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Bill Gates has long been held up as the shining example of a “good billionaire”. The story goes that, having amassed an eye-watering fortune with Microsoft in the ‘90s, Gates decided to take a step back from the rat race to take on a new role: that of the selfless philanthropist. Since then, he has — by his own estimation — helped save millions of lives across the world and changed the face of charity forever. A mythology built up around Gates; he became both the richest but also the most generous man on the planet, revolutionising education, public health and agriculture in the developing world.
In his new book, “The Bill Gates Problem”, investigative journalist Tim Schwab turns this narrative on its head. Schwab has spent years digging into the Gates Foundation’s activities, and comes to far less flattering conclusions about the billionaire. Schwab lays bare an organisation that operates more like a corporation than a charity, one with a narrow and neoliberal agenda at its core that he argues undermines democracy and is a global “net-negative”.
Schwab dialled in from Washington DC to talk to UnHerd’s Flo Read about his new book. It begins with demystifying the man himself. Schwab takes us back to the ‘90s when society had a more accurate understanding of Gates’s character. Gates is no reformed capitalist, according to Schwab, capitalism is all he knows:
As far as Schwab is concerned, the billionaire-philanthropist continues to be driven by a quasi-God complex and an irrepressible belief in his own righteousness, regardless of expertise:
However, the fact remains undisputed in Schwab’s book that Bill Gates does donate huge sums of money to charity. It is difficult to fathom how the world would be better off were Gates to squirrel his billions away. In response to this, Schwab argues that Gates’s philanthropy should not be thought of as “innocent, unimpeachable charity” but as an “exercise in political power”:
Schwab is also concerned that the billionaire’s mindset makes him uniquely ill-equipped to “heal the world”. He is a techno-utopian with a perilously narrow vision when it comes to problem-solving. This was demonstrated in public health in developing countries:
The solution to the Bill Gates problem, Schwab says, must be radical:
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