The history of the world is heavy with tales of epidemics, disease, and death. Terrifying plagues, pestilences, and poxes have felled populations through the centuries. Fevers and humors, outbreaks and contagions have confounded generations of medical experts. But the history of virulent disease is also the story of human ingenuity. In May 1796, the British physician Edward Jenner inoculated a healthy eight-year-old boy with cowpox, a milder cousin of smallpox, the deadly virus. Two months later, after the boy had recovered, Jenner introduced matter from a smallpox lesion into him, and found that the boy did not develop the disease.1 He named the process “vaccination,” after “vacca,” the Latin name for a cow, and in doing so, set humanity on the long course to modern vaccines.
Today, vaccines are a proven method of protecting against a host of illnesses. In many parts of the world, routine immunizations protect children against diseases such as polio, chickenpox, mumps, measles, tetanus, malaria, and diphtheria. On its website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists fourteen such diseases under the title “Diseases You Almost Forgot About (Thanks to Vaccines).” Yet, viruses by their very nature are a step ahead of the cure. Quick to figure out vulnerabilities in the human body, a virus can propel itself from person to person on little more than a gust of exhaled air or a casual touch, mutating even as it spreads and sickens. Globalization is a virus’s delight, making it easy to hitch a ride from country to country on the ever-thickening flows of trade, travel, and commerce.
Although public health professionals have long been concerned about pandemics, it is hard to sound the alarm on a hypothetical premise. Inevitably, the real work begins only when a deadly virus exits its stealth mode. That’s exactly what happened on January 30, 2020, when the WHO declared a global health emergency. The novel coronavirus had been first detected in Wuhan, China, one month earlier. Within two weeks, it reared its head in Thailand, followed by Japan. By the third week, the first case was reported in the United States, and soon after, the virus began popping up around the world. Less than a month after the WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic in mid-March 2020, sending countries into lockdown mode, there were more than one million confirmed cases of the illness in April—a more than tenfold increase. In those first confusing months, the WHO launched a global campaign to find vaccines against the virus and develop diagnostic tests and therapeutic treatments. It urged its 193 member states and private donors to fund protective equipment for frontline health workers and held meetings with Silicon Valley companies to fight misinformation about the virus. It also created a strategy to develop vaccines in partnership with scientists and researchers, and to focus on treatments for those who had contracted the disease. Its donors pledged $675 million. The WHO’s role in orchestrating a global response to the pandemic was unsurprising. Founded in 1948 as a unit of the United Nations, the organization has been the primary agency in charge of global public health since the end of the Second World War. According to the United Nations, the WHO is “responsible for providing leadership on global health matters, shaping the health research agenda, setting norms and standards, articulating evidence-based policy options, providing technical support to countries and monitoring and assessing health trends.”
What was far more surprising, amid all the chaos and fear, was the presence of a single, high-profile actor: the Gates Foundation. In the decades since its inception, the foundation had become one of the top three donors to the WHO, along with the United States and Germany. It thrust itself into the global pandemic response, establishing itself as an authority alongside the WHO and other government agencies. Foundation experts worked closely with government officials to determine the best policy responses and identify the best vaccine candidates. Even the decision to use testing swabs that only required circling inside the nostril—making at-home diagnostic tests less uncomfortable and easier to use—was taken with the input of Gates Foundation researchers. Gates began to use his bullhorn to advocate for Covid-19 vaccines, often speaking alongside Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who became the most trusted face of the U.S. response. Gates held discussions with global leaders like Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel by videoconference. On social media and in interviews, he dwelled on the most promising vaccine candidates, weighed in on policy, laid out the best- and worst-case scenarios. The technology billionaire was no medical expert, but he had enough of an understanding of the vaccine science and enough star power that his opinion appeared to be accepted as fully as those of many professional scientists, especially with the world awash in uncertainty and fear, and thirsty for information. Although he was careful to stay out of political debates, Gates became an unusually vocal critic of then president Donald J. Trump’s approach to the pandemic and his administration’s initial unwillingness to embrace scientifically established methods for testing and setting up a system of disease surveillance. His sense of urgency about the pandemic and frustration with Trump administration officials was palpable; as someone accustomed to having presidents and top public officials take his counsel, his disbelief made him unusually vituperative. He told the medical news site Stat that the Trump administration was appointing people unqualified to run the pandemic response just because they agreed with the “crackpot theories.”2
As of 2023, the foundation had committed more than $2 billion to various Covid-19 response efforts. It directed funds to implement testing and improve health infrastructure in some parts of the world and to conduct research into new treatments and vaccines, and it extended loans to support the development of vaccines in poor and middle-income countries. It guaranteed Abbott Laboratories, the giant pharmaceutical company, and SD Biosensor, a maker of diagnostic tests, that there would be $100 million worth of demand for low-cost rapid antigen tests in developing countries. It has struck similar deals with other companies to accelerate the production of vaccines. Among the other large philanthropic outfits, the Rockefeller Foundation stands out for its $1 billion commitment to the pandemic recovery, announced in October 2020, but those commitments were made with far less fanfare. The Gates Foundation’s singular role in the pandemic response may have surprised some in the wider world, but public health experts, policymakers, and economists in the field of global development had long been aware of its heft in the world of vaccines and the quiet, careful ways in which it had deployed its dollars to build a tightly controlled network.
