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In a world of raging financial markets and soaring wealth inequality, where it sometimes feels like billionaires are becoming a dime a dozen, Bill Gates stands out.
The Microsoft co-founder is not just another excessively rich tech mogul: he is the archetype of the computer nerd-turned-master of the universe, the forerunner of the generation of tech founders who now dominate the business world.
Nor is he just another megadonor with a saviour complex. The foundation he set up with his former wife, Melinda French Gates, has reshaped the philanthropic landscape, matching some big governments in its spending on global health and development. Nearly 250 of the world’s super-rich have signed the Giving Pledge that he championed along with Warren Buffett, promising to give most of their wealth to charity.
And then there is the Gates brain. At the peak of his company’s power, Gates’s considerable intellect, married to his will to dominate, shaped the fortunes of much of the tech industry. The same grey matter has since been applied to some of the most intractable issues of the day, and Gates the public intellectual has become a leading voice on issues from Covid-19 to climate change.
Is it fair to question a person’s motives when they have devoted so much of their time and huge wealth to doing good? And how can we feel sure their actions will be broadly beneficial when they operate beyond normal standards of accountability?
Justifying her new book on the Bill Gates effect, Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King, Anupreeta Das writes that a “large tear in Gates’s public image has forced us to reassess the man we knew.”
The tear in question started with Gates’s association with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Gates has performed his public mea culpas and said he believed Epstein could help with his charitable goals. But his slowness to admit the connection and continued failure to give full details of his meetings with Epstein have left a shadow.
Further sullying the crafted public image of Gates the benefactor were his 2021 divorce from Melinda and the ending of their philanthropic partnership. That came soon after a former Microsoft staffer told the company’s board she had had an affair with Gates, who subsequently stepped down as chair (though Microsoft said these events were unrelated.)
Das, a journalist at The New York Times, reports thoroughly on the Epstein case without shedding much new light. She also brings the Gates story up to date, detailing his wide-ranging personal investments and giving full room to Melinda and her own emergence as a philanthropic force to be reckoned with.
Das also reports on an apparent fading of the close personal friendship between Gates and Buffett, which she attributes to the famed investor’s unease about Gates’s personal behaviour and his view that the Gates Foundation — to which he had committed a large share of his own fortune — had grown slow and bureaucratic.
But it is the impact of Gates’s philanthropic work that remains the book’s main focus. Like Tim Schwab in The Bill Gates Problem, published last year, Das delves into a litany of complaints that critics have levelled against the Gates Foundation. These include claims that the foundation’s wealth has given it too much influence over the way important public issues are tackled; that Gates is driven by the search for quick technological “fixes” rather than trying to solve the deeper social causes of global poverty or ill health; and that the power of private foundations detracts from normal democratic accountability.
Schwab’s deeply reported and critical account sheds useful light on the foundation’s operations. He concludes that it is little more than “a political tool, tax break and PR machine for Bill Gates”. Chasing highly visible, self-aggrandising goals such as the elimination of polio and malaria has, he writes, been mainly about extending the influence of Gates himself. These are important questions, but Schwab’s highly polemical approach makes it hard to reach a clear view about the broader impact of Gates’s philanthropy.
Das reaches a more nuanced view. In India, Gates was criticised by human rights activists for his closeness to the government of Narendra Modi, and some of his foundation’s programs failed to have much impact. Distributing condoms to sex workers to tackle HIV only had limited results, while a telemedicine project was set back by shaky internet connections. But Das still credits the foundation’s work in India with going a long way to advancing the Modi government’s efforts to alleviate poverty.
At 68, meanwhile, there is no sign that Gates is slowing down or retreating from his self-appointed role as global seer and benefactor. For all his media exposure and the frequent book-length reassessments, it’s still hard to judge the long-term impact that Gates will have on the world. Like Schwab, Das has added to our understanding of the man, but they are unlikely to be the final word.
Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King: The Hidden Truth About Bill Gates and His Power to Shape Our World by Anupreeta Das Simon & Schuster $32/ £22, 336 pages
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