the Gates Foundation

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy

by Linsey McGoey  · 14 Apr 2015  · 324pp  · 93,606 words

the donations that Rockefeller, adjusted for today’s dollars, made over his entire lifetime. Today, unlike Rockefeller facing sceptical members of Congress 100 years ago, the Gates Foundation commands considerable public support, fuelled by celebrity accolades from, at times, unlikely sources. Take an encounter between Gates and P. Diddy. Gates, of course,

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and public spending has become clear in recent battles over public education in the United States. Often working in collaboration, three powerful ‘mega-foundations’ – the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family, and the Broad Foundation – are helping to build one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States: secondary and primary schools

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protecting and expanding assets rather than redistributing wealth. Philanthropy often opens up markets for US or European-based multinationals which partner with organizations such as the Gates Foundation in order to reach new consumers. Giving more is an avenue for getting more, helping to concentrate wealth in an ever-narrowing nucleus of power

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Carlos Slim? The answer is simple: there’s a need for it. Most foundations with influence on a par with the Gates Foundation have received considerable scrutiny from academics and journalists. And yet the Gates Foundation – indisputably the most influential private foundation in the world today – hasn’t received much critical attention. While positive news

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global south, and restricting the ability of southern researchers to develop homegrown technological solutions. Diane Ravitch, the noted education historian, has written critically about the Gates Foundation’s role in US public education. These are important criticisms. But they are scattered among a few newspapers and academic journals. Why the lack of

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may have single-handedly thwarted efforts to open pharmaceutical markets to more generic competition. The influential health scholar James Love has noted the problem concisely: ‘[The Gates Foundation] funds most of the journalism on this topic, and they have been hardline advocates for strong patent protection, since the 1990s. This creates more problems

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Global Fund on these issues, not to mention the press coverage and most academics and NGOs working on global health issues’.42 Another concern is the Gates Foundation’s philanthropic partnerships with Coca-Cola, a company that has spent millions lobbying against increased taxes on sugary beverages, something health advocates see as

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markets play in creating worldwide food instability. Public enthusiasm for clipping the philanthropic wings of large benefactors has ebbed and flowed throughout recent decades. The Gates Foundation’s reshaping of the global health field and the US education sector mirrors earlier initiatives led by Carnegie and Rockefeller. Their efforts helped to pioneer

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up, the CGI claims to have secured pledges worth $103 billion. It’s a gigantic sum, trebling the amount disbursed by the Gates Foundation to date. Whether or not you like how the Gates Foundation has spent its money, however, at least it has actually been spent. The Clinton Global Initiative is a clearing house.

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to rehabilitate the image of industrialists who earned their fortunes through predatory, often illegal actions. Large foundations such as the Carnegie, Ford, and today, the Gates Foundation, are often sole sources of income for smaller non-profit organizations. The power invested in foundations has led, as Dowie writes, to numerous complaints over

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is that as well as benefiting from the government’s largesse, for-profit organizations are increasingly privy to generous gifts from private philanthropists such as the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation frequently offers grants to for-profit companies such as, to name just three recent beneficiaries, Vodacom, Ogilvy, and ABC News (which is owned by

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headquartered in Britain, Vodafone avoided paying UK corporation tax for three straight years – and that during a period of drastic government spending cuts. Then the Gates Foundation reduces Vodafone’s expenses even further by offering the company’s subsidiary non-repayable grants worth over $6 million. Finally – and here’s the

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of immediate results. ‘We needed to figure out what things we could do that would flip the system’, Patty Stonesifer, former CEO of the Gates Foundation, said.14 The Gates Foundation is now the largest philanthropic supporter of US primary and secondary education, followed by the Walton Family Foundation. The third major philanthropic player in

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Similar frustration has flared up over the Common Core initiative, involving the implementation of national reading and maths standards for primary and secondary school children. The Gates Foundation played a central role in bringing the standards to fruition. Spending over $233 million to back the standards, the foundation dispersed money liberally to both

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policy-makers and the education community’. While unnamed, the New York Times and other outlets reported that the foundation was believed to be the Gates Foundation.43 In 2007, the Gates Foundation appointed Vicki Phillips to the role of director of education. A former secretary of education for the state of Pennsylvania, one of Phillips

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VAM testing enthusiasts are confident that they have developed reliable statistical tools to quantify a teacher’s individual abilities in the classroom. In recent years, the Gates Foundation has funded the $45 million Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study, which tracks 3,000 teachers in cities across the country. In 2010, preliminary

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evaluation systems’.50 Gates’s reference to Microsoft’s personnel system raises an important question. By the admission of both Gates himself and Jeff Raikes, the Gates Foundation’s former CEO, the foundation often emulates strategies developed at Microsoft. But is adopting Microsoft HR strategies advisable for improving teacher effectiveness in American

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philanthropy is more of it; the failure of philanthropy is its own success.59 The perceived necessity – even the indispensability – of a donor like the Gates Foundation grows in proportion to its own inability to achieve the unachievable: mitigating the very inequalities that its own presence might be inadvertently compounding. As Foucault

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good. In the late 1990s, for example, worldwide donors cumulatively spent a rather paltry sum on malaria research each year – approximately $84 million. Since the Gates Foundation began prioritizing malaria research, the amount spent yearly has more than tripled. The foundation has also boosted global spending on tuberculosis, and recently ramped up

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polio efforts have intensified are the same countries neglecting routine immunization for other infectious diseases – India, Pakistan, and Nigeria. And despite vaccine research funded by the Gates Foundation and elsewhere, the difficulty of fully eradicating vaccine-derived poliovirus, a mutation of the virus contained in the oral vaccine, still lingers. ‘I can’

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eradication is most likely – the areas with the least need’.15 Polio is not the only ‘donor darling’ drawing criticism from global health experts. The Gates Foundation has called loudly and bullishly for national governments to prioritize the inclusion of a number of different high-cost vaccines on national immunization programmes. The

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reactions during a clinical trial. Spirited public discussion over the legal responsibilities of organizations carrying out clinical trials in India helps to make clear why the Gates Foundation’s funding of ethically fraught medical experiments frustrates Indian health activists. ‘Whose impact on India’s health policies has been worse?’ one attendee in

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too obviously at the Indian researchers scattered throughout the room. ‘At least Rockefeller built institutions!’ one researcher, dressed in a sari, called out eventually. ‘The Gates Foundation just leaves chaos. Not only is it changing the ideology of public health – it is deinstitutionalizing public health’.29 I glanced around. Most faces were

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unperturbed. Some nodded in agreement. The anger directed at the Gates Foundation might surprise people living in wealthy nations. Indeed, even vehement critics of the foundation’s influence on US public education seem to have a remarkably

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is widely perceived by casual observers in the west. Surprising as it may be, African nations didn’t suddenly sprout medical systems the moment the Gates Foundation emerged on the global health scene less than twenty years ago. African communities have been battling to improve community-based infrastructures since before the colonial

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sustainable rural water delivery services; IRC-Ghana is an offshoot of a Dutch-based non-profit that receives substantial funding from the Gates Foundation and other donors. Before touching specifically on the Gates Foundation, Duti mentioned the importance of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, which resulted from a high-level summit on overseas aid

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, the chance of a person transmitting the disease diminishes the sooner they are started on HIV treatments. In the wake of the Harvard statement, the Gates Foundation announced a surprise press conference. Together with the heads of the Rockefeller and the United Nations Foundations, Gates appeared personally at the press conference.

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often praised for putting his fortune towards combating HIV. But his campaigning against increasing antiretroviral treatment in poor countries infuriates health activists who say that the Gates Foundation has continually lobbied against price reductions for HIV drugs and other medicines. These activists want a more equitable global patent regime, fostering fair competition.

