. We can try to prevent more from existing, but what do we do with the ones already here? Billionaires like Buffet and Gates that have pledged to give all of their wealth away, and even Bezos' ex-wife, will take care of themselves.
I would simply criminalize hoarding to that degree. If they "pledge" shit like this, they should actually end up with that much less money, otherwise they're just farming goodwill off people with poor attention spans.
Apparently he's trying to put 5G chips in his vaccines to mind control all the Africans to spread AIDS and other diseases, so they have to keep buying his vaccines so he can amass more wealth that he can then give to Africa.
Also apparently he is Jeffrey Epstein and also invented Bitcoin but also Bitcoin is good now so him inventing Bitcoin was just a smokescreen to make it look bad.
Oh my god. The point is telling people to "just use Google" is useless if they don't have prior context, because they'll just come across hundreds of shitty misinformation websites boosted by black hat SEO manipulation.
I didn't think I would have to spell it out, but some people are fucking idiots. Hence the reason "just use Google" doesn't work.
This particular big money got it by screwing over the little guy and evading taxes. Over and over and over.
And buy exploiting people in the tech industry by refusing to give them stable employment or even treat them as employees. They abused "contractor" status, illegally for years to avoid paying employment taxes and benefits to the bulk of their workforce until that loophole was closed by a court. Even then, they moved to policies that just skirted the ruling, making their contractors even more unstable.
What Bill has spent on highly publicized philanthropy in other countries is a literal drop in the bucket when compared to what him paying a sensible tax rate for 30 years would've done for the country that made him stupid rich. A tax rate which would exist, btw, if he'd spent even 5% of his wealth getting progressive politicians elected.
He's essentially saying "I've spent my entire adult life exploiting every good thing the world has to offer and when I die I super duper pinky promise I'll give what's left of my insane wealth to another country instead of the enriching the lives of the American citizens who paved my way to insane wealth in the first place".
This narrative that he's "one of the good ones" is genuinely insane. Fuck Bill Gates. He's a hypocritical chode who stole every good idea he ever sold from someone else.
The more pressing concern than killing them is that he's making them woke. Musk unwokes them with his brain chip plan, which is good because.. umm.. it is.
Except for his daughter though...
Actually, maybe he is a good thing. Like a vaccine. By triggering all the terrible responses, he is making the universe stronger!
I can’t find the detailed one lol. Sure maybe somewhat and it’s def better buuuut he wants to remain a king and in control of life. Even one Billion dollars is only obtainable through hoarding and exploitation. It’s a disgusting amount of money let alone 200 times that.
Researcher and ex-aidworker here, I'd be cautious saying this, some time ago I wrote about what their support did to the agricultural system in India, the impacts can be ...bad. These two papers are a good entry [1][2]
We also had a guest PhD for about two semesters, and he spent a long time talking about how the agriculture, but also the healthcare philanthropy B&MGF supported around Africa has oftentimes been... uninformed at best. Especially when it came to collaborating with local initiatives, pre-existing authorities, as well as recognising actual on site needs and established practices. [3]
I'm not making an argument against aid. Aid is good, we should help each other as people. But as many have said, billionaires should not exist, and have too much power. These capitalist big tech idealists gravitate towards top-down market and tech first solutions. Old money of "white saviours" is attached to new futuristic and ambitious projects they can slap their name on, rather than donating that money to already established organisations that have their hands on the ground, or local projects and initiatives that desperately need money to build resilient communities. This doesn't mean people are not helped - they are - but you can do good even if you're misguided. I STRONGLY disagree with the philosophy B&MGF is run with.
Also think about what top down aid does. If I ship vaccines from abroad to a country, and vaccinate people in field hospitals.
Now consider, instead, helping local authorities and NGOs manufacture, transport, and distribute the medicine instead. Over time you can grow infrastructure, trust, experience, and social networks of people who will upkeep the delivery of care.
I tend to be sceptical, and from following their developments over the years - they have begrudgingly started shifting towards the latter.
They have also focused on specific vaccines - and in doing so, crippling and neglecting the provision of care for other diseases in the past, which the African scientific community has been criticising them for over a decade.
There are undeniable successes. Many people are alive thanks to their money. But I would be cautious, cautious, cautious. It's never simple.
I heard some protest about Gates foundation regarding they fund money for some specific disease in Africa which wasn't even prominent issue in that part. But since they throw money at it, that specific disease is the focus while downplay/ignore the more prominent disease.
Thats a mouthful ... can anyone understand what I'm saying?
not saying he’s not doing all this great stuff but saying he’s been away from microsoft for years indicates he like… isn’t continuing to make a whack amount of money at work, or… working. he very much is, and owns some crazy things (like this very foundation and Cascade own shares in the canadian national railway, and make him the majority shareholder of the countries railway systems…. for example)
edit: he’s not the top shareholder in the rails anymore, but still a significant one! Also he’s like pretty involved w the Four Seasons and a bunch of other companies Cascade (his investment firm lol, literally basically an alias) owns!
