He’s not a CEO any more, but Bill Gates is on a mission to die a mere millionaire, and I think has already given away more than half his net worth.
Bill Gates’ net worth has grown substantially despite his philanthropy, rising from $126.8 billion in early 2023 to $156 billion in December 2024.
Regarding COVID-19 vaccines, Gates actively opposed patent waivers and influenced Oxford University to privatize its vaccine through AstraZeneca rather than keep it open-source. He pushed for maintaining intellectual property rights through COVAX, despite public funding supporting vaccine development.
Not a good guy by any metric.
Thats a good criticism but the CEO he put in charge of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation went against him and supported waiving the patents anyways, which Biden and the WTO went ahead and did regardless.
His argument against the TRIPS terms was that it wouldn’t actually increase production, that every facility capable of producing vaccines was doing so regardless of the patent’s costs especially given that they only had to worry about intellectual properties when importing to countries where the patent is held.
He was wrong, I give you that, I think there is no room to be penny pinching and arguing when even 1 more vaccine could have saved lives. However, that doesn’t even come close to offsetting the number of lives he has saved or improved by handing out vaccines and medicines for free across Africa. The vast majority of Gates’ opponents are generally not fond of Dark Skinned people.
Watching people totally fall for Gates’s incredibly shallow face value self image propaganda bullshit is wild to me. FUCK that guy, so hard. One of the biggest reasons we have enshittification today is this one man.
Yeah how dare he run a tax scheme by
*checks notes
Saving millions of people across all of Africa by providing free healthcare for treatable diseases and potential pandemics?
I’ve noticed that some people really don’t like Africans. I believe there’s even a word for such behaviour, don’t remember which one right now though…
My boss checks in on me occasionally with directness, and did so the other day:
“viva, how’s it going?”
“I want to fight Bill Gates.”
This is understood to mean, “windows is fucked. My computer is fucked. All of this massive, utterly brutal buttfucking inconvenience could have been avoided at some point, and now isn’t, because [our company] bought so hard into Microsoft’s “business solutions” that there’s no turning back, and because of the nuances of the problems you’ve asked me to solve, I am facing said brutal buttfucking inconvenience, and I’m mad about it.”
Apologies for detailing the conversation, but I have noticed the implementation and configuration of MS products (something MS has no control over) really impacts their usability. For example, I worked at a soulless corporation that managed to set up PBI and ADO so there was no live feed of data (and they only allowed for the web version of PBI, which reduces functionality substantially). They were also so far behind on Office versions that the employees didn’t know more than one person could update a file at a time. There are all sorts of very real reasons to dislike MS, but I do wonder how many people dislike them because of a stupid configuration.
incredibly shallow face value self image propaganda bullshit is wild to me.
He’s given away billions of dollars, and that’s face value to you? Besides, he hasn’t been in control at Microsoft for decades at this point.
Also I don’t understand how you can defend a man who convinced a bunch of people to not give away the COVID vaccines for free. This is not the actions of a humanitarian. It’s the actions of a monster.
We wouldn’t need him to make these donations if he actually paid his fucking taxes is the thing though. And it’s significantly less.
He was kind of a prick becoming a billionaire, so his is more of a redemption arc than a hero’s journey.
Bill Gates is a massive piece of shit. Don’t let all the propaganda he puts out there fool you. When you start looking closer at his so-called charity work it’s not nearly as pretty as you might think.
In camp “BG still has 4240000x times more money than me”.
Not to mention he executed the “trolley problem meme” by killing a million to save a million. Now, he did not literally kill people (unlike some other CEOs I’ve heard about), but he did fuck over a ton of people, all in the name of “Business” (which is PR/propaganda for “greed”).
Some of that propaganda is in the form of material help to people around the world. Like sure, he’s not great, no question. But if every other CEO funded global healthcare to the extent he did to whitewash their own problems, I wouldn’t complain. Sure his charity work is by no means ideal, but even the ugly charity he does actually winds up saving lives.
The question was “are there any CEOs we should save” and the answer is still “not Bill Gates” in this context.
Could you be a little bit more specific with your criticisms of his charity?
He basically gave $54BN to the “Gates and Melinda Charity”.
Guess who controls the charity?
Guess if the “Charity” pays taxes?
It’s crazy how fast people simp for billionaires, old evil shitty hated-by-all billionaires too, just because they spend some publicities around.
I personally prefer all billionaires follow his path.
I’ve looked at his charities too over the last few years and didn’t see anything that was questionable.
Anything you want to call out?
Bill Gates fucked the public school systems pretty hard.
Something I think is extremely fucked up in general is that if you have millions to throw at a pet cause, you will disproportionately benefit your cause over other causes in a non-democratic manner. That means that every individual and organization involved in fields related to your pet projects are incentivized to focus on your pet projects over others. Because you have so much money, you basically individually shape public policy.
Look at the WHO (source):
…over 80 per cent of WHO’s funding relies on “voluntary contributions,” meaning any amount of money given freely by donors, whether member states, NGOs, philanthropic organisations or other private entities.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alone is responsible for over 88 per cent of the total amount donated by philanthropic foundations to the WHO. Other contributors include the Bloomberg Family Foundation (3.5 per cent), the Wellcome Trust (1.1 per cent) and the Rockefeller Foundation (0.8 per cent).
So yeah, it’s great that they donate so much… but that also means they can stop donating… so they have control.