The bill gates problem, p.16
The Bill Gates Problem, page 16
After publishing her piece, Bertram told me she got feedback from some readers that she was “feeding conspiracy theories.”
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THE FIRST EDITION of a new newsletter from Politico called Global Pulse, published in late 2020, offered remarkable and rare clarity about a vastly underreported story in the Covid-19 pandemic response: the Gates Foundation seemed to be in charge. “America may not be leading in global health anymore, but an American is,” Politico reported. “Bill Gates is the architect of the global health infrastructure now at the forefront of the pandemic response.”
From this revelation, it should have been a small, easy step to raise some obvious Civics 101 questions. Why was the world’s then third-richest person, a software magnate with no medical training, serving as “the architect” of the response effort to the most pressing public health crisis in many generations?
Politico went in a different direction: “Everywhere you turn in this pandemic, the Gates Foundation is involved, which has fueled conspiracy theories amplified by anti-vaxxers that he caused the pandemic to vaccinate the world and get richer in the process or that he wants everyone in the world to be implanted with a microchip,” the outlet reported.
It then looked to the Gates Foundation itself to explain the crazy making. “Conspiracy theories thrive on the notion that hidden secret things are happening,” Mark Suzman, CEO of the Gates Foundation, explained. “And so one of the key things we do is to say we have no secrets, ask us questions and we will explain what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.”
Versions of this victim narrative played out hundreds or maybe thousands of times during the pandemic as journalists spilled volumes of ink describing how the Gates Foundation, despite all its best intentions and good deeds, was being maligned by irrational criticism and attacked with misinformation. The foundation leaned hard into this reporting, using it as an opportunity to espouse its commitment to transparency. Bill Gates took endless questions from journalists about the conspiracy theories—in one instance, condemning them as “evil” and “crazy.” The foundation also poured millions of dollars into charitable grants aimed at combating “misinformation” and “disinformation.” The effect was to cement Gates’s reputation as a champion of truth, reason, and transparency.
Some of the foundation’s fiercest defenders were found in the “fact-checking” verticals 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 developing Covid-19 vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s annual tax filings clearly showed hundreds of millions of dollars invested in companies working on the pandemic. That is, the foundation, while exercising significant decision-making power over the pandemic response, was positioned to benefit financially from the pandemic through its stock and bond investments, including in pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Gilead.
We can and should debate whether this is appropriate—but to have such a debate, we have to be able to agree on the basic facts. When journalists and fact-checkers make this impossible, when their “facts” steer us toward fiction, it means that these self-appointed truth seekers have become part and parcel of the very misinformation pathology they claim to be interrogating. It also highlights the almost cultlike status of Bill Gates during the pandemic, a leader whose adherents and followers zealously protected him from any scrutiny. The groupthink and herd mentality reached such a point during the Covid-19 crisis that any criticism of the foundation was apt to be branded as “conspiratorial” across news outlets and on social media.
After I discussed this phenomenon with writer Paris Marx on his podcast, Tech Won’t Save Us, he posted a link to our talk—only to have Twitter suspend his account for “Covid misinformation.” As fact-checkers and social media gatekeepers almost universally turned their focus in one direction, to defend and support Bill Gates, the Gates Foundation became the beneficiary of misinformation, not the victim.
It is true that unhinged conspiracy theories targeted the Gates Foundation during the pandemic—like the idea that Bill Gates had engineered the coronavirus—but one reason people are drawn to such ideas is that the foundation is so nontransparent and so undemocratic—and because the news media and the social media gatekeepers, instead of opening up a platform to interrogate Gates’s arrogation of power, have chosen to applaud and defend it.
This is not normal, and people know this is not normal. And the failures of the news media lead to public distrust and create a marketplace for grifters, demagogues, and con artists to propose ridiculous theories and alternative “facts.” The mainstream news media then take potshots at the stupidity of such theories. Lather, rinse, repeat—and what you end up with is two distinct piles of misinformed people: one group trading in absurd tales of Bill Gates implanting microchips in people and another one trading in equally far-fetched, equally dangerous mythologies about Gates’s noble, selfless leadership in the pandemic.
What the emergence of conspiracy theories around Bill Gates also shows us is how polarizing a figure he is. This raises important concerns about his expansive role as a self-appointed spokesperson, or expert, on topics like vaccines and climate change. The simple fact is Bill Gates doesn’t have expertise, training, or education in most of the topics where he asserts it. And, almost universally, he or his foundation has financial interests in the public policies he endorses. Gates is someone who often stands to gain financially—or his private foundation does—from the advice he gives. That fact alone makes him a terrible messenger on just about any subject.
For readers of this book concerned about vaccine hesitancy, are you not concerned that Bill Gates’s interminable efforts to play expert might actually have the effect of driving such hesitancy? In a moment of public crisis like a pandemic, should it be a software geek whose foundation has far-reaching financial ties to vaccine companies giving prime-time advice on public health?