Vaccines are close to Gates’s heart. They are scientific breakthroughs with measurable impacts, a combination that spoke to his rational mind: The more vaccines were developed and delivered, the more lives could be saved. “Vaccines work,” is a mantra he has repeated often. In the 1990s, the billionaire had been jolted awake by the plight of the world’s poorest, witnessing firsthand how people died of easily preventable diseases because their governments couldn’t afford enough vaccines. At the same time, big drug companies had little financial incentive to pursue vaccine research for diseases that had been eradicated from the developed world. In that unmet need, Gates saw a role for his dollars. In 2000, soon after it launched, the Gates Foundation partnered with the WHO, UNICEF, and the World Bank to create the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization. The alliance, known as GAVI, provides purchase guarantees to drug makers to encourage them to manufacture vaccines at a lower cost so that poorer nations can buy them. The alliance, which has received more than $4 billion from the Gates Foundation, built up enough market power that it could negotiate prices with big drug makers like Pfizer, Sanofi, and others, a strategy that has led it to immunize more than half of the world’s children in the past two decades. GAVI also funds institutions to accelerate vaccine research. More than a decade ago, the alliance and the Gates Foundation also muscled their way into the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which was created in 1988 by the WHO, UNICEF, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Rotary International, a community service organization. The Gates Foundation is also the primary partner of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI. Funded by the governments of several countries, including the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Ethiopia, as well as the Wellcome Trust, a U.K.-based healthcare philanthropy, CEPI makes grants to speed up development of vaccines during pandemics and outbreaks. In 2010, the Gates Foundation launched the “decade of vaccines” in partnership with governmental and multilateral organizations including the WHO. Its goal was to spur research and delivery of vaccines to the world’s poorest countries, and to that end, it pledged $10 billion.
The foundation is the largest private donor to an international organization called the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. The fund was born in 2002 under the auspices of the United Nations. As of 2022, the Gates Foundation had committed $3.6 billion to the fund’s efforts to fight those diseases in more than 100 countries. It is an ally of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary U.S. agency responsible for medical and public health research. The two entities have collaborated on several different projects; together, they fund 54 percent of global research and development into diseases prevalent in poorer countries. For more than a decade, Gates had been a regular speaker and guest at NIH events, discussing the zika virus, tuberculosis, and other topics of public health. During the pandemic, that network of alliances funded and nurtured by the Gates Foundation over the years gave it substantial influence in shaping the direction of vaccine research and delivery to low-income countries. The Gates-backed vaccine alliance GAVI jointly led another vaccine alliance called COVAX, which aimed to pool together demand for Covid-19 vaccines. The other co-leads were CEPI and WHO, along with UNICEF as the delivery partner. An investigation by Politico and Welt published in September 2022 found that GAVI, CEPI, the Gates Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust together have spent nearly $10 billion on the global Covid response since 2020.3
The COVAX partnership spearheaded the global Covid vaccination effort. By stepping in and negotiating pricing with individual pharmaceutical companies and guaranteeing them payments using donor funds—what is called “advance market commitment”—it created collective purchasing power and procured more than one billion doses for people in poor countries. Countries that committed to buying vaccines from COVAX’s facility got them at a discounted rate, while those who opted for the “optional purchase” agreement paid a higher rate. Still, supply bottlenecks and other disruptions during the pandemic meant that vaccines didn’t reach residents of poor countries swiftly. That led to calls from many public health experts to waive patent protections on the vaccines so that they could be manufactured locally by generic drug makers. But pharmaceutical companies were reluctant to give away their intellectual property for free, and COVAX agreed, saying that patent protection was critical for innovation, and that vaccine manufacture was a complicated process that local drug makers might struggle with.