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partners in serodiscordant couples was expected to be released. The WHO abruptly chose to delay the guidance. Many people attributed its reticence to opposition from the Gates Foundation, which was strongly invested in separate studies exploring the medical benefits of pre-exposure prophylactic treatments (PrEP), a new HIV treatment method which involves

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as compounding recent spikes in seed and food prices, are, however, not mentioned. A closer look at the connections between Goldman Sachs, Monsanto and the Gates Foundation will help in understanding why the foundation’s investments in global agriculture may be compounding food insecurity rather than mitigating it. Global food prices began

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but it continues to collaborate on philanthropic ventures aimed at expanding the company’s presence in African markets. By partnering with companies such as Monsanto, the Gates Foundation is eroding the positive effects of its investment in programmes such as Purchase for Progress, provoking bewilderment and anger from farmers who have seen their

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HIV/AIDS.30 Despite the staggering cost of deaths from chronic diseases worldwide, the vast majority of philanthropic donors, including the Gates Foundation, have shown scant interest in tackling the problem. To date, the Gates Foundation has invested less than 4 per cent of funding into research on non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Tikki Pangestu, a

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cent now are voluntary contributions’. Voluntary, or extra-budgetary contributions as they are termed, are earmarked for specific interventions stipulated by donors such as the Gates Foundation. As leading global health scholar Devi Sridhar has emphasized, studies show that voluntary contributions to the WHO are far less aligned with the actual global

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partnered with Coca-Cola in a number of partnerships encouraging communities in developing nations to become business affiliates of Coca-Cola. In 2010, for example, the Gates Foundation provided a $7.5 million grant to TechnoServe, a non-profit organization that works to expand business opportunities for multinational firms in developing regions.

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the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), a pan-African platform composed of different farmers organizations throughout the continent, submitted an ‘open letter’ to the Gates Foundation and Iowa State University expressing concern over human feeding trials of GM bananas taking place at the university. The results of the trials were aimed

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of GM crops in the nation. Signatories to the open letter included 127 different NGOs and human rights organizations throughout the world. The response from the Gates Foundation was the same response that most concerned stakeholders receive when they question the foundation’s funding priorities: silence.43 The foundation did, however, reply

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delay in the start of the feeding trials – reportedly due to difficulties in shipping the bananas that had been developed in Australia – the Gates Foundation sent a prepared comment stating, ‘The Gates Foundation continues to support the Banana21 project, which is helping find ways to tackle vitamin A deficiency. We look forward to seeing the

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25 June 2012; Bill Gates, ‘How Good Schooling Matters’, Washington Post, 28 January 2009. 14Bishop and Green, Philanthrocapitalism, 58. 15Sanford is no longer with the Gates Foundation – a few months after our interview, she took up a position at the College Board, a non-profit education institution. 16Diane Ravitch, The Death and

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23 July 2011. 39Daniel Golden, ‘Bill Gates’s School Crusade’, Bloomberg Businessweek, 15 July 2010. 40Michael Klonsky, ‘Power Philanthropy’, in Philip E. Kovacs ed., The Gates Foundation and the Future of U.S. Public Schools (New York: Routledge, 2011), 26. 41Ibid. 29. 42Lyndsey Layton, ‘How Bill Gates Pulled off the Swift Common

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1618–19; and – a seminal article on the parallels between the Gates and Rockefeller foundations – Anne-Emanuelle Birn, ‘Philanthrocapitalism, Past and Present: The Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Setting(s) of the International/Global Health Agenda,’ vol 12, no. 1(2014), e8. 2Lederer, Subjected to Science, 80–3. 3Matthew Connolly, Fatal

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Edmund Sanders, and Robyn Dixon, ‘Dark Clouds Over Good Works of Gates Foundation,’ LA Times, 7 January 2007; see also Alex Park and Jaeah Lee, ‘The Gates Foundation’s Hypocritical Investments’ Mother Jones, 6 December 2013. 39David Stuckler, Sanjay Basu and Martin McKee, ‘Global Health Philanthropy and Institutional Relationships: How Should Conflicts of

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, 1995). Knowledge Ecology International also has a useful timeline on its website exploring important patent rulings in relationship to the work of both Microsoft and the Gates Foundation; see keionline.org/microsoft-timeline. 3Rivlin, The Plot to Get Bill Gates, 98. 4David Bank, Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future

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Kerlin, ‘Special Report’. 40Elizabeth Woyke, ‘How NYU chose Colombia over Coke’. BusinessWeek, 23 January 2006. 41TechnoServe press release, ‘The Coca-Cola Company, Technoserve and the Gates Foundation Partner to Boost Incomes of 50,000 Small-Scale Farmers in East Africa’, 20 January 2010, at technoserve.org. 42See Stuckler et al., ‘Global Health

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs

by John Doerr  · 23 Apr 2018  · 280pp  · 71,268 words

publish books for every reader. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Doerr, John E., author. Title: Measure what matters : how Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation rock the world with OKRs / John Doerr. Description: New York : Portfolio/Penguin, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2018002727| ISBN 9780525536222 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525536239 (epub

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transparency to fortify a software pioneer’s open culture. 10 Superpower #3: Track for Accountability OKRs help us monitor progress and course-correct. 11 Track: The Gates Foundation Story A $20 billion start-up wields OKRs to fight devastating diseases. 12 Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing OKRs empower us to achieve the seemingly

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, take a breath to savor your progress. Throw a party with the team to celebrate your growing OKR superpowers. You’ve earned it. 11 Track: The Gates Foundation Story Bill Gates Cochairman Patty Stonesifer Former CEO In 2000, the newly hatched Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation became something the world had never seen: a

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early for us. That was our biggest advantage: We aimed higher. Making Goals Concrete In the year 2000, Melinda and I put $20 billion into the Gates Foundation. Suddenly it’s both a start-up and the biggest foundation in the world. And the way the payout rules work, it has to spend

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, but bold goals don’t faze them. * * * — Case in point: the ongoing fight against the most lethal animal on the planet, the mosquito. * In 2016, the Gates Foundation teamed with the British government in a five-year, $4.3 billion campaign to eradicate malaria, the deadliest of all tropical diseases. Driven by empirical

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how they inspire workers, develop leaders, and unify teams to do great things. By measuring what matters, objectives and key results are helping Bono and the Gates Foundation mobilize against poverty and disease in Africa. They’re driving Google in its audacious 10x quest to make the world’s information freely accessible to

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life and real time. So here is a special thanks to the storytellers, who shared so generously from their experiences. I want to start with the Gates Foundation team, past and present, who are especially inspiring for the breathtaking scope and lifesaving impact of their work. Thank you, Bill and Melinda, Patty Stonesifer

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was blazing speed at the time, but today you can buy a $300 Chromebook that runs better than two giga hertz—250 times faster. * As the Gates Foundation made a series of eight-figure grant awards to the Carter Center, the number of reported cases of Guinea worm disease dropped from 75,223

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

whatever they could on the way out. In previous eras, public negativity encouraged many monopolistic industry titans to give back to society in conspicuous ways. The Gates Foundation worked to eradicate diseases. But many of the new Big Tech billionaires showed little sense of noblesse oblige. They privately competed on yacht length and

Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World

by Anupreeta Das  · 12 Aug 2024  · 315pp  · 115,894 words

planning and gender equity. In 2006, the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett announced that he would transfer the bulk of his multibillion-dollar fortune to the Gates Foundation. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, had met Gates in 1991 and the two became fast friends. Twenty-five years older than Gates,

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commitment, effectively impossible to enforce or track, and in the end, perhaps little more than a showcase for a billionaire’s generous intentions. Today, the Gates Foundation has enough global heft that it can shape development agendas through its grant-making, particularly in low-income countries. It donates as much money to

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candidacy for the big prize, some of his handlers for years strategically launched publicity campaigns when the world was nearing a public health milestone that the Gates Foundation was involved in. At the same time, criticisms of the foundation’s bigfooting abound. Its activities have been described as antidemocratic, neocolonial, technocratic, and

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optimistic, populist billionaire was complete. The Reign of Janus Every year, Gates—and, until she left, French Gates—would hold multiple meetings with executives of the Gates Foundation to approve plans and budgets, and review strategies. One of the highlights was the annual strategy review meeting, where the two of them listened to

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billion, and the acquisition had caught the attention of the financial and science press. Knowing his interest in agriculture given that it was one of the Gates Foundation’s focus areas, Cunningham brought up the deal. He could tell Gates was immediately engaged, launching into a discussion about the merits of agricultural