We can’t blame Bill Gates as the sole driver of vaccine hesitancy, but he’s not helping the situation. When the Gates Foundation aggressively uses its vast wealth to buy influence over the news media, the scientific discourse, and political debates—very often in opaque ways—it is begging the wider world simply to speculate and theorize as to what its real ambitions are, why this mega-foundation is so deeply secretive, and why in the world we would ever allow such a malevolent model of private power to take hold in a democratic state.
The reason the Gates Foundation cannot, constitutionally, be transparent is that doing so would reveal just how much power it has and how many levers it is pulling. The real solution to our Bill Gates problem is not simply for his foundation to be more transparent, however. It’s for his foundation to lower its voice and unwind the unaccountable power structure it has built. Simply put, if Bill Gates wants to end the conspiracy theories surrounding his work, he should stop talking.
6
Lobbying
During my reporting for this book, a source sent me a document he had found years ago on an Amtrak train leaving Washington, DC. It was labeled as being Bill Gates’s personal schedule from March 26, 2015. None of the people named on the schedule whom I reached out to would confirm or deny the schedule’s authenticity, but the listed meetings line up with news reports of Gates’s time in DC that day. The itinerary gives us insight into a day in the life of Gates, whose calendar is fastidiously organized, with precisely timed “car transfers” as well as details about who will accompany him on “ride-alongs” between meetings.
March 26 started with an 8 a.m. wake-up call from Chris Cole, whose name matches that on a LinkedIn profile for Watermark Estate Management Services, the company that manages Gates’s work schedule. At 8:45 a.m., Gates’s “security advance” whisked him from the Four Seasons hotel, the luxury chain Gates partially owns, to Capitol Hill, where a meeting with Sen. Lindsey Graham was followed by testimony at a hearing by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs.
In his testimony, Gates talked about the importance of marshaling taxpayer dollars to support Gates’s effort to eradicate polio and Gates-led initiatives like Gavi. He also argued that the United States has a self-interest in expanding foreign-aid spending. “While the lives of people in poor countries will improve more than anyone else’s over the next decade and a half, that improvement will have very positive consequences for the people of the United States,” Gates told the committee. “Several countries that were once major aid recipients … have become U.S. allies and partners, as well as export markets for our farmers and manufacturers: Nigeria is the third-largest U.S. wheat market; Angola is the fourth-largest broiler-meat market; and Ghana ranks as one of the top 10 rice markets.” It was an odd take from Gates, who often claims his foundation’s focus is on helping African nations feed themselves. Here, on Capitol Hill, Gates read the room and offered a vision of Africa as a captive market for the U.S. economic empire: when Congress invests in Gates’s health-related philanthropic efforts, the U.S. economy will grow.
Actor Ben Affleck was also at the hearing to offer testimony, drawing laughter with his opening quip—“Thanks for having me follow the greatest and most important philanthropist in the history of the world.” In his testimony, Affleck echoed Gates: “This isn’t charity or aid in the traditional sense. It’s good business. With proper training and strategic investments, agriculture will become a driving force for Congo’s economy.” Affleck was there not just to add star power to the panel but also to promote his cause célèbre, a “social enterprise” he had founded called the Eastern Congo Initiative, which works with companies like Nespresso and Starbucks.
After the hearing, Gates’s day began in earnest. According to his agenda, he had a private meeting with Senator Graham “and freshman Senators” and then a series of one-on-one meetings with Senators David Perdue, Patty Murray, Patrick Leahy, Roy Blunt, and Rand Paul.
After Gates’s busy day on Capitol Hill, he went to the Gates Foundation’s DC office, where he had fifteen minutes of “down time and media briefing” before a forty-five-minute interview with Vox journalist Ezra Klein, who later published a long, flattering story about Gates.
Gates then dined at the Four Seasons—his reservation was under a fake surname, “Bell”—with Ron Klain, a former chief of staff to two vice presidents (Al Gore and Joe Biden). Klain later became President Joe Biden’s chief of staff.
By 9:00 that evening, Gates was off to the airport and on to other destinations. A busy day for a very important person.
This visit to Washington wasn’t particularly unique for Gates, who, over the years, seems to have had unfettered access to virtually every elite power broker in DC. “I had a meeting with Trump in December and the appointees like secretary of state, or defense, OMB, a lot of jobs that affect us, until those people are confirmed we won’t have meetings, but in the next month or two that opportunity will start,” Gates casually noted in a 2017 interview. “So we’ll engage, including myself personally, with all these key people just like we have in every administration.”
In 2022, Gates told the media about his expansive, yearslong campaign to advance federal climate legislation, as another example. “Almost everyone on the energy committee came over and spent a few hours with me over dinner,” he reported. Gates’s interest in the legislation could be seen in terms beyond saving the planet—he has invested two billion dollars of his personal wealth in climate and energy technologies that could benefit from federal spending programs.
