The Bill Gates Problem
Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
New York Times Editors' Choice
A powerful investigation of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation, showing how he uses philanthropy to exercise enormous political power without accountability
Through his vaunted philanthropy, Bill Gates transformed himself from a tech villain into one of the most admired people on the planet. Even as divorce proceedings and allegations of misconduct have recently tarnished his public image, the beneficence of the Gates Foundation, celebrated for spending billions to save lives around the globe, is taken as a given. But as Tim Schwab shows in this fearless investigation, Gates is still exactly who he was at Microsoft: a bully and monopolist, convinced of his own righteousness and intent on imposing his ideas, his solutions, and his leadership on everyone else. At the core, he is not a selfless philanthropist but a power broker, a clever engineer who has innovated a way to turn extreme wealth into immense political influence—and who has made us believe we should applaud his acquisition of power, not challenge it.
Piercing the blinding halo that has for too long shielded the world’s most powerful (and most secretive) charitable organization from public scrutiny, The Bill Gates Problem shows how Gates’s billions have purchased a stunning level of control over public policy, private markets, scientific research, and the news media. Whether he is pushing new educational standards in America, health reforms in India, global vaccine policy during the pandemic, or Western industrialized agriculture throughout Africa, Gates’s heady social experimentation has shown itself to be not only undemocratic, but also ineffective. In many places, Bill Gates is hurting the very people he intends to help.
No less than dark-money campaign contributions or big-business political lobbying, Bill Gates’s philanthropic empire needs to be seen as a problem of money in politics. It is a dangerous model of unconstrained power that threatens democracy and demands our attention.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Microsoft mogul's vaunted charity has done more harm than good, according to this heated polemic. Journalist Schwab debuts with an exploration of the allegedly counterproductive machinations of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—"one of the most feared organizations on earth," Schwab writes, because its vast funding resources give it dominion over the global nonprofit sector. Much of his criticism targets Gates's work on vaccines: the Gates Foundation both dominated and botched the World Health Organization's COVAX program to procure Covid vaccines, Schwab argues, resulting in a tragic scarcity of vaccines in Africa and other poor regions. He also tags Gates with pushing America toward the Common Core program of educational standards, which failed to improve student performance, and prodding African farmers to use genetically modified crops that failed to improve yields. Along the way Schwab probes Gates's egomania and rages, his harvesting of tax breaks, his chumminess with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and vague intimations of racism at the Gates Foundation. Much of Schwab's case against Gates is simply that he is a billionaire and therefore a defender of inequality and "a canker on democracy." Still, Schwab's critique hits home when he details how Gates Foundation initiatives have misfired with little benefit from billions spent. Gates's detractors will find useful ammunition here. Photos.