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away all his Berkshire shares.) Only decades later would the broader implications of that lifetime pledge become an issue of significance for future funding at the Gates Foundation, the four Buffett family foundations, and the responsibilities of his three children. It would also come to strain Buffett’s friendship with Gates. But

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to expand the foundation’s programs, defining new strategies and foci in global health, agriculture, and development. Prabhu Pingali, a professor at Cornell University, joined the Gates Foundation in 2008. Pingali, who worked at the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome at that time, recalled a visit from foundation executives who

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word “lifetime” to avoid any miscommunication or confusion about which philanthropies stood to get his money, partly because there was a longstanding assumption within the Gates Foundation that it would always get Buffett’s money, three of the people said. In a footnote to its combined financial statements for 2022 and 2021

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employee who runs Charity Navigator, a nonprofit organization that evaluates other nonprofits to help people direct their giving. Charity Navigator had been receiving grants from the Gates Foundation for several years. When the divorce was announced, the foundation’s grant officers reached out to say that they wouldn’t be able to

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giving interviews to magazines and newspapers, and creating the conditions for her emergence as an independent feminist-philanthropist. By 2024, when she decided to leave the Gates Foundation to pursue her own form of philanthropy, that identity had fully taken hold. It was French Gates’s moment of lift. Scenes from a Marriage

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has become increasingly popular with philanthropists, Pivotal has sought to be more experimental and innovative, while bringing the same analysis and rigor to projects as the Gates Foundation does, according to an outside consultant who has worked with the firm. Pivotal’s main goals are getting more women into technology jobs and

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stands out for its $1 billion commitment to the pandemic recovery, announced in October 2020, but those commitments were made with far less fanfare. The Gates Foundation’s singular role in the pandemic response may have surprised some in the wider world, but public health experts, policymakers, and economists in the field

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Eradication Initiative, which was created in 1988 by the WHO, UNICEF, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Rotary International, a community service organization. The Gates Foundation is also the primary partner of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI. Funded by the governments of several countries, including the United Kingdom

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as the Wellcome Trust, a U.K.-based healthcare philanthropy, CEPI makes grants to speed up development of vaccines during pandemics and outbreaks. In 2010, the Gates Foundation launched the “decade of vaccines” in partnership with governmental and multilateral organizations including the WHO. Its goal was to spur research and delivery of vaccines

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at NIH events, discussing the zika virus, tuberculosis, and other topics of public health. During the pandemic, that network of alliances funded and nurtured by the Gates Foundation over the years gave it substantial influence in shaping the direction of vaccine research and delivery to low-income countries. The Gates-backed vaccine alliance

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2015 as a “universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.” Currently, the Gates Foundation makes grants largely in five big areas: global health, gender equality, global development, global growth and opportunity, and global policy and advocacy. A sixth

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the foundation for his work, said that many other big grant-making bodies invite competitive proposals for grants and give out the funds. But with the Gates Foundation, academics and nonprofits searching for a grant often end up turning to their networks for introductions to foundation employees who might consider their project.

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always say that they’re giving their money away.15 In his book Winners Take All, the journalist Anand Giridharadas criticizes all big philanthropy, including the Gates Foundation, for trying to “solve for” individual, intractable issues via technology, rather than fighting for ground-up social and economic justice or change. Giridharadas and

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standards didn’t give individual schools enough adaptability. Diane Ravitch, a former research professor of education at New York University and an outspoken critic of the Gates Foundation, once called the billionaire the nation’s unelected school superintendent. On her blog, Ravitch pointed out that by 2022, no one had expected that

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who argue that private philanthropy, which is subsidized by taxpayers because charitable deductions are essentially lost tax revenue, is antidemocratic because a massive entity like the Gates Foundation reports only to itself; with no voters or shareholders to hold it publicly accountable, it can ignore alternate points of view and direct outcomes in

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and the World Bank, whose efforts to “solve” poverty with Western expertise either backfired or produced mixed results at best. It doesn’t help that the Gates Foundation seems to borrow freely and extensively from those approaches to global development, where words like “partnerships,” “stakeholders,” “progress,” “prosperity,” “equity,” “transformation,” “solutions,” and “sustainability”

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the “data-driven” approach that was au courant in philanthropy, arguing for an approach that was based more on intuition than simply data. Additionally, the Gates Foundation has come in for criticism for its unquestioned belief in the power of technology to solve problems. Tied to its technological bias, critics say, is

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an opinion piece for Project Syndicate in 2021. Both Friedman and Sunderland are former senior foundation executives. Friedman is a former chief financial officer for the Gates Foundation, hired in 2007 to help the entity grow and manage its finances better after the Buffett gift. Sunderland led the foundation’s investment partnerships with

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Suzman said, possessed “amazing expertise and background that could really add value to helping us make better strategic decisions.” However, Suzman was very clear that the Gates Foundation was “unequivocally” a family foundation that wasn’t about to change its mission and priorities.25 In the summer of 2021, the foundation had said

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. For all the criticisms, though, the foundation is undeterred. Paul Schervish, a professor emeritus at Boston College who has long studied philanthropic models, likened the Gates Foundation to an elephant, and the critics to mosquitoes. “The mosquitoes won’t bring down the elephant and you may not hear the elephants doing much

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after the United Nations announced the 17 Sustainable Development Goals agreed to by its member states that the world should try to meet by 2030, the Gates Foundation put together its own initiative called Goalkeepers. It brought together what it called “a global collective of collaborative and diverse changemakers,” a jumble of

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National Nutrition Mission because one of the chronic problems India faces is malnourishment, which has long-term implications for the workforce, including productivity and mortality. The Gates Foundation and other agencies partnered with the government to carry out its mission. However, the visuals they created of nutritional and balanced diets contained images of

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more funding than one that is focused on other mosquito-borne diseases or on diarrhea. A public health professional in Vietnam who has worked with the Gates Foundation dubbed it the “Gates effect.” Imprint Billionaires have long endowed university chairs, funded hospitals, given support to religious or humanitarian causes, or written checks

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he is one of the most active philanthropists around, having given away more than $17 billion. Trevor Neilson, one of the early employees of the Gates Foundation, built an entire business around philanthropic strategy. He created the Global Philanthropy Group, which worked with 40 or so philanthropists to build out their strategy

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and identify potential philanthropy partners, build advisory boards, hire people, and get the outfit up and running. Neilson used his brief but formative experience at the Gates Foundation to tell others: “Gates is the model to emulate if you’re trying to build a strategy for philanthropy.” In Silicon Valley, where wealth

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Cascade NDAs said they were so expansive as to prohibit employees and external managers from talking about their employer, Larson, Gates, French Gates, and even the Gates Foundation. Similar NDAs were also required of senior executives elsewhere in the Gates universe. Lawyers for Cascade have sometimes called people who they thought had broken

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idea to Gates, and even included slides: Could some of the billionaire philanthropic dollars being pledged be pooled into a charitable fund created for the Gates Foundation? Such donor-advised funds are vehicles created by banks and other big asset managers into which wealthy individuals can deposit money that they eventually plan

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million. Like other donor-advised funds, this one too would provide donors the tax benefits up front. The proposed structure would involve silos—areas that the Gates Foundation focused on, such as polio, maternal health, vaccines, and agriculture—that donors wanted to direct their money into. Membership to this donor club would

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it felt like God had fallen to earth. Gates was suddenly both philanthropist and philanderer, and a womanizer whose foundation worked for women’s rights. The Gates Foundation, already sensitive to the criticisms about its top-down structure and size, used the opportunity to make changes in its governing structure. In January

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an essay for The New England Journal of Medicine—which typically publishes medical research—about how to coordinate a pandemic response. At the same time, the Gates Foundation was working closely with pharmaceutical companies and governments on vaccines. His public presence was so widespread that people like Chapman, who only had a

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bed nets that the foundation and other health agencies distribute, creating new challenges even as the existing ones evade conquest. Polio, another big priority for the Gates Foundation, too has proved impossible to uproot. The highly infectious and crippling disease cannot be cured, but multiple vaccinations can prevent it. In 1988, the

