Summary:
⚈ Goals include ending preventable deaths, curing diseases, and reducing poverty
⚈ Critics question billionaire philanthropy’s motives and Gates’ past business tactics
One way Bill Gates has worked to prevent getting hit with a second pie in the face in the last three decades has been through his massive charity donations. As part of the process, he pledged that his net worth would drop by a massive 99% in the next twenty years.
The famous billionaire and founder of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) published a plan for his Gates Foundation to cease operations by 2045 as it fulfils its charitable mission.
While it is always difficult to quantify exactly the amount of money ultra-high-net-worth individuals have due to it being intrinsically tied to stock and bond market fluctuations, Gates’ net worth is estimated at $113 billion at press time on May 8, 2025.
Under the circumstances and assuming things remain generally level, his wealth is set to drop to $1.1 billion, and his foundation is set to give $112 billion.
Unfortunately for Gates, such a setup ensures that he will die disgraced, judging by an Andrew Carnegie quote he has cited as inspiration in the accompanying article:
The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.
Bill Gates’ 20-year plan
In the accompanying article, published on the Gates Foundation website and shared via the social media platform X, the billionaire also outlined the goals of the coming 20 years of charity.
According to the text, finding cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, as well as vaccines for many other maladies with the explicit goal of ensuring that ‘no mom, child, or baby dies of a preventable cause,’ and that ‘the next generation grows up in a world without deadly infectious diseases.’
As the third major goal for the foundation’s last twenty years, Gates identified lifting ‘hundreds of millions of people’ from poverty and ‘putting more countries on a path to prosperity,’ though he also acknowledged that the ambitious and admirable plans require cooperation from governments worldwide.
Interestingly, though the announcement has the air of a final decision, the billionaire left an interesting caveat in the text when discussing the upcoming Microsoft annual employee meeting when he stated:
Although it’s been many years since I left Microsoft, I am still a CEO at heart, and I don’t make any decisions about my money without considering the impact.
The dubious generosity of billionaires
As generous as many billionaires and millionaires have been since Carnegie introduced the notion of philanthropy, their work has often drawn criticism.
A poster child for why many are doubtful about the good intentions of wealthy individuals when giving away their wealth has been an Elon Musk tweet in which he promised to end world hunger if someone came forth with a plan to achieve the goal for less than $6 billion.
When a UN team presented such a plan, Musk simply ignored it, and famine remains a major issue four years later.
Some of the most ardent critics of the system and of billionaire philanthropy have, thus, been pointing out that the world throws away a significant proportion of the food it produces and that companies operating in the industry depend on artificial scarcity for profit.
The concern turned into a striking image as police stood watch over trash cans filled with food in certain parts of the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Decades of Bill Gates controversy mar the Foundation’s last roadmap
Gates himself has been criticised for allegedly using his charitable foundation to promote and whitewash businesses and avenues of innovation that the billionaire has invested in, or at least to help diminish his taxes.
Some have alleged that Microsoft’s founder has used media platforms such as the popular YouTube channel Kurzgesagt to entice people to worry less about unfolding catastrophes like climate change. However, the company has denied any undue billionaire influence.
Still, it is a strategy that has been employed in the past, such as when Standard Oil utilized Robert Flaherty, a pioneer of documentary cinema, to encourage people not to think about oil company devastation in Louisiana, as described by Erik Barnouw in his book Documentary.
Lastly, though the good work the Gates Foundation has done over the years cannot be discounted, it is always worth remembering that the billionaire was greeted with that pie at the end of the previous century in part due to being a cutthroat businessman who used Microsoft’s financial muscle to crush competing startups.
Featured image via Shutterstock
