Tim Schwab in conversation with Chloe Blades from Unity Auckland

To write about the monolithic billionaire Bill Gates and all that’s wrong with him would take courage, I imagine. What were the biggest risks for you writing a critique of one of the world’s most powerful men?

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a very significant media presence, including donating hundreds of millions of dollars to support journalism, which helps explain why the news media tends to report on the Gates Foundation so uncritically. So, this is one risk for me----writing a book about Bill Gates’s philanthropic career that lands in a media landscape larded with Gates’s funding. As many peers told me, it’s not a great idea to criticize the media in the ways that I did because the success of a book depends in part on getting a robust media response---book reviews, profiles, etc. But if you’re honestly writing the Gates story, the news media has to be a very big character---because it has been such an important accomplice in normalizing and legitimizing Gates’s anti-democratic influence on the world stage. There are a lot of nuances. It’s true, for example, that the media---from the Times of London to the Times of India to Nature----very widely covered my book, and most of the coverage was favorable. But it’s also true that the biggest and best coverage happened outside the United States—which is odd because I’m an American writer reporting on one of the most prominent Americans. 

What was the catalyst for writing The Bill Gates Problem?

The job of journalism, as they teach it in U.S. universities, is to “afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted.” Who is more richly deserving of afflicting reporting than Bill Gates, one of the richest and most powerful people in the world? The problem is the news media treats him as a saint-- unimpeachable in his charitable efforts. That was one catalyst for the book, that I saw a need for a new narrative on Gates. What I’m doing with the book is interrogating the Gates Foundation as an unaccountable political actor. Through philanthropy, Bill Gates is traveling around the world, shaping government priorities and spending---on everything from public health to public education. He’s pressuring elected leaders to put billions of dollars---in public taxpayer funds---into supporting his favored charitable projects. This isn’t charity. This is power. Journalists should be scrutinizing and interrogating this power, not praising Gates as a heroic philanthropist.

You explain that by the end of 2000, “Bill ploughed $20 billion into the newly formed Gates Foundation” and was at the same time “the richest man in the world, with a $60 billion personal fortune.” During your research, was there much evidence to show that the super-rich have caused social problems in order to profit from it?

I don’t doubt that Bill Gates truly believes that his philanthropy is highly effective, that he is helping people. And I think it’s wrong to imagine that he has uniquely organized his philanthropy around financial self-enrichment. So, in some superficial sense, his motivations are good. The problem is his hubris. He’s trying to solve problems that aren’t his to solve. And he’s doing a horrendous job. His solutions haven’t worked, and he’s bullying other, better solutions off the table. As just one example, farmer organizations across the African continent are widely calling on the Gates Foundation to end its charitable crusade because it is doing so much harm, because it's standing in the way of locally devised solutions. Meanwhile, independent academics have showed that Gates’s interventions are moving African agriculture in the wrong direction. Gates said his work with farming would cut hunger in half, but hunger has actually increased. In the face of this criticism, resistance and evidence of failure, however, Gates has decided to double down, insisting that his plan will eventually work. It is stunning how wrong, how incorrigibly wrong, the foundation is in its efforts to drive social progress.

Furthermore, you make a strong case about wealth driving inequality. The $150 billion that Gates controls, “is a totem and a driver of inequality, not a solution to it” - could you explain a bit more about this?

My book is about Bill Gates, but it’s really a case study for the larger problem of extreme wealth—or as the title says, ‘the myth of the good billionaire.’ Does it make sense to allow an extremely small group of individuals to become so phenomenally wealthy while so many people on Earth can’t provide the basics for their families? Should we praise Gates for giving away tiny amounts of money that he doesn’t need---for projects that do nothing to change the structural inequalities all around us? Two decades into Gates’s philanthropic career, his personal wealth has nearly doubled, meaning he’s become phenomenally richer during his tenure as the world’s most generous philanthropist. And the world has become increasingly unequal by many metrics during this time. As billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg begin to transform their great wealth into philanthropic power, now is the time to interrogate and debate the institution of billionaire philanthropy and the problem of extreme wealth. And Bill Gates is a great place to have this debate

The Gates Foundation website says things like, “[o]ur goal is to urgently reach children, adolescents, and adults in lower-income countries with the vaccines they need to live a life free from vaccine-preventable diseases”, and “[t]o empower women and girls to take charge of their own reproductive health”. But you argue that the “top-down political maneuvering”, and the “sheer weight of the foundation’s donations… shattered whatever suspicions remained around Bill Gates’s intentions”. What do you think are their true motivations and intentions?

Gates has a classic case of main-character syndrome. He has a way of inserting himself into every storyline as the leader. He genuinely believes he’s one of the smartest and affective people on Earth. The world is a meritocracy, according to Gates, and no one has more merit than he does. As evidence, he can point to his business success at Microsoft and his massive fortune. Armed with this rationalization, Gates has decided he should be an expert and authority---on everything: the pandemic, family planning, agricultural development, climate change and on and on. And he uses philanthropy to buy a seat at the decision-making table. This is a fundamentally undemocratic model of power.

You cite many interesting articles, including one in the Scientific American titled “Bill Gates Should Stop Telling Africans What Kind of Agriculture Africans Need”. It seems his philanthropy isn’t dissimilar to the British and Americans invading Afghanistan, telling them how to live, and building infrastructure unsuitable to the people’s needs. Do you think these countries that the Gates Foundations are involved with would be better off without them?

The Gates Foundation is very much interested in world-making activities, if not aspects of nation-building. It actively partners with governments to re-organize public policy, from public education to public health. It’s totally inappropriate for a billionaire from Seattle to have this level of influence in foreign nations. And, again, we now have two decades of evidence to show that the foundation generally does not deliver on its promises. A great many critics today around the world are raising their voices to say that the Gates Foundation is doing far more harm than good, and I agree.

What would you say is ultimately the problem with Bill Gates?

Gates is a problem for democracy, or a signal of our failing democracy. He uses philanthropy the same way that billionaires use campaign contributions and lobbying: to buy political influence, to remake the world—how we feed, educate and medicate our families. The good news is, we have the power to challenge Gates’s anti-democratic power brokering. In many places around the world we’re seeing an increasingly mainstream political debate about whether billionaires should exist. And there are also a great many social and political movements afoot that are aggressively challenging the growing specter of oligarchy, which is essentially what Gates represents: the richest guy gets the loudest voice. The hero narrative around Gates is already changing, and it will continue to change in the years ahead. I hope that my book can help advance this debate and open up a larger political discussion around the danger that extreme wealth presents to democracy.