As a firm believer in preserving intellectual property rights, Gates appeared to have his fingerprints all over the discussion. Rather than set aside his convictions in the face of a global health emergency, Gates used his foundation’s power and influence to buy vaccines from the companies and deliver them to developing countries, acting as an intermediary to solve a problem. Critics accused him of “vaccine colonialism.”4 Eventually he agreed to a temporary waiver on IP for Covid vaccines. The foundation also played a big role in convincing Oxford University to sell the vaccine it had developed, with funding from the British government, to AstraZeneca rather than share the science with developing countries for free so that they could manufacture it locally. Later, French Gates explained the reasoning behind it. Oxford had the science but not the skill to bring a vaccine to market, which is why they encouraged the university to partner with the drug maker.5
The WHO has a metric to calculate the years of life lost due to premature deaths and disabilities around the world because of the prevalence of certain illnesses within a population. Known as disability-adjusted life years, or DALYs, they are a helpful measure of the overall global burden of disease. One DALY is equivalent to one year of lost health, according to the WHO. Those numbers spoke to Gates in a way that personal experiences and reports could not, because they showed numerically how a child born in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh had a far lower chance of survival than a child born in the United States. Trevor Neilson, the early Gates Foundation employee, recalled just how disturbed Gates was by the DALYs. “That is fucking insane,” Gates would tell Neilson. “That’s unfair.” With his logical approach, Gates couldn’t get past the irrationality of the “ovarian lottery,” a term his close friend Warren Buffett coined to describe the divergent fortunes of children based on where they were born. “In Bill’s brain, it made no sense to him, so there was this very quiet outrage.”
Science and math have always been Gates’s way of connecting with the world. He found comfort in the incontrovertible nature of facts. Numbers told the story every time. The moral compass that guided his philanthropy was underpinned by a faith in metrics, datasets, and evidence. Much as a cartographer puts a surveyor’s data to work to build a map, Gates digested mountains of available data to understand the features of the global health landscape—the lush mountains of the rich Western world where healthcare was abundant, and the parched deserts of the poor where it was not. These neglected regions were the targets—or in capitalism speak, potential markets—for his philanthropy. In the crevasses between government ineptitude and corporate cupidity, Gates found the unmet demand that his billions could help fill. The “profit motive” was social good, and the return on invested dollars, in this case, would be measured in terms of lives saved and problems solved in the poorest countries. Gates called his approach “catalytic philanthropy,” which simply meant finding causes where his money had the biggest potential to accelerate change, whether by funding innovative technology or making grants to nonprofits.6 In a 2013 essay for Wired, Gates wrote that capitalism “is the best system ever devised to make self-interest the wider interest.”7 Or as the former journalist and Canadian politician Chrystia Freeland wrote in Plutocrats, her 2012 book about the rise of the new global super-rich, Gates became “an evangelist for the idea that capitalism must do good, and do-gooders must become more capitalist.”8
To identify the biggest problems and determine where the foundation’s money would make the biggest quantifiable difference, Gates relied mainly on scientists, researchers, economists, policymakers, and other experts trained in the West to help him build core areas of focus, namely healthcare, agriculture, education, and financial services. The foundation attracted people with a technocratic bent, well versed in the argot of the development community. Global public health was the perfect starting point for the foundation and remains one of its biggest areas of focus to this day because both the causes and the fixes were evident in existing data and science and because governments routinely underinvested in it. The bias toward data sometimes had the opposite effect: Areas of public health that didn’t already have data exhibiting an unmet need were less likely to get funded because it was harder to justify the need for dollars.