The prevailing reporting about Gates’s political influence in Washington generally tends to describe his power rather than interrogate it, and it assumes that his access to Capitol Hill derives from his profile as a philanthropist. In reality, Gates’s political influence comes the old-fashioned way: through money.
Bill and Melinda French Gates have put well over ten million dollars of their personal wealth into campaign contributions and political contests, including supporting a wide range of candidates like Mike Pence, Barack Obama, Katie Porter, Marco Rubio, Cory Booker, Lindsey Graham, Andrew Cuomo, Mitch McConnell, Rob Portman, and Nancy Pelosi.
Gates’s financial influence can also be seen in its charitable giving to politically connected organizations, including the nearly $10 billion the Gates Foundation has donated to organizations based in the nation’s capital—three thousand charitable grants, including donations to a never-ending stream of advocates who help put Gates’s agenda in front of Congress and other political tastemakers. If we expand the geography slightly to the Beltway suburbs that comprise the DC metro area, Gates’s giving crests to $12 billion. That’s more than twice as much money as the foundation gives to the whole of Africa, a clear signal of where its real priorities lie.
The reason Washington is such a focus of the foundation is that the foundation’s charitable empire is so heavily funded by tax dollars, which Congress controls. Gates’s largest charitable projects are organized as public-private partnerships, where private philanthropies, private companies, and governments pool money (and supposedly leadership) to work on issues like vaccine distribution and agricultural development. Gates has given three billion dollars to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, for example, one of the foundation’s best-funded initiatives. Yet governments have put more than sixty billion dollars into the project. Similarly, the Gates Foundation has awarded around six billion dollars to Gavi, while government donors have pledged thirty-five billion.
Putting pressure on elected leaders to keep the money flowing is a crucial part of all the foundation’s work, essentially leaning on taxpayers to subsidize organizations that Gates has an outsize influence over. The foundation’s annual reports once delineated a line item in its accounts for “donor government relations”—as much as forty million dollars a year—but stopped reporting this in 2021.
“Foreign aid budgets [from wealthy nations] … are about 130 billion a year. So, in terms of the bulk of money that helps the poorest … [it] is government aid money,” Bill Gates noted in a 2013 speech. “And so our [the foundation’s] 4 billion a year, although it’s very big in the upstream—malaria vaccine, AIDS vaccine, diarrheal vaccines—when it comes to downstream delivery, we have to partner with these governments. And their tight budgets are making it so we have to go off and really make the case for this money that goes to other countries.”
In that speech, Gates boasted that he had helped raise $5.5 billion for polio, more than half of which came from governments—funding he said would lead to the eradication of the disease by 2018. He missed his target, and as we’ll examine later in the book, many experts describe the Gates-led eradication scheme as wrongheaded, if not a vanity project, arguing that this money could have helped far more people had it been used on other public health projects.
This gets to a core democratic question. An essential function of elected governments is deciding how to spend taxpayer dollars, making budgetary priorities through democratic decision-making. This is where monied interests can tilt the scales, using lobbying, campaign contributions and, yes, charity to push their priorities ahead of others. This money-in-politics influence peddling, which gives the richest private actors the loudest voice, is obviously undemocratic, if not anti-democratic. And it’s a game that Bill Gates plays expertly.
“Jetting in to Washington on Monday, Gates appeared with former President Bill Clinton at a public forum Tuesday morning and then went behind closed doors to speak to the Senate Republican luncheon,” Politico reported in 2013:
Throughout the day, there were face-to-face meetings with senior members of the Senate and House Appropriations committees important to Gates’s health and agriculture agendas. And before flying out Wednesday, his schedule included time with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a rising young Republican star whose support could prove pivotal.
“He’s a character,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio). “Not your typical corporate CEO who comes in pounding the table.”
It’s this side of Gates, the practical, unconventional Harvard dropout, that’s most appealing for lawmakers caught in their own dysfunction.
“I wish there were more like him around here,” said Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.). “He’s very results-oriented.”
“He is trying to get programs over the finish line that have stalled out,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “He is a guy with a real sense of detail. A great combination of a visionary who understands detail, and he is interesting to listen to because he can make a complicated issue understandable.”
When asked by Politico to weigh in on a food aid program Congress was debating, Gates dodged the question: “We are not a lobbying organization,” he said and then smiled. “But if you listen to our technical advice, you get a very positive feeling about this type of activity.”
Gates evaded the question because philanthropies, generally speaking, are not allowed to engage in lobbying. As he hinted, however, that doesn’t mean the foundation can’t make its voice heard. Politico didn’t report it, but the Gates Foundation has given $248 million to the ONE Campaign, whose sister organization, Data Action, later renamed One Action, has spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying, including on the Food Aid Reform Act that Politico had asked Gates about. A Gates Foundation employee even once sat on the board of directors for Data Action/One Action. Even if the foundation cannot always directly lobby Congress, it can count on its army of surrogates to make legislators see which way to vote.
