The bill gates problem, p.9
The Bill Gates Problem, page 9
As these and other allegations, spanning decades, came into public view, the public began to take a hard look at Microsoft itself. Hundreds of complaints of discrimination and harassment rolled in to Microsoft during Gates’s leadership at the company (not all directed at Bill Gates), and Gates stepped down from the board of directors in 2020 as Microsoft probed misconduct allegations against him. (Gates denies stepping down because of any probe.)
In 2021, Natasha Lamb, managing partner of Arjuna Capital, spearheaded a successful shareholder resolution to force Microsoft to investigate the allegations of misconduct against Gates and make its findings public. “The case of Bill Gates is a classic example of money and power. Clearly, hitting on his employees was his move. That’s how he met his wife. It’s clear that kind of behavior continued,” Lamb noted. “This leaves an open question as to how the board and leadership is addressing sexual harassment within the company. There was some change following MeToo in how the company was dealing with these issues internally. But clearly, you had this signal of bad behavior from the top, which sets the culture.” The Gates Foundation, because it has no shareholders, is not subject to the same kinds of resolutions.
Throughout the allegations, Bill Gates has consistently denied that he mistreated anyone or behaved inappropriately toward women. Yet, to Natasha Lamb’s point, the allegations against him weren’t exactly news. Despite his public persona as a computer nerd or a soft-spoken philanthropist, Gates has always been a hard-driving alpha male. At Microsoft, he constantly tested the mettle of his subordinates with screaming matches, racked up speeding tickets driving his Porsche recklessly, and had long (allegedly) viewed the workplace as his sexual playground. Most of us, for example, have lost track of the fact that Melinda French Gates was once Gates’s subordinate at Microsoft. And she wasn’t the only employee with whom Gates reportedly had a relationship. In the early 1990s, the news media reported his having an “on-again, off-again romance with a product manager in Microsoft’s marketing division” and several dates with a “low-level employee in Microsoft’s information center.”
Under Gates’s leadership, Microsoft also developed a corporate reputation for questionable conduct toward women. According to the book Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire, in the company’s earliest days, women were paid hourly wages—unlike men, who were salaried. When the women in the office asked for back pay for all the overtime hours Gates had pushed them to work, he refused. They filed a complaint with the state, prompting Gates to throw a tantrum; he screamed so violently that his face turned purple. And the company, allegedly, didn’t hire its first female executives until it had to—to win a government contract that had affirmative action provisions requiring gender representation in the workforce. According to an anonymous Microsoft source quoted in Hard Drive, “They would say, ‘Well, let’s hire two women because we pay them half as much as we will have to pay a man, and we can give them all this other “crap” work to do because they are women.’ That’s directly out of Bill’s mouth.” The source added, “I thought it was surprising that he wasn’t more sensitive to the issue.”
In 2021, Maria Klawe went public about her service on Microsoft’s board, between 2009 and 2015, saying Bill Gates was consistently hostile toward any suggestion of diversity, including the idea of opening up the company to women: “‘Are you trying to effing destroy the company?’” she recounts him asking her. “They had launched a press release saying how I would help them bring more women … to help diversify Microsoft,” Klawe told me. “And then when one actually suggested doing something [on the board], it was like absolutely zero openness from Bill.”
Klawe sees the same contradictions in Gates’s leadership at the Gates Foundation, describing him as “living a double life”: “There’s the person he projects as the leader he wants to be seen as, helping make the world a better place. And then in his day-to-day interactions, he treats women without respect.” Klawe has said that “the work that the Gates Foundation has done in supporting poor women in Africa and many other parts of the world, it’s obvious to me that that’s not a priority for him, but he’s willing to be videotaped saying it’s a priority for him.”
Misconduct allegations followed Gates into his philanthropic work. The New York Times reported an allegation that Gates had made an unwanted advance to a subordinate at the foundation who was uncomfortable with his overture. “Six current and former employees of Microsoft, the foundation and the firm that manages the Gates’s fortune said those incidents, and others more recently, at times created an uncomfortable workplace environment,” the Times reported. “Mr. Gates was known for making clumsy approaches to women in and out of the office. His behavior fueled widespread chatter among employees about his personal life.” Gates denied the allegations of misconduct. The foundation publicly stated that it had never received any complaints or allegations against Bill Gates, so it had no reason to investigate him for misconduct—even as the news media very widely profiled the problem.
One former Gates Foundation employee told me a top foundation official had once asked that an attractive female staff member not attend meetings with Bill Gates because he would be distracted. “The place had a culture of excusing his behavior, I would say,” the source said.
Reports also emerged that Gates’s money manager, Michael Larson, who oversees both the foundation’s endowment and most of Bill Gates’s personal fortune, faced years of allegations of workplace misconduct, including inappropriate behavior toward women. Larson consistently denied or downplayed the allegations. After the major exposé, Larson kept his position managing the foundation’s endowment.