In the beginning, the foundation’s priorities were broadly informed by the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, a set of eight global health and development targets to meet by 2015, which the world missed. Since then, the foundation has taken its cues from the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted in 2015 as a “universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030 all people enjoy peace and prosperity.” Currently, the Gates Foundation makes grants largely in five big areas: global health, gender equality, global development, global growth and opportunity, and global policy and advocacy. A sixth big grant-making unit focuses on the foundation’s work in the United States. Each area of focus is headed by a president and staffed with academics and experts in the field. Under the areas lie different program strategies—41 at last count. Agricultural program strategies sit under “global growth.” The programs for tuberculosis and vaccine development fall under “global health.” Charter schools and “economic mobility and opportunity” are part of the U.S. focus. The teams have ambitious objectives. To meet them, they pick the nonprofits to give grants to and use internal metrics to track and assess the success of their grant-making. Typically, foundation representatives dole out the money in tranches, subject to the nonprofit meeting specific goals or implementation milestones. Individual programs may be shuttered, and funds redirected, if they don’t meet the foundation’s performance criteria. Program officers in various countries and regions act as intermediaries between the foundation and the grantees to make sure everything is working as intended. It is a highly structured organization, with more than 2,000 people and nine offices, including in India, China, and three African countries; multiple committees, advisors, planners, and operations managers; and hierarchies known only to those who sit in it. Projects often need the approval of as many as 10 people. On top of that, there is an extensive staff operation, where dozens of assistants and others work with executives to manage their schedules and arrange travel and security. “They are not people with a light footprint,” said a former foundation employee.
It can be difficult to fathom the extent of the Gates Foundation’s influence around the world, especially in global health and development. The pandemic provided a glimpse into how deeply embedded the foundation is in public health networks and research efforts that most people assume are the preserve of a few big, multilateral organizations like the WHO and the United Nations. But because of the billions of dollars it has given away, the Gates Foundation often shows up alongside countries on lists of donors to these types of entities. In a 2018 study, the Brookings Institution found that the foundation was the seventeenth largest donor to 53 multilateral organizations. It was the only private actor; the rest were all countries.9
The foundation’s annual budget alone is $8.3 billion, about the same as the annual gross domestic product of Monaco, or the 2023 net worth of Marc Benioff, the cofounder of technology giant Salesforce, philanthropist, and owner of Time magazine. That kind of money has given the foundation incredible heft and prominence, especially with the two cochairs being such forceful and visible advocates of their work. Since the Buffett money started coming in, the foundation has given money to an ever-growing pool of nonprofits, universities, media entities, research centers, and start-ups and other for-profit entities whose work fits into its mission. It has given away more than $70 billion since its founding, which works out to $3.5 billion a year on average. At the end of 2022, it had an endowment of $67 billion. There is no dearth of money to spend or trade-offs to make. This largesse has become increasingly troubling to critics because it allows the foundation to exert a level of influence that is often far larger than the money. Gates can easily get an audience with leaders of governments, businesses, and other organizations. The multiple relationships the foundation has built through formal alliances and informal networks given the revolving door between the foundation, policy experts, and employees of multilateral organizations—one high-profile example is Dr. Rajiv Shah who, before he became the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, was the USAID administrator appointed by President Obama, before which he held a number of government roles and played a crucial role in developing the vaccine industry for the Gates Foundation—allows for a tremendous amount of purchase that it can use to direct outcomes in line with its preferences. Together, the cash, the star power, and the leverage can and does skew the priorities of nonprofits, multilateral agencies like the WHO, research universities, and even governments, whether it’s about how best to deliver vaccines or which tools to use to increase crop yield.