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document established new and pressing targets: reducing economic disparity, combating climate change, and promoting sustainable growth. The goals have also shaped the recent priorities of the Gates Foundation, but it’s already clear that the world is unlikely to fulfill them by 2030. The pandemic had created massive roadblocks, choking off access to

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vaccines because supply chains broke down and healthcare systems were too overwhelmed to administer routine immunizations. In April 2023, as the pandemic ebbed, the Gates Foundation, along with global agencies like the WHO and UNICEF, announced an urgent vaccination campaign called “The Big Catch-Up.” With more than 25 million children

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should assume that the information is synthesized from multiple accounts of an event or experience. Bill Gates, his representatives at Gates Ventures, and representatives of the Gates Foundation did not participate. Once presented with the information in this book, they stonewalled for months. Following multiple entreaties, both organizations initially said they would not

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Krista Rasmussen, “Who Actually Funds the UN and Other Multilaterals?,” January 9, 2018. 10. Kirstin R.W. Mathews and Vivian Ho, “The Grand Impact of the Gates Foundation,” EMBO Reports 9, no. 5 (2008): 409–12. 11. “Funding to Universities by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,” University Philanthropy Research by the Cape

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Partnership, August 2021. 12. Julia Belluz, “The Media Loves the Gates Foundation. These Academics Are More Skeptical,” Vox, June 10, 2015. 13. Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World (New York: Bloomsbury

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14. Kavita Ramdas, “Philanthrocapitalism Is Not Social Change Philanthropy,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2011. 15. Linsey McGoey, No Such Thing As a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (London: Verso, 2015), 24. 16. Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (New York: Vintage

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website), “PM Modi’s Candid Conversation with Bill Gates,” press release, March 29, 2024. 29. Manjari Mahajan, “Philanthropy and the Nation-State in Global Health: The Gates Foundation in India,” Global Public Health 13, no. 10 (2018): 1357–68. 30. Manoj Mohanan et al., “Effect of A Large-Scale Franchising and Telemedicine Program

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December 30, 2022. 7. Steven Levy, “Bill Gates Is Upbeat on Climate, Capitalism and Even Politics,” Wired, March 18, 2021. 8. Bill Gates, “By 2026, the Gates Foundation Aims to Spend $9 Billion a Year,” GatesNotes, July 13, 2022. Further Reading Alger, Horatio, Jr. Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward. New York: Penguin Books

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better

by Rob Reich  · 20 Nov 2018  · 257pp  · 75,685 words

Pledge signatories are to the twenty-first century. The last decade of the twentieth century witnessed the creation of unprecedentedly large foundations like the Gates Foundation. The combined assets of the Gates Foundation and a separate Gates Trust, which holds donations from Bill and Melinda Gates and contributions from Warren Buffett, totaled more than $80 billion

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change, and the scope of foundation activities, some of which are very local (community foundations) and others of which are global in reach (e.g., the Gates Foundation). The technical and conceptual issues in trying to measure redistribution notwithstanding, Wolpert concludes that foundations are at best “modestly redistributive,” as can be determined with

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direct government expenditures are. To give an obvious example, citizens can unelect their representatives if they are dissatisfied with the spending programs of the state; the Gates Foundation also has a domestic and global spending program, partly supported through tax subsidies, but its leaders and trustees cannot be unelected. Thus the success of

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a foundation stands for election, regardless of what the public thinks about the distribution of its grants. Suppose a group of people disapprove of what the Gates Foundation, or any other foundation, is doing. What then? There’s no mechanism to unelect Bill and Melinda Gates. Referring to the foundation’s education grant

The death and life of the great American school system: how testing and choice are undermining education

by Diane Ravitch  · 2 Mar 2010  · 403pp  · 105,431 words

reforms. In District 2, Alvarado had similarly redirected Title I funds, calling it “multipocket budgeting.”10 Bersin raised more than $50 million from foundations, including the Gates Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Broad Foundation. Several foundation grants had a specific contingency: The money would be available

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schools. But the mayor lined up overwhelming political support for continuing his control of the public schools, financed in part by millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation.22 The only group that might have stymied his goal was the United Federation of Teachers. More than 80 percent of

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solve the problems of education. As more charter schools opened, advocacy for charters in Washington and state capitals grew stronger, supported by major foundations, including the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, and wealthy entrepreneurs. Everyone knew the charter sector was big, bold, diverse, and getting bigger, bolder, and more diverse. Their quality

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who chose to retain their tenure would not be eligible for the higher compensation. Rhee obtained a five-year commitment from several major foundations, including the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, to support the supersize salaries. Rhee wanted the freedom to fire teachers who did not share her belief that all children

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and Educational Options ($700,000), and the Black Alliance for Educational Options ($850,000). The foundation also aided organizations favored by the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation, including Teach for America ($283,000), New Leaders for New Schools ($1.2 million), and the New Teacher Project ($1 million). The foundation made grants

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some $30 billion make it the largest foundation in the nation, if not the universe, and the pledge of another $30 billion or so to the Gates Foundation by one of its trustees, the famed investor Warren Buffett, in 2006 ensured its future dominance of the world of philanthropy (these values were depressed

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by market turbulence in 2008-2009, but the Gates Foundation remains the largest in the nation). The Gates Foundation has laudably addressed some of the biggest global problems, such as public health and poverty. It has committed its vast resources to

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about the foundation’s overwhelming influence and power. The chief of malaria research for the World Health Organization, Dr. Arata Kochi, complained in 2008 that the Gates Foundation was stifling a diversity of views among scientists, because so many of the world’s leading scientists in the field were “locked up in a

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have implicitly dangerous consequences on the policy-making process in world health.”11 In other words, the Gates Foundation was setting the international agenda, because of its unrivaled wealth, and unintentionally shutting out competing views. In 2000, the Gates Foundation selected a problem in American education that it wanted to solve: boosting high school graduation rates

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of Columbia. Some of the Gates schools were new, while others were created by dividing up existing large schools. 12 It was never obvious why the Gates Foundation decided that school size was the one critical reform most needed to improve American education. Both state and national tests showed that large numbers of

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performance dropped sharply, and its graduation rate fell to about 60 percent. The principal eliminated many Advanced Placement classes, and academic expectations dropped. In 2001, the Gates Foundation awarded more than $1 million to restructure Manual High School into three small, autonomous high schools, each on its own floor of the building. Manual

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any other stakeholder.” It said that the reforms were implemented hastily, with inadequate planning and involvement of those who were expected to carry it out. The Gates Foundation’s insistence that the three new schools be autonomous caused conflict and competition for resources among the schools, when collaboration was needed.16 Even more

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embarrassing to the Gates Foundation was the dissension in its own backyard at Mountlake Terrace High School, a suburban school of 1,800 students a few miles outside Seattle, not

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far from the foundation’s headquarters. The school had a dropout rate of one-third and looked for ways to improve. In 2000, the Gates Foundation offered the school a gift of $833,000 to convert itself into small autonomous schools; 83 percent of the faculty voted to accept the grant

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students in the “loser academy.”20 She also found that breaking schools into subunits did not necessarily lead to instructional improvement.21 In Chicago, where the Gates Foundation had invested $21 million to create new small high schools, the results were depressingly familiar: Students had higher attendance rates and were less likely to

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drop out of school, but the academic results in the new high schools were no different from those of regular high schools.22 The Gates Foundation liked to point to its work in New York City as one place where it saw good results. It invested more than $100 million to

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diploma, a student had to pass five exit examinations; a student could get a local diploma without passing the exit examinations.25 So what did the Gates Foundation learn from these problems? It discontinued the evaluations of its small school grants and increased its funding for “advocacy work.”26 In the fall of

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-Wall, president of the Seattle school board, which had previously received $26 million from the Gates Foundation. She said, “I don’t understand if the Gates Foundation sees itself as trying to support districts or lead districts. No one was elected by the Gates Foundation to run schools.” Others quoted in the article quickly rebutted Butler-Wall; an education

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change the minds of public officials.29 But never in the history of the United States was there a foundation as rich and powerful as the Gates Foundation. Never was there one that sought to steer state and national policy in education. And never before was there a foundation that gave grants to

