Too knee jerk. Needs "tax" incorporated as it's so unpopular.

Bill Gates uses his "charity" to exert influence worldwide and demand stuff in return.

If this man was truly giving away his money then world hunger would have been solved by now.

He is the largest landowner in the US

I mean if I want my next of kin/whoever to get my money, it's better to do it while alive when you can get creative with the accounting. Especially when you've got Gates money and setting up something like a nonprofit is relatively easy.

Once you're dead and you've got this lump declared assets you're trying to pass on that Uncle Sam will take up to like 40% of.

I’m using it sarcastically

Communism is a word with different legitimate meanings and it sound like this comment is conflating two of them.

• The communist movement, guided by the various theories within Marxist schools of thought. [as you can see, there's a huge range of ideologies in this school of thought, and a few different ones have become ruling governments, and any claiming to be the one true 'real communism' are being arrogant and ignorant]

• Communist society, a society with a socialist mode of production replacing the capitalist mode of production, which those theories are trying to achieve. This has not been accomplished by a post-industrial society.

Because it's a dream that would suffer the same fate that capitalism does.

foundation which quietly pays the Gates kids as much as they want

Any sources?

I will say, the business of fake charities is so common that it does sound almost preferable to make their own, and actually understand where aid is needed in the world.

It’s an old topic for me, but I do remember hearing about the B&MGF working on clean water solutions in other parts of the world.

Also; Warren Buffett recently pledged to the charity, while having his own trust for his kids. That action wouldn’t make sense if the charity just existed to protect family.

American people have not been known for wise choices lately.

He was anti-competetive towards Netscape navigator, admitted guilt and paid for it, since then he's putting his money where his mouth is. Anything else I left out?

Microsoft has gone to shit after he left.

Lemmy sounds exactly like magas

I think only allowing bad people to hoard wealth would be a moral failure if a good person had the opportunity to choose.

The first US full non-emergency-use approved vaccine was Pfizer-BioNTech in August 2021.

Patent laws aren't something they implemented to stop the vaccines, its the default stance which they, including the Gates Foundation, pushed to change for the greater good.

This is correct.

He's gone in depth about this a number of times, where he talks about the complexity of using philanthropic money effectively. For example, is a dollar better spent educating poor children, or building wells in rural communities? Providing bed nets for malaria, or treatments for tuberculosis? And then once you decide on the cause you will put your money into, how do you ensure the money goes where you wanted it to go, rather than being syphoned off by bureaucrats, reallocated to spurious pet projects, or lining the pockets of some local warlord? And once your money has gone to the cause, how do you measure its impact to ensure it was money well spent? Do people actually use the well? Does it provide clean water? Does it work reliably? Did rates of malaria actually go down, or are people too lazy to use the bed nets? Etc.

These things are complicated and take time to figure out. Hence why all the "donate it now" comments are ridiculous.

A UBI for 340 Million Americans from 200Bn USD comes out to about...

Tap tap tap tap

$588.23 each for exactly once. Saving 0 children across the world from starvation, malaria, or dehydration. You could also try distributing that money directly to poor regions but thats such a terrible idea that its on the same tier as immediately releasing Afghanistans funds to the Taliban.

Dude, even just planning and organizing a UBI takes time and effort.

It would start with a billionaire requesting people’s personal data (because he couldn’t publically admit to having it through dark sources) and who wants to do that?

He also couldn’t afford a UBI in every nation on the planet; right now his help is focused on countries with far worse standards of living than the USA.

You think preventing vaccine patents was the bad outcome? I don't even know how to begin with that, I don't feel any need to defend if that's your stance.

Which are also tax avoidance schemes

When you own shares of Microsoft from 1986 to 2025 yes you do.

Stocks are an unpredictable mess of human behavior; you can’t put anything in a calculator to see what they will be tomorrow. It is based on market confidence.

90% of investors won’t buy claims of “It’s just for charity” and will only see a massive sell off of MSFT, and drain the rest in turn through panic sales. It’s how every stock exchange crash has happened (though it can happen to just one or a few companies)

The basic lesson for finance as in all things is whatever you want to do, it’s better to do it slowly over time. Even charities work better if they have funding over a long period to hire staff and plan events, rather than a sudden billion all at once for a room of 8 volunteers to figure out.

OH NO! OH GOD NO! The US Tech Workers! They're being forced to use, oh god no, forced to use Visual Studio Code *vomits

Oh the exploitation!

I don't think he has that influence any more.

And yeah, genocide would be one of the reasons to feel guilty, but it's far from the only one.

lobbying the gov for strict IP law, he buys pharma stock before awarding the contracts for buying all the drugs to make money on that as well

https://www.realchangenews.org/news/2013/07/03/gates-foundation-s-support-monsanto-reveals-it-has-put-ending-hunger-back-burner

Billions in deadweight losses 30 years ago is part of why they aren't already making their own lifesaving drugs by now, and why the drugs are still so expensive. He stole their TV too.

Yo this motherfucker fights diseases that kills millions and absolutely is nowhere near Musk or his shit filled ilk

Stop consuming right wing propaganda. This dude tries more than most let humans be human fuck sake not like he set this system up

Yes I'm not disagreeing

Dinner sentence with reprieve.

You making yourself our enemy won't make us take your side.

...you do realize that, for example, if you had 100 billion dollars, you already have every asset you ever wanted, and then you lost 99 billion, and still had a billion dollars, your life wouldn't be impacted at all, right?

99 percent of his wealth being lost does what to him exactly? I literally can't think of one thing he loses with this.

i think you could benefit from reading yourself, my point was about what he loses by donating the wealth, if you think money has inherent value I feel very bad for you, honestly.