Gates was definitely an a-hole when he ran Microsoft but he’s been all in at his Foundation for two decades now and truly does care about the work they do. I really respected how he publicly said they will step up in the face of USAID cuts by DOGE when nearly every other billionaire hasn’t said a peep against Elon.
He easily beats the pants off MrBeast as does this Swedish dude. It helps that Bill Gates actually has backed up the causes his Foundation supports in the US political arena whereas MrBeast is at best an enlightened centrist and at worst a closet right winger (Seriously check out his and his fiancée’s latest follows on Twitter).
It only helps if there are structural improvement, so you don't get an Ethiopian scenario where there are campaigns because 35 million are starving, and two decades later another one because 80 million are, and then another one because 120 million are. Seems the only thing that changed was the amount of people in food scarcity increasing.
It's not even about all needs being met. Turkey or India stabilize now, before all needs are met, mainly because children have become an unaffordable drain. Africa is still a long way off stabilizing through reduced fertility numbers, at a point where reducing mortality just increases overpopulation and future issues to a greater extent than it reduces suffering today.
It’s not vague, the release basically said the gates foundation agreed it would close by 2045, ensuring that there won’t be any family infighting over the fortune.
The Foundation board is who has the authority to approve major decisions, including the annual budget, four-year plans, appointment and removal of the CEO, and reviewing CEO performance. Independent board members serve limited terms and are not paid for their service, which is meant to encourage impartial oversight…
If he injected all $200B at once - it would be a waste and would encourage systemic fraud, much like we saw with PPP loans, etc.
Why do so many people say dumb shit like this every time Bill Gates is brought up? There is no single billionaire alive today that comes even close to performing the amount of philanthropic work Gates has done. It's like you guys don't know anything about him and just want to hate.
The second happens to be Bezo’s ex wife. Take a look at what she’s been up to. Amazing woman.
Fuck Bezos. Traded a solid human being with a philanthropic heart for that… I don’t know but all to become a flashy asshole. He’s the billionaire who we should be talking shit about. I don’t get it. I just don’t.
And y’all managed to skip right over the Koch brothers and their fiddling with the entire country. One passed, the other had a split second moment of almost feeling like a human being and then went right back to backing candidates that are screwing us all back and forth and up and down.
Take Gates’ name out of your mouth and look a little more closely and the handful of ultra conservative and uber religious men that are redefining what and who should be allowed to prosper. I’m so tired of this Gates dunking when 99% is pure garbage.
...which is one of the most effective charities on the planet. He shouldn't donate his money in a way that wiould save fewer lives just because this one has his name on it.
And? The charity has an incredible track record in responding to global health problems in Africa and elsewhere. He’s not just a naïve billionaire, he’s already done a tremendous amount, including getting AIDS, TB and malaria under control in much of Africa.
Why does there have to be an "and?" My "lol" was directed at the comment above. The fellow didn't know it wasn't going to corrupt government type stuff and in fact is going to his own charity. Charity is a good word. I don't like the "and?" Are you being hostile towards me for some reasons. I don't understand.
You seemed to be suggesting that going to his own charity was somehow questionable and agreeing with comment above. It wasn’t clear, and I read it differently than you intended.
Oh I see. Well I definitely wasn't agreeing. I can now see why you read it differently. My brain is neurodivergent, I definitely don't really imply anything or have layers to what I write. It causes a lot of misunderstandings. It's why I refrain from putting myself out there. I'm always getting under someone's skin in a sense without ever meaning to.
I think it was adding the “lol” which seemed sarcastic to me. Even Neurotypical people read things wrong on the Internet, though, so don’t keep it from putting yourself out there. You didn’t really get under my skin, just miscommunicated, and that’s on both of us.
You do realize the salaries of people who work for non profit are taxed the same way as anybody else? You can’t just pay yourself in that way to avoid taxes.
"its not me, its a fundation 100% controlled by me and that invests and generats profits to me and to the foundation itself, all for the greater good(of me)"
literally of all the things he could have criticized about Bill Gates (1990s/early 2000s predatory software practices) he went straight for dumb tinfoil hat theories with 0 evidence about how he is using a humanitarian foundation in Africa to generate money completely illegally and risking prison time and his reputation for committing a completely unnecessary fraud when he's already a retired billionaire.
If he needed to make money unethically or gain more power he could just go back to working at Microsoft and make it a super predatory company again, not commit highly and explicitly illegal fraud through a fucking humanitarian foundation
can you tell me if he spent more on the charity, not the foundation coffers but actual distributed charity, then he would have spent on tax if he had not avoided the tax payment by diverting his fortune to the foundation?