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tank and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving almost no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence. In late 2008, the Gates Foundation announced that it was changing course. Its $2 billion investment in new small high schools had not been especially successful (although it was careful not

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school choice while overhauling the bureaucracy. He closed low-performing schools and opened charter schools. He attracted $26 million in grants from the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Dell Foundation, and corporations based in Oakland.35 But three years after he arrived, Ward left to become superintendent of the San Diego County

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. Fordham Institute; the American Enterprise Institute; the Black Alliance for Education Options; Education Sector; and Education Trust. Many of these groups also received funding from the Gates Foundation. It invested millions to subsidize pay-for-performance programs for teachers in several cities, including Houston, Chicago, and Minneapolis, and in programs to pay students

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to motivate (or “incentivize”) teachers and students, and seeks to replace neighborhood schools with a competitive marketplace of choices. This agenda is now shared by the Gates Foundation, along with several other major foundations, including the Robertson Foundation (assets in excess of $1 billion) and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation (assets in

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his election, President Obama called for the elimination of state caps on charter schools and endorsed merit pay. Duncan appointed a high-level official from the Gates Foundation to serve as his chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Education. He traveled the country urging mayors to take control of their

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public schools, an item high on the Broad Foundation’s agenda. Secretary Duncan appointed James H. Shelton III, a former program officer for the Gates Foundation, to oversee the $650 million Invest in What Works and Innovation Fund. Shelton worked previously for McKinsey & Company as a management consultant and later launched

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change.” The NewSchools Venture Fund helped to launch many charter management organizations and other nonprofit and for-profit agencies. The fund was a beneficiary of the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and many other foundations. 42 As he began his term in office, Secretary Duncan had charge of $100 billion that Congress had

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(I resigned in April 2009); I opposed the foundation’s decision to accept Gates’s funding for its programs, not because of any doubts about the Gates Foundation, but because I wanted Fordham to remain independent and free to be a critic. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Elizabeth Green, “Gates Foundation Will Steer

Philanthrocapitalism

by Matthew Bishop, Michael Green and Bill Clinton  · 29 Sep 2008  · 401pp  · 115,959 words

winner Muhammad Yunus pioneered with the Grameen Bank microcredit loans, which have helped lift more than 100 million people out of poverty across the world. The Gates Foundation has used it to save countless lives from malaria, to search for better ways to prevent HIV/AIDS, and to improve education in poor communities

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right. Oprah Winfrey, for example, the billionaire television host and producer, has paid for a school in Africa and also works in partnership with the Gates Foundation. This makes some people uneasy. What does a rock star really know about the poor in Africa? Yet just as celebrities are now an integral

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may have absorbed some of his wider humanitarian values from his religious upbringing. Melinda Gates is a Catholic, however, which some observers think has led the Gates Foundation to steer clear of certain projects involving reproductive health, i.e., abortion and birth control. In contrast, Arthur C. Brooks argues in his 2006

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foundation, but is at the moment also one of its least generous.” The magazine estimated that this foundation could be worth $36 billion, more than the Gates Foundation at that time. Its purpose? Ending hunger? Curing diseases? No: “innovation in the field of architectural and interior design.” Philanthropy that is devoted to

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especially, libraries were no longer nice-to-have amenities but essential community facilities, as important as first responders after the disaster. Ten years on, how the Gates Foundation views its relationship with libraries has evolved significantly. Its focus has gone global, looking to spread connected libraries abroad, especially in the poorer parts of

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judge’s decision was overturned a year later on appeal, in August 2002 what Gates felt about Klein suddenly mattered a great deal. In 2000, the Gates Foundation, George Soros’s Open Society Institute, and the Carnegie Corporation had together pledged to give $10 million each to help the New York Board

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Money also went to organizations such as Replications Inc. (eight schools), the College Board (six schools), and the Asia Society (ten schools with international themes). The Gates Foundation tries to find organizations whose methods it likes and then scales them up. New Visions, for example, run by small-school champion Robert Hughes, has

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say, reading or mathematics, unless the curriculum and teaching are right too. And despite some disappointments, the overall picture was encouraging. At the small schools the Gates Foundation has funded, the graduation rate has risen to 73 percent, from between 31 to 51 percent in the schools they replaced. In New York, less

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math and more than 50 percent were in reading. Graduation rates were at their highest in decades. But even this does not satisfy those at the Gates Foundation. Despite the progress in New York, so much more is needed. “How many Mayor Bloombergs are there?” Stonesifer says, sighing. One attempt to do

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states had committed in principle to common standards, and the foundation was focusing increasingly on getting them to translate this commitment into policy. In 2007, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, a consultancy, launched the campaign Ed in ’08, run by former Colorado governor Roy Romer, to put

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nationwide education reform at the heart of the 2008 presidential election. This built on earlier advocacy work, in which the Gates Foundation has worked with Oprah Winfrey. On one Oprah show, Winfrey swapped pupils from a poorly performing inner-city school in Chicago and a nice suburban

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to solving global health problems in future—its past contributions, typically driven by short-term commercial priorities, being for the most part underwhelming. Since 2000, the Gates Foundation has worked in partnership with GSK on microbicides to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and on eradicating malaria. “Our foundation pays the cost of

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partnership to get the drug to the needy with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which had an existing distribution capability in the affected areas. The Gates Foundation has also been the driving force behind numerous public-private partnerships with governments and multilateral organizations. In 2000, it announced the launch of an HIV

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of several rich countries, to pledge large sums of money. By the end of 2006, the Global Fund had committed $7 billion in 136 countries. The Gates Foundation applied this lesson again in 2007 when it joined with five governments to pilot an innovative new funding mechanism to incentivize drug development. The Advance

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vaccine and thus makes such development more likely to happen. If the pilot succeeds, more AMCs backed by more governments are likely to follow. THE GATES FOUNDATION is now among the biggest sources of funding for global health. Even before Buffett’s gift, it had a larger annual global health budget than

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64 percent of its nurses, and 85 percent of its physicians—mostly to foreign NGOs, largely funded by the U.S. or British government or the Gates Foundation, which “can easily outbid the ministry for the services of local talent.” Garrett’s article was not explicitly targeted at Gates, though as his foundation

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a profit tends to concentrate minds on the task at hand. Recruiting staff with the right skills is also trickier than in business because of the Gates Foundation’s unique position straddling the public and private sectors. (Indeed, questions were raised about the foundation’s due diligence process after successive heads of

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with the best intentions, Kochi argued, “a lot of money leads to a monopoly, and discourages smaller rivals and intellectual competition.” If the power of the Gates Foundation is enough to worry a U.N. agency, its effect on other philanthropists may be even greater. Many observers of the philanthropic world think that

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also pose significant challenges, particularly if the foundation increasingly plays a formal role in it, based on a model pioneered at the Global Fund, where the Gates Foundation sits on the board alongside sovereign governments. The governance of the fund was designed to address some of the deficiencies of the traditional United Nations

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approach, which is often bureaucratic and slow. The representative of the Gates Foundation and a representative of business were included on the fund’s twenty-person board, provoking a lively debate about how to ensure proper accountability to

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only as the world’s greatest investor, but the world’s greatest investor for good,” predicted Gates, after Buffett pledged most of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. Gates chose his words carefully. Buffett regards his gift as an investment in changing the world for the better, not just as an expression

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with enduring competitive advantages—typically dominant players in an industry, such as Walt Disney and Coca-Cola. Here, the parallels with his philanthropic “investment” in the Gates Foundation could hardly be clearer. “I do the same thing in business as I am doing in philanthropy—associating with people who are more talented than

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in which wealthy people who want to give effectively without having to be overly involved will invest in successful foundations established by other philanthropists. When the Gates Foundation agreed to accept his money, it did not expect others to follow Buffett’s lead. Indeed, it was caught by surprise soon after when

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the “five global goliaths”: spiritual emptiness, egocentric leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic diseases and illiteracy, and lack of education. His church has become a partner with the Gates Foundation, among others, in the Malaria No More campaign to eradicate the mosquito-borne killer. This mixture of philanthropy, capitalism, and religion that Drucker helped to

