Opinion | Why Did We Think Bill and Melinda Gates Could Fix the World? (original) (raw)
Opinion|Why Billionaires Like Bill Gates Can’t Fix the Problems They Helped Create
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/opinion/bill-melinda-gates-foundation.html
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Guest Essay
Why Billionaires Like Bill Gates Can’t Fix the Problems They Helped Create
May 25, 2021
Credit...Illustration by Nicholas Konrad/The New York Times; photograph by Nipitpon Singad / EyeEm via Getty Images
Linsey McGoey
Dr. McGoey is a professor of sociology and director of the Center for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation at the University of Essex. She is the author of “No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy.”
This essay has been updated to include a response from the University of Oxford.
Bill Gates hasn’t changed. His public image has. Mr. Gates’s personal behavior and his troubling comanagement of the Gates Foundation are being reported more openly. The question is why it took so long.
For years, the Gates Foundation has been steered by an unusually small board of trustees, made up of Bill, his estranged wife, Melinda, and the billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
The foundation was created in 2000, merging two charitable organizations that were established in 1994, the year Bill and Melinda married. The size of the foundation increased significantly in 2006, when Mr. Buffett announced he would give most of his Berkshire Hathaway fortune to the organization, saying that he trusted Bill and Melinda’s expertise to use the money for good.
A paradox emerged. The larger the foundation became, the less anyone seemed willing to ask tough questions about its secretive management structure or its penchant for giving money to lucrative pharmaceutical and credit card companies such as Mastercard, despite the fact that giving away billions to wealthy corporations set an unusual and troubling precedent in the philanthropic sector.
I first reported this pattern of showering money on private corporations while researching my 2015 book, “No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy.” The main argument of the book was that billionaires who make their fortunes through corporate practices that undercut workers and deepen inequality — like corporate tax avoidance, insufficient sick pay and the immoral gap in pay between executives and low-paid workers — are not the solution to problems they generate.
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