This thread is keyboard warriors complaining that a billionaire is taking action to save millions of people, from the comfort of their couches.

You say this as if Gates isn't making their announcements in luxury. It's an odd point, as if it would invalidate their objections somehow.

[Bill Gates announcing they will eventually donate money] is objectively a good thing.

It's more complex when you look at the bigger picture surrounding philanthropy. (As a side note: moral concepts like "good" and "evil" can't be objective in the first place; there wouldn't be these arguments if it was)

Saving many innocent lives from preventable disease benefits those societies in need, I'm not disagreeing with that. I donate to fund malaria nets and vitamin supplements too, I think it's a worthy cause, and more money does mean more help.

My objection is that this is philanthropy being used as buying good will. Bill Gates gained their money through exploiting the needy and continues to do so. We should not pretend that donating a minor chunk to charity makes this ok, can redeem Gates, or can make them a "good billionaire" (quoting others, not you). It's better than nothing, yes! It's also not enough to justify their actions.

Nor should we be satisfied with far-off statements, like "I'll donate most of it to good causes when I'm dead", or "I'll donate most of it in 20 years", and interpret them as selfless or noble actions - in fact, delaying some of these life-saving donations until 2045 is allowing large numbers of innocent people to die. Isn't that clearly a bad thing?

Philanthropy is almost always reputation laundering, not some uncharacteristic Scrooge-like change of heart. It's a simple trick and we shouldn't enable it and defend Gates for it - we are obliged to re-iterate that Gates is still a greedy billionaire. Because Gates isn't the first to play this transparent trick and won't be the last.

That’s very true. No body needs a $500m yacht, like Bill Gates has. I think Zuckerfuck has one too. Elon doesn’t look like a boat guy to me. Although… he might have a submarine. Let’s hope it’s carbon fiber.

Also these people: Zhong Shanshan, Zhang Yiming, Ma Huateng, Colin Huang, Robin Zeng, William Lei Ding, He Xiangjian, Lei Jun, Jack Ma, Wang Chuanfu, Huang Shilin, Li Shufu, Wang Wei, Lu Xiangyang, Qin Yinglin, Qi Shi, Dang Yanbao, Zhang Zhidong, Zheng Shuliang, Wang Xing… to name a few.

So then, Bill isn't a billionaire, by definition?

But honestly it does kinda fit, someone like Elon Musk is a billionaire with the sole goal of gaining more useless wealth at any costs, while Gates kinda realised over three decades ago that he has so much already he doesn't have a need to actually get more.
He's already given around $100 billion in donations, and probably actually would have ran out of money by now if not for the fact that even though he has sold off his Microsoft stock from the initial 45% down to just around 1%, that 1% has been growing like crazy -15 years ago, it would have been worth around $2.5 billion, today it's over $40 billion.

That original 45% would be worth 1.5 trillion today, btw.

His son recently gave half a billion to Ukraine, out of pocket. I get the impression they At least have their minds on the right side of history.

What would be great is if the trust is designed to be given to charities, rather than for his kin’s space flights. But they may do that anyway.

Well if you just manage your money properly, it grows. I would argue it's better to do that and give you money away rather than not manage your money properly. In the end, more money goes to good causes that way.

If they "stopped" that would mean leaving their money in a bank account sleeping. The only entity benefiting from this would be the bank.

Right, but then why would he constantly talk about it? Why wouldn't he just say "yeah, I donate a lot to charity", feign ignorance about the concept of effective charities, and then arbitrarily dole out money to a mix of innumerable small local charities and shell charities which feed back into his pocket? Like, the number one rule of doing crime is "don't draw attention to yourself when you are committing crime". You don't announce to all your coworkers that you are going to the kwikymart 5 minutes before you rob the kwikymart.

Are there any rich countries with malaria?

Is everything he does good? No. Is this story about a good thing? Yes.

I’ve been browsing the whole thread. I saw the thing about vaccine patents which seems to have pros and cons; and it’s true Microsoft gained its wealth in anticompetitive ways. But I’ve not seen any well documented, proven dismissals of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s work.

Weird that all his money is from the Tech industry and that he givea away the vast majority of his income to charities, then.

Is there any reputable journalist that has echoed this take? It sounds very stretched. Monopolization on Word is one thing, but I’ve heard of some governments finally getting fed up and moving to open source.

I won’t deny Microsoft has done bad shit. I’m currently boycotting them for their assistance to Israel. But “most evil corporation” is a gigantically high bar in the world we live in.

Aight, yeah, thank you! Gates isn't that much in the headlines for the things he does, I remember him owning/buying a ton of land too now?

The WTO adopted partial patent waivers in 2022, many nations allowed complete vaccine patent exemption, and very soon after the Bill Gates statement your article cites the Gates Foundation made a full reversal and endorsed it.

Then why does he have so much wealth? Donate more. Do more. Some isn't enough.

He donates as a form of investment to avoid paying taxes and to clean his image.

You still earn more than me & have a lavish life compared to me who lives in a 3rd world

Yes but they're hypocritical in nature. They elected another billionaire to lead

And as much as I hate to ally with a group that I see as mostly ingorant and foolish…

There's nothing to hate about it, sharing a view isn't allying. Political ideologies are about having consistent positions, not blindly opposing others. In fact, when you strip away all their nonsense delusions, plenty of them have the same material needs and interests as you so there is inevitably some common ground. Like you said elsewhere, we're on the same side of the class war, whether they realize it or not.