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U.N. Foundation and UNFIP may be the start of a trend to give significant philanthrocapitalists a recognized role in the global governance system, like the Gates Foundation’s seat on the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. UNFIP’s first success in moving beyond Turner to

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. “Anything worth achieving can be stated as a goal and measured,” says Tom Vander Ark, who became president of the X Prize Foundation after leaving the Gates Foundation. A good prize, he says, must be important, offer significant benefit to humanity, and be measurable and fundable (the reward needs to reflect how

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, some already are. In the past five years he has seen “a dramatic increase in giving to Save the Children from superrich philanthropists, led by the Gates Foundation, but also Soros, Hewlett, the U.N. Foundation, the Elmer Foundation, and CIFF.” In that time, the charity has gone from getting two thirds

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emerging trend among the old foundations. Perhaps inspired (or threatened) by the Rockefeller Foundation’s lead, the Ford Foundation, still second in size only to the Gates Foundation, in 2007 chose “a dark horse candidate with little experience of institutional philanthropy as its new president,” in the words of the New York Times

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The goal was to achieve impact early and quickly.” A second new initiative was to get into bed with the leading new philanthropist, partnering with the Gates Foundation in its ambitious long-term project to end hunger by boosting agricultural production in Africa. The Alliance for Green Revolution in Africa will tackle issues

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putting up the first $39 million of what it hopes will become a $120 million fund by June 2008. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Gates Foundation joined this effort, contributing a further $49 million. The first beneficiary was the Nurse-Family Partnership, which was raising $50 million to finance its growth

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involves investing directly in projects that address a specific social goal of the foundation. How ethical is ethical enough is much debated. The refusal of the Gates Foundation to engage in screening (except for tobacco companies) resulted in its coming under fire in 2007. Two articles in the Los Angeles Times accused the

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activities contribute to the very problems it is trying to solve (poverty, debt, disease, and so on). The newspaper calculated that some 41 percent of the Gates Foundation portfolio was invested in companies—ranging from oil major ExxonMobil to drug giant Abbott Laboratories—that “countered the foundation’s charitable goals or socially concerned

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that it is absurd not to enlist their huge investment portfolios directly in their efforts to do good. This may be one respect in which the Gates Foundation reflects philanthropy’s past, not its future. “ROCKEFELLER—THEY ARE a great foundation. In fact I think over the decades they have probably done

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president thinks needs a complete turnaround. Some may also find it particularly ironic, given the widely held perception that it is the massive investment by the Gates Foundation in global health issues that has largely squeezed the Rockefeller Foundation out of this sector, despite its long and distinguished track record there. Gates denies

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care. Within a year, the incidence of trachoma was down by 50 percent in Morocco and Tanzania. The program has since been expanded aggressively by the Gates Foundation and the British government’s Department for International Development, with a goal of reaching thirty million people. Coca-Cola, which has come to realize that

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a pivotal role in securing billions of dollars of developing-country debt-reduction and new aid at the G8 summit in 2005. Indeed, some say the Gates Foundation’s initial investment of $1 million, by generating an impact that arguably totaled many billions of dollars, is the greatest-ever example of philanthropic leverage

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overcome the vagaries of nature and set the stage for future generations to lead modestly better lives?” Yet Patty Stonesifer, the longtime chief executive of the Gates Foundation, became a believer after initial skepticism about the value of celebrities. That, after all, is why the foundation seeded One. “One of our most

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ten years ago, I would probably have said no.” One reason for this growing enthusiasm has been the realization that to achieve its goals, the Gates Foundation could not rely on technological solutions but needed to influence public opinion and thereby shape the right policy context. “I did not realize how much

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will often be a subject for debate, especially when it comes to the bigger, bolder initiatives. For instance, did that initial $1 million investment by the Gates Foundation in One really deliver all those billions of dollars in aid and debt relief promised at the G8? Leverage is a somewhat fuzzy concept, particularly

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on application to particularly deserving causes). It has three main focuses: philanthropy, global public health and economic development, and opportunity creation. Notable McKinsey clients include the Gates Foundation and Bono’s campaigning organization, One. While McKinsey has chosen to cross-subsidize its work with philanthropists and nonprofits within its mainstream business, two other

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of Bain. The new firm was also seed-funded by several foundations that wanted a better consultancy for the sector, including the Atlantic Philanthropies and the Gates Foundation. Tierney is a firm believer in the virtues of intermediaries. “Think about where business was post World War Two, in the fifties and sixties,”

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hyperagency to the masses. It may also make online giving and activism sites increasingly attractive partners to the bigger beasts of the giving business, from the Gates Foundation down, especially as they look to leverage the impact of their money by allying with social movements. Activism is not the only attraction of these

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aggregate may have a better grasp of the truth than a few so-called experts looking down on a situation from above. In 2009, the Gates Foundation allocated $4 million to match any gifts made by citizen philanthropists to projects posted on DonorsChoose by high school teachers preparing students to go to

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college. As Best says, “if the Gates Foundation is outsourcing its grant-making to ordinary people, it is probably the start of a trend.” CHAPTER 14 The Age of Plutocracy? “I INDULGE IN

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one trying to do so. Recall that Soros provided start-up capital for One, Bono’s campaigning organization, with software tycoon Ed Scott and the Gates Foundation—which as well as funding new initiatives in the public education system also joined with Eli Broad to put education reform on the presidential election

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of the world’s governments. To encourage them, the public should support formal roles being given to philanthropists in global governance, along the lines of the Gates Foundation seat on the board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. And, of course, there is the battle of ideas to

The New Prophets of Capital

by Nicole Aschoff  · 10 Mar 2015  · 128pp  · 38,187 words

the Business of Feminism 2.Capital’s Id: Whole Foods, Conscious Capitalism and Sustainability 3.The Oracle of O: Oprah and the Neoliberal Subject 4.The Gates Foundation and the Rise of Philanthrocapitalism 5.Looking Forward Further Reading Acknowledgements Introduction: Storytelling We are all storytellers. We embellish, ignore, and cherry-pick moments of

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these new storytellers: Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook), John Mackey (CEO of Whole Foods), Oprah Winfrey (media mogul), and Bill and Melinda Gates (creators of the Gates Foundation).7 I argue that each of these storytellers acts as a prophet of capitalism. They believe that there are serious problems with capitalism, or with

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only to know how to fix problems, but also appear to be already doing the fixing. However, instead of alleviating the ills of capitalist markets, the Gates Foundation’s policies deepen the reach of capitalist markets to provision of basic human needs such as healthcare and education, and hence reinforce the divide between

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in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979), 130–48. See Kathi Weeks in The Problem with Work on the power of the demand. 4 The Gates Foundation and the Rise of Philanthrocapitalism “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing

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, and it aptly sums up the philosophy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gateses are changing the world. Since its founding in 1997, the Gates Foundation has transformed the medical and research fields for diseases like malaria and pneumonia and is at the center of an education reform movement in the

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trajectory. Forbes ranks her at number three on its 2014 list of the World’s Most Powerful Women, right behind Angela Merkel and Janet Yellen. The Gates Foundation is at the forefront of a new form of philanthropy called “philanthrocapitalism.” Unlike the traditional foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford), philanthrocapitalists don’t believe in old

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rapid improvement for the poor we need a system that draws in innovators and businesses in a far better way than we do today.16 The Gates Foundation wants to lead the way in creating this better system by using its power to convert economic need into economic demand. To facilitate this transformation

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malaria. Why? Melinda Gates argues that there is simply no “rich world market” for products like diarrhea or pneumonia vaccines. Their solution is to use the Gates Foundation to create such a market in poor countries: [If] we could stimulate the pharmaceutical companies through public private partnerships to … create vaccines. If we could

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foundation also relies on other, smaller foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation for institutional and logistical support. To date, the Gates Foundation has successfully brought both malaria and pneumonia vaccines to market. Through its Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), it has also vaccinated millions of

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of parochial schools, but they think the public is too invested in public education and thus resistant to these kinds of sweeping change.23 Instead, the Gates Foundation is pursuing incremental change through the increased application of market mechanisms to public schooling. The idea is that by applying a market logic to the