The far-ranging allegations of sexism and sexual misconduct surrounding Bill Gates force us to reexamine his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. While the leading explanations for his connection to Epstein are that it was innocently directed at philanthropy or self-servingly organized around a lobbying campaign to win a Nobel Prize, we also have to question other possibilities—that the relationship could have had something to do with Epstein’s principal activities in life: sexual gratification and the exercise of power.
There’s never been any direct allegation against Gates in this regard, and Gates, in his original explanation, went so far as to stress that his meetings with Epstein were with men, not women. Yet media reports show that Epstein surrounded himself with young, attractive women at these meetings with Gates. So, were women one attraction that drew Gates to Epstein?
Former victims of Epstein have said that he had pin-size cameras hidden all over his New York City mansion, the allegation being that Epstein’s lifestyle of wealth and impunity was built on blackmail. He invited powerful men into his sexual pyramid scheme and collected compromising videos of them. (For what it’s worth, a police raid of his Palm Beach mansion in 2005 found hidden cameras in two locations.)
Adam Davidson, cofounder of the NPR show Planet Money and a contributing writer to the New Yorker, looked deeply into these questions while producing the podcast Broken: Seeking Justice. On social media, Davidson reported that he had learned many things about Epstein during the course of his reporting that he couldn’t publish, either because it could hurt one of Epstein’s victims or draw a lawsuit from a rich and powerful man. He tweeted a thread on Twitter that went viral, arguing that we shouldn’t give Epstein’s cohorts, including Bill Gates, any benefit of the doubt.
If someone spent any amount of time with Jeffrey Epstein, at a minimum they saw him physically touching girls in provocative ways and rather gleefully showing off his ability to do so. More than likely, they were offered sex with whatever their preference was (Epstein did employ, abuse, and traffic women who weren’t underage).… They knew. Yes, of course, many participated. But ALL knew … these men should not be invited into polite society. They should not be celebrated on TV shows as experts on Covid or international relations or whatever.
In an interview, Davidson told me that Bill Gates deserves special scrutiny because, unlike many of the other men who made their way into Epstein’s inner circle, Gates consorted with Epstein after his 2008 conviction, after he was a known felon. And, Davidson says, Gates’s explanations for his relationship with Epstein are particularly implausible. As a fairly well-known and easily google-able convicted sex offender, Epstein would have been far more of a liability to Gates than an asset. Why in the world would Bill Gates have gotten so close to him for so long?
While revelations of Gates’s relationship with Epstein, alongside allegations of misconduct with female subordinates, did somewhat diminish Gates’s moral authority on the global stage, he remains very much welcome in polite society—and, presumably, will continue to as long as his checkbook remains open. The real irony is that the Gates Foundation has become one of the world’s leading philanthropic funders of gender equity and women’s empowerment. This giving could be seen as papering over the misconduct allegations that hound the foundation. And recipients of this money could be seen as laundering Bill Gates’s reputation.
Philanthropic giving was also one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most important accomplices and enablers. Davidson says Epstein’s vast, decades-long grooming operation would not have been possible without his charitable giving. “One thing that philanthropy sells is a product called reputation management,” Davidson notes. “It was part of the seduction. When you talk to the victims, they reference that [Epstein] was friends with all these powerful people. When you walk in [his mansion], there are photos of all these famous, powerful people. He has this connection to Harvard [through philanthropy]. He has this connection to MIT.… These women said part of the reason they didn’t speak out against him was because he seems to know everyone. He seemed to be part of the powerful elite.”
This same model of wealth, power, and impunity is also undeniably part and parcel of the cult of Gates. The endless PR broadcasting his good deeds and his big donations has helped drown out the allegations he has faced, or persuaded us to give him the benefit of the doubt. At the same time, an irresistible devil’s bargain asks us to suspend moral judgment under the rationalization that a greater good may be served by his generous philanthropy—up to and including using the Gates Foundation’s money to clean up the problems the foundation might itself be enabling or normalizing.
After a bruising news cycle in 2021, Bill and Melinda French Gates together announced that they were donating $15 billion to charity—that is, to their own private foundation—the largest sum they had donated by far since the massive donations they made at the height of their previous major PR crisis, the Microsoft antitrust trials. The Washington Post and other outlets rushed to report that the Gateses were the world’s most generous givers in 2021. The foundation also appears to have elevated its work to “empower women and girls,” reporting a billion dollars in charitable grants on this project. This includes a $500,000 donation to the Clooney Foundation for Justice, founded by actor George Clooney and his spouse, Amal Clooney, a human rights lawyer. The money supported the launch of an initiative called Waging Justice for Women. A quote from Amal Clooney notes on the group’s website, “We can combat the injustice that women face by ensuring that unfair laws are overturned and that those who abuse women are held to account.”
Will this noble fight for justice probe the misconduct allegations that surround their benefactor? What about the 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 a partner in the fight for accountability and justice—or should it be the target of the investigation? At what point does the world decide that the ends do not justify the means? The Clooney Foundation did not respond to multiple press inquiries.
