The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by
Tim Schwab
Published 13 Nov 2023
A search through public disclosures shows that the Gates Foundation has served as a sponsor for the following: a $14,000 trip for Arizona representative Kyrsten Sinema (now senator) to travel to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2016 to learn about “maternal, newborn and child health issues,” with Sinema and other travelers staying at the Serena Hotel in Kigali, which boasts of its “5-star comfort”; a $14,000-per-head trip for Minnesota representative Erik Paulsen and his daughter to travel to Kenya in 2016 to get “direct insight on how U.S. investments are working to improve global health”; Maryland representative Andy Harris and his daughter also came on the trip, reporting that their trip cost only $7,500 per head; a $25,000 trip in 2014 to send Illinois representative Mike Quigley and his wife to Cambodia to learn about child and maternal health; an $18,000 trip to send Illinois representative Aaron Schock and his father to Ethiopia in 2010 on business class flights to learn about maternal and child health; $17,000 to send California representative John Garamendi and his spouse on business class flights to Tanzania in 2015 “to discuss security, terrorism, and international relations.” According to the itinerary, Melinda French Gates presided over a roundtable on “putting women and girls at the center of development”; a $9,000-a-head itinerary to send a fleet of Republican legislators—Ann Wagner, Susan Brooks, and Carol Miller and her spouse—to Guatemala in 2019, a trip that included chartered helicopters “to minimize transfer times between sites and maximize time for programming in-country”; and a $14,000-per-person trip for California representative Barbara Lee and her daughter-in-law to travel to Uganda in 2012 “to showcase the positive reach and scope of U.S. investments in programs that improve family health outcomes and save lives for women and girls in Uganda.”
…
In 2008, a Washington, DC, think tank named the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) announced that it had received “the single largest foundation grant … in its history” from the Gates Foundation to start a new program called the Center for Global Health Policy. A few years later, the new project sent congressional staffers on business class flights for a weeklong learning tour about HIV/AIDS in South Africa. The four staffers were joined on the trip by a senior program officer of the Gates Foundation, Tom Walsh, according to the itinerary. Another Gates staff member, Dr. David Allen, joined the group once they touched down in South Africa.
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While Gates inveighed against teachers’ supposedly inflated benefits, his private foundation, heavily subsidized by taxpayers, has forged what one former staffer called a “palladium” benefits package for its own high-paid employees. Current and former employees I interviewed spoke with some embarrassment about the business class flights, unlimited vacation days (paid), and fifty-two-week leave for new mothers and fathers offered by the foundation. (Parental leave was later pared down to six months.) “Very generous but totally unnecessary,” one former employee noted. “People used to say, ‘Come for the mission, stay for the benefits.’”
Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World
by
Robert Lawson
and
Benjamin Powell
Published 29 Jul 2019
We thank José Torra and Marshall Stocker for valuable travel advice and, in Marshall’s case, meeting up for drinks in Moscow. Speaking of drinks, thanks to the SMU MBA students who bought us a bunch of shots in Shanghai, and to Cathy, an American Airlines flight attendant, who remembered us from a business class flight to Asia and kept us well lubricated when we were stuck flying proletariat class home from Europe. We benefited from interviews or barroom discussions with scores of people while visiting these countries and are grateful for the insights they provided. Although we’ve both written books before, neither one of us had ever tried writing a book like this one.
Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Live Your Dreams, Ignite Your Passions and Run Your Business From Anywhere in the World
by
Jesse Krieger
Published 2 Jun 2014
The past year has been incredible. I’ve been fortunate enough to see my company’s revenue grow by over 400% while living a life normally reserved for lottery winners. I have lived in hotels almost the entire year and been handed the keys to the Presidential suite in more 5 star hotels than I can count. I took over 60 business class flights, visiting 39 cities in 20 countries across 5 continents. I’ve played with and fed lions, taken a tiger cub for his morning exercise, swam with dolphins, scuba dived with sharks, shared a balcony with monkeys and flying lemurs overlooking one of the top 10 beaches in the world, spent a month snowboarding in Canada, and guest lectured at Oxford University.
The Knife's Edge
by
Stephen Westaby
Published 14 May 2019
Two were committed to outreach clinics at district hospitals trying to bring in ‘customers’, as the NHS now called them, or better still the odd private patient. The third was away at a conference, one of those academically destitute commercial meetings at a glamorous resort paid for by the sponsor, with business-class flights and all the rest. As a gullible young consultant I had enjoyed these trips, but it eventually wears thin – tedious airports, buckets of alcohol and forced comradery with competitive colleagues who would cheerfully drive their scalpel into your back the minute it was all over. It was this surgeon’s operating list that lay vacant, and the unit manager had twisted my arm to stand in for him.