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best products can be taken to scale.25 The best way to “scale-up” reforms and educational products is contested and prone to dead ends. The Gates Foundation initially focused on reducing class size. In the early 2000s it spent billions opening 2,600 small high schools in forty-five states, but the

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all, polio vaccines and bednets in malaria-ridden places are good things, as is challenging Malthusian narratives of population growth and promoting contraception, which the Gates Foundation also does. But the Gates Foundation does whatever it wants. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), a Gates/Rockefeller joint project that started in 2006, is

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, and communities is building, but they face an uphill battle, because despite their frustration and anger they have little say in the education reform process. The Gates Foundation is a private institution that is free to use its money as it sees fit. It’s not just Bill and Medinda Gates. Education reformers

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Street Journal, July 23, 2011. 24Jim Horn and Ken Libby, “The Giving Business: Venture Philanthropy and the NewSchools Venture Fund,” in Philip E. Kovacs, ed., The Gates Foundation and the Future of US “Public” Schools, New York: Routledge, 2011, pp. 172–3. 25Diane Ravitch, Reign of Error: The Hoax ofthe Privatization Movement and

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education I draw heavily on her work and encourage readers to visit her blog, dianeravitch.net. 26Ravitch, Reign of Error; Bill Gates, TED Talk. 27Kovacs, The Gates Foundation and the Future of US “Public” Schools, pp. 172–3; Riley, “Was the $5 Billion Worth It?” 28Nancy Fraser, “Marketization, Social Protection, Emancipation: Toward a

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning With the Myth of the Good Billionaire

by Tim Schwab  · 13 Nov 2023  · 618pp  · 179,407 words

innovator. Beyond creating complex procurement mechanisms that purchase medicine, like Gavi, Gates wants his foundation involved in the actual creation of new lifesaving pharmaceuticals. The Gates Foundation reports spending billions of dollars for projects related to pneumonia, for example, including funding directed at the development of new vaccines. Gates has given charitable

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, including GSK, Pfizer, SK bioscience, PnuVax, Genocea, Matrivax, the Serum Institute of India, and Inventprise. “There were actually many, many more,” Amit Srivastava, previously the Gates Foundation’s global lead for pneumococcal vaccine development, told me. As examples, he pointed to the foundation’s partnerships throughout China with companies like Sinopharm and

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surprising, and maybe not even controversial, that the foundation endorses this approach in its work on pharmaceuticals. What is surprising, and controversial, is that the Gates Foundation, a nonprofit, tax-privileged charity, is so involved in the commercial marketplace around pharmaceutical development. Gates’s expansive corporate partnerships have long raised questions about

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confidential information about their company’s pharmaceutical development during the negotiation of a charitable grant. The foundation never came through with the money. Buried on the Gates Foundation’s website is a survey instrument that asks its vaccine development partners for detailed business information. “Any data received from a manufacturer or obtained

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Inventprise, which seems to be the design of its financing arrangement, sales of the new vaccine could drive new revenue into the Gates Foundation. It’s difficult, then, to ignore the optics: The Gates Foundation is operating like a pharmaceutical company. One vaccine developer I interviewed believes that Bill Gates is actually trying to create the

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widespread allegations of harassment and discrimination from women working at Microsoft? What about the Gates Foundation’s money manager, Michael Larson? What about the Gates Foundation’s yearslong, still-unclear relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? What about Epstein’s countless victims? And what about the Gates Foundation’s wholesale failure to address these issues internally? Should the foundation be

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-funded Stanford report phrased it differently: “As Zyomyx’s largest equity holder and an observer on its board [of directors], the Gates Foundation had the tools to protect its charitable objectives.” With the Gates Foundation at the helm, the project failed fast. Mylan eventually pulled out, and Gates began winding down Zyomyx, offering it a

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other than those offered through its massive PR machinery. When Adam Fejerskov set out to research the Gates Foundation for his academic book The Gates Foundation’s Rise to Power: Private Authority in Global Politics, he reached out directly to the Gates Foundation early in his project, hoping to set up interviews. Fejerskov was interested in how the foundation

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that populate the news media today. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively, both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) deployed their fact-checkers to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” specifically the allegation that the foundation had financial investments in companies

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readily project shifting organizational identities, sometimes appearing as an NGO, sometimes as a multinational company, and sometimes even as a state actor,” Fejerskov writes. “The Gates Foundation strategically practices a hybrid authority, allowing it to alternately expand and compress its organizational identity, sometimes assuming multiple organizational forms and at other times (particularly

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meeting in a private residence in Manhattan to discuss potential philanthropic partnerships, with Gates reportedly pushing the group to consider work on overpopulation. Historically, the Gates Foundation has tracked this work to the social problems it believes overpopulation causes. In its early days, the foundation gave generously to the Population Resource Center

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alongside access to abortion, fertility treatments, and a variety of reproductive health care like Pap smears, breast exams, and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. While the Gates Foundation clearly understands these perspectives and even parrots these points of view in its rhetoric, its philanthropic interventions, in practice, appear far more concerned with meeting

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—or carrot—that visited Park and Fortner when they teamed up on a reporting project for the Dutch news outlet De Correspondent examining the Gates Foundation’s work on polio. Incredibly, the Gates Foundation, once again, went over their heads. Rachel Lonsdale, the head of Gates’s polio communications team, contacted the outlet’s editor,

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other dimensions of editorial influence from donors. In 2018, Bhekisisa, a media outlet based in South Africa and mostly funded by the Gates Foundation, published an essay about working with charitable donors, mentioning the Gates Foundation and the German government: “Bhekisisa’s donor resources, and accompanying impact, has come at a great cost. It has

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Bornstein and Tina Rosenberg. When I spoke to Bornstein and Rosenberg in 2020, the group’s largest all-time funder was the Gates Foundation, which has given at least seven million dollars. The Gates Foundation also reports giving millions of dollars to other outlets for work on solutions journalism, including Grist and the Stichting European Journalism

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virtually universal ethical rules in journalism require newsrooms to disclose financial conflicts of interest to readers. In short, if you’re reporting on the Gates Foundation, and you’re funded by the Gates Foundation, readers must have this information. And failing to be transparent is a recipe for public distrust. If the foundation wanted to, it

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which he views his charitable giving. It highlights the existential limits of what he can accomplish, and it explains why the Gates Foundation has achieved so little. 11 Bloat In 2014, the Gates Foundation was experiencing technical issues tracking and managing the charitable grants it made—a sad irony for an institution run by one

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to Gates. If so, it would be a powerful statement about Buffett’s loss of confidence in the effectiveness of the Gates Foundation. Whatever Warren Buffett, born in 1930, decides to do, the Gates Foundation still has to contend with Bill Gates’s personal wealth—more than $100 billion as of early 2023. Gates, born

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scientific discourse, or the same influence in the public discourse, as the work Gates funds. To a very large extent, what we know about the Gates Foundation comes from the Gates Foundation itself. * * * CHRIS MURRAY IS a towering figure in the world of global health—and he enjoys a level of prestige and wealth like

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little more than write checks. “We would not consider the IHME to be an institute that was, you know, founded by the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation has provided a lot of financial support to the IHME—that’s at the IHME’s request. They [IHME] come up with individual projects,

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research questions they want to have answered and so on, and then they propose to the Gates Foundation—that the Gates Foundation provide funding for those things, as designed by the IHME. And then Gates either says yes or no,” Giffels told me. I also asked him

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from the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations. Even today, many top brass and board members are not based in Africa—like Rodger Voorhies of the Gates Foundation. Internal policy documents at the Gates Foundation describe AGRA as an example of where it is “creating a new entity and providing significant funding”—and also serving in a governance

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and infant mortality rates dropping by more than 30 percent. But where do these numbers come from? How much credit does the Gates Foundation really deserve for this work? Why do the Gates Foundation and CARE benchmark their success based on data from 2005—years before the foundation’s interventions began? (CARE did not respond

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advisory committees in countries across Africa and Asia. These groups generally provide scientific and technical advice to governments, which informs national vaccine policy. In India, the Gates Foundation has served as the funder of India’s Immunization Technical Support Unit, which provides “techno-managerial” assistance. The Indian government defines the unit’s

