The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire
by
Tim Schwab
Published 13 Nov 2023
We’ll find an organization enamored with itself—its experts, its answers, its strategies, and its founder—and that is eager to bulldoze anyone who gets in its way. We’ll see a foundation with a retrograde colonial gaze that leans hard on high-paid technocrats in Geneva and Washington, DC, to solve the problems of poor people living in Kampala and Uttar Pradesh. And we’ll find a man suffering from a bad case of main character syndrome, constantly asserting his leadership and expertise on issues in which he has no training, standing, or mandate. We’ll see an organization that ferociously brands itself as a champion of science, reason, and facts, but that openly trades in ideology. We’ll see a philanthropy that spends large sums of money on evaluation and measurement of other organizations while going to extraordinary lengths to limit independent measurement and evaluation of its own work.