Pattern Recognition
by
William Gibson
Published 2 Jan 2003
Then, when Dorotea produces the logo-rethink (which Cayce imagines will almost certainly work for her, as Heinzi is nothing if not very good) she'll wait a beat or two and then shake her head. And Dorotea will know, then, that Cayce is lying, but she won't be able to do anything about it. And then Cayce will leave, and go back to Damien's, and pack her things, go to Heathrow and get on the next business-class flight with her return ticket to New York. And probably blow the contract, a big one, and have to hustle very hard indeed in New York, finding fresh work, but she'll be free of Bigend and Dorotea, and Stonestreet too, and all of the weird baggage that seems to come with them. Mirror-world will get put back into its box until the next time, hopefully a vacation, and when Damien is here, and she will never have to worry about Dorotea or Asian Sluts or any of it, ever again.
Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story
by
Greg Smith
Published 21 Oct 2012
A big part of this business is face-to-face interaction; there is a human element to it. That was probably the thing I always liked most about being in sales. Some people in investment banking find traveling ten thousand miles around the world to have a few meetings to be a chore. But it never got old for me. Business-class flights with wine and sashimi at thirty thousand feet. Ritz Carlton or the Four Seasons? Three-star dinners with a $150 per-person budget when dining with clients. If I had time: a stop at a tailor in Asia to get some quality suits hand-tailored (for less than you would pay for one at Brooks Brothers).
Bit Rot
by
Douglas Coupland
Published 4 Oct 2016
At the hotel I look up the price difference for my seat: about fifty euros. What is it about business class that brings out some of the weirdest and deepest class responses we experience in a given year? I have a hunch that airlines do as much as they can to ensure that those not seated behind the blue curtain are fully aware of what’s happening behind it. Some business class flights are amazing, like an Emirates A380 from Dubai to New York, filled mostly with expats coming or going from or to six-month stints living in walled compounds, with everybody getting hammered for opposite reasons. They also have great Wi-Fi, but there’s something really odd about enjoying Wi-Fi when the in-flight map tells you you’re directly above Baghdad.
Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World
by
Tom Wright
and
Bradley Hope
Published 17 Sep 2018
But he had developed a taste for the lifestyle in Asia, with its servants and drivers, and he was back in Singapore by 2006, residing in a modern apartment with a pool and outdoor whirlpool bath within walking distance of the city’s botanical gardens. In the other direction was Orchard Road, a shopping-and-entertainment hub with restaurants and bars. The remuneration was another attraction: Brunner earned more than 1 million Swiss francs a year, with more in bonuses, received stipends for a driver and multiple free business-class flights home, and enjoyed tax rates of only 15 percent. But he also had a problem. The global financial crisis had forced the British government to bail out the Royal Bank of Scotland, Coutts International’s parent company. Now state controlled, RBS set about cutting bonuses at Coutts and offering deferred payments in bonds instead of cash.
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by
Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023
“He was one of these fucking nerds that tries to get under your skin,” Eagle, who’s now sober, said. After graduation, Lichtenstein co-founded an advertising technology company, then left it in 2016, around the time of the hack, for reasons he never explained. On social media, he and Morgan posted photos from business class flights to Hong Kong and Mexico. In Morgan’s TikTok videos, he often seems like a grudging participant. “You keep filming me, expecting something to happen, what do you want me to do? You want me to shove something up my ass and do a little dance?” he says in one video, after Morgan asks him about his habit of tasting Clarissa’s cat chow.
End of the World Blues
by
Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Published 24 Sep 2006
“You smoke this stuff instead…” CHAPTER 23 — Thursday Evening, 21 June “Find yourself a seat,” suggested Kate, dumping her flight bag next to a recliner in the British Airways lounge at Narita. So Kit left his own case on a chair overlooking the darkened runway and nodded towards a bank of computer screens in the corner. “I’ll be back in a moment.” “Sure,” said Kate, settling herself down. Kit was able to use the lounge because Kate O’Mally had paid for Business Class flights for the both of them. Having found herself a copy of yesterday’s Mail, Kate was preparing to tut over some celebrity outrage and sip from a glass of mineral water on the table next to her. A Nurofen packet rested beside her glass and an unopened cheese sandwich rested next to that. The morning’s tears in Shinjuku Chuo Park were gone and not to be mentioned, Kate had made that clear.
Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together
by
Philippe Legrain
Published 14 Oct 2020
She may be a Guatemalan girl about to trek north to seek asylum on the US-Mexican border. He may be a Nigerian doctor who has been recruited by Britain’s National Health Service. They may be a Venezuelan family planning to seek refuge from their country’s economic collapse in neighbouring Colombia. He may be an Indian IT consultant boarding a business-class flight from Hyderabad to Houston. She may be a Chinese student setting off to university in Australia. They may be Pacific Islanders seeking a new home in New Zealand as rising sea levels engulf their homes. She may be a British businesswoman moving her operations to the EU to escape Brexit disruption.
Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil
by
Alex Cuadros
Published 1 Jun 2016
From Jack Welch, the longtime CEO of General Electric, they adopted the twenty-seventy-ten rule: Promote the top twenty percent of your employees, maintain the seventy in the middle, and fire the rest. Mixing and matching the best from all over, their constant ingredients were ruthless cost-cutting and Garantia-style incentives. They got rid of executive perks like dedicated elevators and business-class flights and gave large stock bonuses to the best performers. It worked so well that Telles once referred to their operation, with self-deprecating humor, as a “one-trick pony.” The trick was a formula for making money. Lemann did have his personal failures. His dedication to work, for instance, was slightly insane.
The Firm
by
Duff McDonald
Published 1 Jun 2014
Revelations included allegations of egregious conflicts of interest, such as advising the government to revamp the way it handled health service contracts in ways that would benefit McKinsey’s own corporate clients and then sharing those proposals with the private sector clients in advance. The article also highlighted the means of achieving influence, including the consultants’ spending lavishly on an NHS regulator—including business class flights to New York, a five-star hotel stay, and a lavish banquet. The regulator? David Bennett, a former McKinsey consultant himself. Several consultants have passed through the revolving door between McKinsey and NHS, including Tom Kibasi, who left the firm to become a policy adviser to NHS before eventually returning; and David Cox, who left McKinsey to become strategy manager for London NHS.26 Helping Inflate a New Bubble If McKinsey was caught unawares by the dot-com boom, it was no laggard when it came to the surge in financial services at the turn of the century.
ZeroZeroZero
by
Roberto Saviano
Published 4 Apr 2013
And so, after some accelerated personalized training by the DEA, Maria Monti is born: an expert in international finance who exudes a vivacious femininity and an ambition as ravenous as it is innocent. Like many young women, she’s more talented than the men and extremely eager to prove herself. Everyone who comes in contact with her finds that working with her is a pleasure. Maria is catapulted into a whirlwind of business-class flights, taxis and limousines, hotels and restaurants for the happy few. The unreality of it all calms her anxiety. There’s the risk of enjoying it too much, of letting her guard down, of growing distracted by all the novelty and luxury. But that doesn’t happen. She handles it all as if she is used to such things.
Bad Pharma: How Medicine Is Broken, and How We Can Fix It
by
Ben Goldacre
Published 1 Jan 2012
Even where the gifts are regulated, there is still hospitality; and it’s clear that meals, travel and accommodation will continue to be available as before. A quick browse through the PMCPA website shows that the self-regulation guidelines on sensible limits are regularly broken. There’s the odd visit to a strip club, business-class flights around the world, golf hotels and so on.68 One recent case concerns an unwise conference feedback document from Cephalon, describing how the company paid for doctors to go to an educational medical conference in Lisbon. Alongside the £50-a-head meals and early-morning bar bills for spirits and cocktails are comments from doctors like: ‘dinner was fantastic’, ‘great night again’, ‘we then went to a few bars and to a club until 3 a.m.
The Bank That Lived a Little: Barclays in the Age of the Very Free Market
by
Philip Augar
Published 4 Jul 2018
Wanting to get on with his day and sensing that the Barclays man needed him to enter, he spent a couple of minutes filling out a simple form, then got back to selling records. He forgot about the competition until a couple of weeks later he received another unexpected call from his man at Barclays. ‘Good news, Karl. You remember that competition you entered? You’ve won first prize, an all-expenses-paid trip to New York, business class flights for you and your wife, spending money and three nights in the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan. How does that sound?’ It sounded pretty good and of course it further increased Edwards’ warmth towards Barclays. They were looking after him and they were on his side. As 2006 progressed and the economy entered its ninth consecutive year of growth, Edwards decided to expand his warehouse space and look for new premises.
The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze
by
Laura Shin
Published 22 Feb 2022
It had been five years since Vitalik left college with $10,000 worth of bitcoin and a gig writing about the cryptocurrency. He now had hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ether. A smart sale of about $700 ETH helped him maintain his lifestyle of constant travel, which had been upgraded to mostly business class flights and comfortable Airbnbs. Having reached financial independence, he never needed to worry about money again. Otherwise his lifestyle hadn’t changed. He traveled with a small backpack, which held his laptop, seven days’ worth of clothing, a jacket, a sweater, a toothbrush, toothpaste, random cables, USB keys, a pouch of the currencies of numerous countries, subway cards from more than a dozen cities, and a universal power adapter.