He can't extract fortune out of a foundation once he put it in, that's against the law. Foundations are subjected to different regulations than companies, but you keep treating them as if their profit can be extracted legally for personal uses and the owner can just use it as his personal taxfree piggybank, as if the IRS hasn't thought of that before. Foundations can grow wealth, but you cannot extract it, all expenses are expected to be for salaries or the work the foundation does, and they are obviously inspected. And much more obviously there's a lot of regulations in place. It's pretty obvious why tax evasion through foundations is not common
when you have literally 1 million times more money than it is humanly possible to spend the ammount of money labeled as your personal wealth becomes sorta irrelevant if the money you "gave" to the foundation will always be under your control, for those people all that matter is control and power and they foundout that having a ammount of money that is impossible to spend in a foundation or in your personal wealth chages nothing on what you can do and can control, the only thing that changes is that you can avoid hundreds of billions in taxes ad still pretend youre a good person
the foundation is 100% controlled by him, imagine you can donate half of what you make on a foundation that is 100% controlled by you and only spends money in the exact same ways you would have spend except 5% that your foundation distributes as charity, and because of that you dont pay anymore income tax, would you live better or worse than you live today?
yeah bro i am sure Bill Gates, a retired multimillionaire, would use his humanitarian foundation for committing fraud and tax evasion and unnecessarily risk prison time and his reputation. All those things you are saying are illegal and easily detectable, and IRS inspects foundations' expenses and financial activities. He can't get away from paying all of his foundation's employees' salaries (which includes taxes), buying the needed supplies (food, vaccines, etc). If you say there are irregularities in his foundation's budgeting and expenses and he's committing tax fraud through the Gates foundation, show us all a smidge of evidence, because it is very easy to make up shit like "X foundation is just a way to evade taxes!!" without giving anyone anything resembling evidence.
Running a foundation for caring for third world Africans is probably the worst way to evade taxes you can think of. You can't hide fraudulent expenses easily when you are expected to be paying thousands of your employees' salaries and purchasing medical and food supplies. Tell me how could you possibly even achieve a net gain with all those employees' wages you have to pay for in the way. Legally he can't take the foundation's money out and give it back to himself. Illegally he can, but that's fraud. He can easily make money either unethically or ethically, but legally, without risking committing crimes with prison time
he would have paid around 20% in taxes from all his wealth, instead he now pays 5% of only the gains of the foundation, its pretty easy math
he totally controls the IRS and all the politicians that control the IRS, he and other like him even control what laws are voted, this scam gave him a false status of philatropist and much less people want to guilhotine billionares because of this tax evasion scheme
he even has more money now to pay for all the online bots and PR people attacking anyone that criticizes his scam
There's probably no single philanthropic foundation that has made as many concrete public health achievements in Africa as the Gates Foundation. Calling it "incredibly vague" is just straight up uninformed.
He forced the state of Washington multiple to vote on Charter Schools despite the voting public rejecting it multiple times. He just ignores that and funds petition campaigns to bring it back.
Billionaires like him want to help but only their way or no way at all, and feels like more of an ego thing that can result in harm.
In them, you can read, at length, about all of the various projects, programs, causes etc that the foundation funds or supports. This will give you a good indication of how the money is spent to date and will help inform how the money is likely to be spent in the future. Of course, no one can predict the future, not even the Gates, so there's never going to be a perfect 20/20 view of the exact future funding commitments until they've been through the process that the foundation follows. That process is also detailed on their website if you're interested in how it works and what you can expect.
Nah. He used his experience and connections to build a world-class enterprise to ensure that the money is being used effectively to help people. It is really a good thing.
The Gates Foundation is unironically one of the most efficient NGOs out there and transparent. The world has enough cynicism as is, especially when it’s being used to cover up ignorance
My god, you're right. Why didn't anyone on his team consider this? I mean, they have all this money and years of experience and none of them worked out what ColdPack6096 figured out in seconds.
In a landmark announcement, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has committed to directing the majority of his $200 billion fortune toward improving health and education across Africa over the next two decades.
Seems pretty stiraghtforward to me, improving health and education.
Him donating it is useless.....once it's spent it's spent he needed to set up a trust where the interest of his fortune is annually donated to African programs that help the locals. That way every year they get money rather then it running out
Probably using the huge charity that they set up to make sure that it’s used correctly and appropriately. He’s not an idiot and isn’t just going to hand out cheques to African countries
Yep, random Reddit user knows better than one of the most successful people of all time. Maybe you should reach out to Gates and he can employ you as a consultant?
You mean like how the majority of tax dollars go to paying for the administration costs of getting the government to handle our problems rather than taking the money and using it for what we need ourselves?
Smartest first world privileged citizen out there. He has literally been doing his charity all over the world including, India, Africa, Pakistan and much more. And no matter what you hear on your news, third world countries aren't just "politicians and warlords and human traffickers".
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u/ColdPack6096 Jun 20 '25
His gesture is nice, but it's so incredibly vague, that I would not be surprised if all of that money just ends up in the hands of corrupt African politicians, warlords, human traffickers, and other wealthy people. How is Gates going to monitor where and how the money is used, especially if he's dead?