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have never had in the United States—Indian legislators, policy makers, and journalists began very publicly interrogating the phenomenal financial conflicts of interest underpinning the Gates Foundation’s charitable enterprise. The foundation makes charitable donations and engages in a wide variety of other financing mechanisms that help Big Pharma grow their businesses

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deserve healthy lives. I resigned from it for the exact same reason. By presenting Mr. Modi with this award, the Gates Foundation is going against its own core belief,” Sabah Hamid wrote. “The Gates Foundation has crossed the wide gulf between working with a regime and endorsing it. That is not the pragmatic agnosticism of

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GoI, Think Tanks, International Organisations and G20 member & invitee countries etc. A source with direct knowledge confirmed that the unnamed “American private foundation” was the Gates Foundation. 15 Covid-19 Years before the word Covid burned itself into public consciousness, researchers at the University of Oxford’s Jenner Institute had been developing

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put its surrogates CEPI and Gavi in charge, allowing Gates to disclaim any influence (or responsibility) when convenient. “The PR person at the Gates Foundation will often say, ‘Oh, you know, the Gates Foundation is not on that body, I really suggest you direct your questions to Gavi or CEPI,’” Kate Elder of MSF told me

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spends (slightly) more: “Tuberculosis Research Funding Trends,” Treatment Action Group, December 2022, Figure 10, https://www.treatmentactiongroup.org/resources/tbrd-report/tbrd-report-2022/. Note: The Gates Foundation grant records show $10 million in donations to the NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and $44 million to the Foundation

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:55. survey instrument: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, “Production Economics for Vaccines,” 2016, https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/Documents/PE_Vaccines_Appendix_2016.xlsm. Iqbal later left the Gates Foundation: Robyn Iqbal, LinkedIn profile, https://www.linkedin.com/in/robyniqbal/. “locked up”: “WHO Official Criticizes Gates Foundation ‘Cartel’ on Malaria Research,” New York Times,

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and at the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute (LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-farnum-4b180a1); Ralf Clemens, a scientific adviser to the Gates Foundation (LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/ralf-clemens-75578513/details/organizations/); and Stewart Parker, a Seattle-based consultant who previously ran the Gates-funded Infectious

…

-trust.html. equestrian facility in Wellington, Florida: Bandell, “Bill Gates, Jennifer Gates’ Trust Sells Wellington Equestrian Property.” chocolate and cocoa companies: Alex Park, “Is the Gates Foundation Still Investing in Private Prisons?,” Mother Jones (blog), December 8, 2014, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/gates-foundation-still-investing-private-prisons; Laura

…

of its URLs, or links, to audits are dead or missing. Later, the foundation put its endowment into a separate entity, the Gates Foundation Trust, which reports its own financials. To find the Gates Foundation’s investment income, I used “investment income, net” as reported in its annual financial audits, which were not published until

…

.intellectualventures.com/what-we-do/global-good-fund/our-work. “controlled subsidiary”: This $500 million, notably, did not come through charitable grants from the Gates Foundation, but rather through transfers from the Gates Foundation’s endowment. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, 990-PF, Statement 12, Transfers to Controlled Entities, 2010–2020. Note: In 2010, the

…

-outlawed-in-washington-state-will-whistleblowers-speak-up/. “mechanism of public accountability”: Friedman and Sunderland, “How to Fix the Gates Foundation.” scroll through page after page: Before I began my first investigation into the Gates Foundation, I contacted them to see if they would give me an Excel spreadsheet containing all their charitable grants—as

…

tax filing showing some of the recipients—but not all and not in a way that allows us to see which funds came from the Gates Foundation. In total, the Gates Foundation has donated close to $7 billion to organizations with the word foundation in their name. “who in turn fund others”: Again, in the

…

15, 2021, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-gates-climate-change-disaster-60-minutes-2021-02-14/. gee-whiz questions: “The Gates Foundation: Giving Away a Fortune,” 0:10. province of Uttar Pradesh: “The Gates Foundation: Giving Away a Fortune,” 2:20. Bill was getting all the credit: Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift: How

…

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Part VII, IRS 990 filing, 2001. “what motivates these people”: “The Gates Foundation: Giving Away a Fortune,” 2:30. poor villagers in India: “The Gates Foundation: Giving Away a Fortune,” 3:25. Traveling to the Indian countryside: “The Gates Foundation: Giving Away a Fortune,” 0:55. “she’d have eight children”: “Extra: Gates on

…

Undermine Journalistic Credibility?,” Undark, April 22, 2016, https://undark.org/2016/04/22/do-industry-partnerships-undermine-journalistic-credibility/; “The Chronicle of Higher Education and the Gates Foundation.” American Public Media: Mike Janssen, “Gates Funding Spurs Doubts over Pubmedia’s Impartiality in Education Reporting,” September 9, 2014, https://current.org/2014/09/

…

Is Ruining Education,” GeekWire, June 27, 2014, https://www.geekwire.com/2014/teachers-protest-gates-foundation/; Jesse Hagopian, “Debating the Gates Foundation,” Socialist Worker, March 13, 2012, https://socialistworker.org/2012/03/13/debating-the-gates-foundation. “shaming poorly performing teachers”: Gates, “For Teachers, Shame Is No Solution.” preposterous good-cop routine: Anthony Cody, “Teachers

…

Center for Health Journalism; Schwab, “The Conflict over Conflicts of Interest.” criticism as a “black box”: “IHME Global Public Goods,” OPP1152504, Grant proposal narrative to the Gates Foundation, IHME, September 20, 2015. pushes back on allegations: Schwab, “Playing Games with Public Health Data”; Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Client Services Unit,

…

being transparent” and that “the extensive resources of IHME relative to other institutions have created an unhealthy imbalance in the field.” The evaluators called on the Gates Foundation, as the IHME’s primary funder, to improve its accountability and transparency. institute’s first temporary offices: Schwab, “Playing Games with Public Health Data.”

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire

by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson  · 14 Apr 2020  · 491pp  · 141,690 words

-19 vaccine. The following day, a website called Biohackinfo.com posted a story with the headline: “Bill Gates will use microchip implants to fight coronavirus.” The Gates Foundation: DENIED its plan to use vaccines to track people and thereby control the global health policy. DENIED Gates’ effort to help develop a vaccine is

…

sponsor of the Common Core initiative was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with over $250 million spent to develop and push the national standards. The Gates Foundations is also involved in purchasing education organizations for the purpose of advancing his Common Core agenda. The following organizations have been funded by, and therefore

…

compromised by, The Gates Foundation: • American Enterprise Institute: $1,068,788. • American Federation of Teachers: $5,400,000. • Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development: $3,269,428. • Council of Great

…

disease. Finally, there was “Clade X” – a daylong pandemic simulation held by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in May 2018 – also funded by the Gates Foundation. But wait, there is more proof that all world “leaders” were reading off the same Covid-19 script. The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board’s 2019

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The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race

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Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety

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Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children

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Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America

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Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making

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Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing

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Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

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The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund

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System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

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Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk

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Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

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How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance

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Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil

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Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer

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Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back

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How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

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The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite

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The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century

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Waiting for Superman: How We Can Save America's Failing Public Schools

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We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production

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The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job

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No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

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Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone

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Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature

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The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation

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User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play

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Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children

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The Enlightened Capitalists

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Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy

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Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World

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Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology

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WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World

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Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman  · 23 Sep 2013  · 579pp  · 164,339 words

The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters

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Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order

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Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

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Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe

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Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World

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Capitalism: A Ghost Story

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The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory

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Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

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Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom

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The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands

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Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime

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Future Sex

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The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society

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Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers

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Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America

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Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos

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Winning the War on War: The Decline of Armed Conflict Worldwide

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How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means

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The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career

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Social Life of Information

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The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset That Drives Extraordinary Results

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Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination

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The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations

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The Premonition: A Pandemic Story

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Work Rules!: Insights From Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead

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Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

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Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries

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Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

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The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions

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Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy

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Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day

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Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can Improve the World Even More

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Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner

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Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

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Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together

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The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa

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Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World

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Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety

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European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right

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Markets, State, and People: Economics for Public Policy

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A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order

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A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

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Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus

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The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality

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When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency

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MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World

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The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

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Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

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