To Adam Davidson’s point, reputation management, undeniably, is a key function of philanthropy for men like Bill Gates. But there’s more to the story than just reputation. When we embrace and applaud the Gates Foundation’s philanthropic giving, we’re doing more than burnishing Bill Gates’s image. We’re also handing over unaccountable power. If charity is a product too, there has to be a point at which we stop buying what Bill Gates is selling.
3
Taxes
Melinda French Gates’s 2019 autobiography, The Moment of Lift, was an automatic bestseller, but it wasn’t a critical hit. An NPR review—published online but not broadcast over the radio—called the book “more of a whisper than a call to action,” describing it as “long on heartwarming anecdotes, short on argument.” A week later, however, NPR broadcast a much higher-profile puff-piece interview with Melinda Gates on its Goats and Soda program, which is financially supported by the Gates Foundation.
We saw a similar flip-flop in the medical journal The Lancet, whose review of The Moment of Lift began with a damning critique and ended with ring-kissing conciliation. After examining the disconnect between Melinda French Gates’s rhetoric on gender equity and the dearth of female leaders at the Gates Foundation, the journal landed on an odd non sequitur: “Gates’s writing reveals her to be an exceptional person. She could have spent the family wealth on yachts, luxury holidays, and designer bags, but instead she has chosen to focus her career on improving global health. She comes across as someone who is thoughtful, a dedicated mother, and, overall, a compassionate person driven by faith, love, and connection.”
What these book reviews show is how difficult it is to criticize the Gates Foundation without sandwiching that criticism between high praise that is often rooted in dangerous mythologies. Are we really to believe, for example, that Melinda French Gates doesn’t go on luxury holidays or have designer bags? That she is sacrificing any personal indulgences through her philanthropic giving?
The Gates family spends truly obscene sums of money on themselves and lives categorically different lives from the rest of us. They have mansions, plural, filled with expensive things like original works by Leonardo da Vinci and Winslow Homer alongside expensive rare sports cars. The Gateses travel by private jet, even as this deeply pollutive activity stands at odds with Bill Gates’s claimed leadership on climate change. Instead of owning a yacht, they prefer to rent one—the typical price is several million dollars a week. CNBC reports that the Gates family owns a private island in Belize, while the New York Times reports that Bill Gates rents out Frégate Island in the Seychelles by the week.
The Gates family also has an army of staff at their fingertips, ranging from private security to private schedulers. They spare no expense with their children, sending them to the most elite private schools. When the Gateses’ son enrolled at the University of Chicago, he doesn’t appear to have spent his first year in a cramped dorm room with a total stranger, as most American students do. Local news outlets reported that Bill Gates bought a $1.25 million house just off campus—boasting “3,000 square feet with four and a half bedrooms, sprawling deck space, a kitchen with quartz counter-tops, and built-in Viking appliances.” Likewise, the Gates family bought their eldest daughter not just a horse, but a world-class horse-riding facility near San Diego, whose Dutch Olympiad “equestrian trainer,” Harrie Smolders, is “formerly the top-ranked show jumper in the world,” according to the website of Evergate Stables. (Gates also reportedly bought and sold a $26 million equestrian facility in Wellington, Florida.)
Also like other billionaires, the Gates family appears to take an ethically agnostic approach to financial investments, with little concern over harm to human health or well-being, including that of the poor people they claim to help. Though critical journalism of the foundation is rare, journalists have several times reported on the Gates Foundation’s $54 billion endowment having investments in private prisons, weapons manufacturers, tobacco, fossil fuels, and even in chocolate and cocoa companies linked to child slavery. The investment income from this dirty money, the logic goes, can save lives through philanthropy.
The Gateses not only live like any other billionaire family, but they live among other billionaires, eagerly cloistering themselves off with other global elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos or the Sun Valley Conference in Idaho, where the superrich clap each other on the back and make business deals.
So, yes, Melinda French Gates is an “exceptional person”—an exceptionally rich person. Just because the Gateses and their private foundation are constantly reminding us of their generosity, of how they are going to give away all their money instead of spoiling themselves or their children, this does not make it true. It’s a point that Melinda French Gates herself quietly began to acknowledge following her divorce—a legal transaction that made her a billionaire many times over in her own right. (As I write this in 2022, Bloomberg pegs her net worth at around $11 billion; Forbes puts it at closer to $7 billion.)
“It’s important to acknowledge that giving away money your family will never need is not an especially noble act,” Melinda French Gates wrote in an essay announcing her “Giving Pledge” to donate most of her wealth to charity. “There’s no question in my mind that the real standard for generosity is set by the people who give even when it means going without.”
There’s honesty to this, but also false modesty. Melinda French Gates and her ex-husband have little compunction about wearing the noble crown, aggressively using their wealth to make their voice heard above others while gamely accepting high-profile awards and endless media adulation for their charitable acts. And they’ve never been particularly honest about the benefits they personally receive from their charitable giving—not just the political influence, the public relations, and the goodwill but also the billions of dollars in tax savings.