One study published in 2008 found that as early as 2003, the National Institutes of Health, which is funded by tax dollars and focuses primarily on biomedical research to address the health problems of Americans, allocated $1 billion to fund global health priorities during a period when its budget grew little. The researchers attributed it to an initiative called the Grand Challenges in Global Health led by the Gates Foundation.10 By engaging the scientific community and drumming up positive coverage in the media, the foundation was able to direct the best researchers and funds to global health, one of its biggest priorities, the study concluded.
Bequests to universities are a big focus of grant-making. Since 2010, the Gates Foundation has given away at least $11.6 billion to 471 universities, according to one study, and the money was directed to fund research in three of its primary areas of interest: maternity and early childhood, agricultural research, and HIV/AIDS. Most of that money went to universities in the United States, but also the U.K. and Canada.11 In 2017, the foundation gave $279 million to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, the largest private donation in the university’s history, on top of a $105 million grant it had given a decade earlier to help launch the institute. The massive amount of money enabled the independent institute to conduct research and build databases on the state of global health, including Covid, tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases, and become the preeminent source of data cited by media and other public health organizations. To build more databases in priority areas such as financial inclusion, the foundation has also provided funding to organizations like the World Bank. Since 2011, the bank has published the Global Findex Database report every three years to track people’s access to digital financial services such as payments around the world. Directing resources to overlooked problems such as patchy data can be a good thing. At the same time, critics have long chafed that the foundation decides to fund whatever it deems important without inviting input from the broader scientific and research community. The criticisms can tend toward the polemical and the hyperbolic, but they are essentially arguments about unchecked power and accountability.
Academics, policymakers, and journalists, particularly leftists and progressives, as well as rival foundations, nonprofits, and disillusioned former workers have attacked multiple aspects of the foundation’s work and principles. Some take issue with the foundation’s reliance on a market-based, technocratic, fix-it attitude that entrenches long-standing power dynamics between rich and poor countries, and between donors and recipients. Others point to the pitfalls of relying on a narrow, top-down, data-based and expertise-driven approach that ignores local and cultural realities. Yet others say such untrammeled private power without public accountability is antidemocratic. A fourth group of critics says that the rigorous reporting the foundation demands from its grant recipients and its bureaucratic approach place unnecessary burdens on the staff of nonprofits that might not be set up to meet those requirements. And although it is a low-level hum, the way the Gates Foundation casts its own work irks some critics. Often, the foundation will describe its work in terms of “lives saved” rather than “deaths prevented.” The latter term, which is drier and more technical, is often used by multilateral agencies. It might be a matter of semantics, but the Gates Foundation’s terminology plays into the notion that it has a superior mission, a loftier goal than others working in the field. When is a life saved, after all?
At the same time, defenders of the Gates Foundation point out that the data alone is evidence that its style of philanthropy works. The criticisms don’t carry much meaning for the people on the ground who have seen their incomes rising, their access to basic necessities like food, water, and medicine improving along with their health, or the yield from their crops increasing. If the critics are idealists who attack the foundation’s influence on normative grounds and question the underlying system that allows for one entity to have so much influence, the defenders are the beneficiaries and the realists who point to the fact that improving the quality of life for some within an unfair system is better than complete apathy.
Many observers and partners, however, take a nuanced view that acknowledges the successes on the ground while pointing out how the foundation sidesteps trickier questions about its size, influence, and lack of accountability. Manoj Mohanan, a public health expert who teaches at Duke University, said that the foundation could do a better job of disclosing how it makes decisions and assesses its success, inviting independent verification of the success or failure of a project they have undertaken. Mohanan, who has received grants from the foundation for his work, said that many other big grant-making bodies invite competitive proposals for grants and give out the funds. But with the Gates Foundation, academics and nonprofits searching for a grant often end up turning to their networks for introductions to foundation employees who might consider their project. Rather than making it about a bigger call for proposals, which would perhaps be more democratic, the foundation’s mandate comes from the two cochairs sitting at the very top. The level of control is such that you might be sitting in a room discussing a grant and get an email from Gates asking for numbers about a specific disease. It suggests that the former couple want to keep the controls in their hands like it’s a small organization, Mohanan surmised. “I hate to say it because I’m a beneficiary of the process, but networks become much more important in that setup than in a purely transparent process.”
The world was largely uncritical of the foundation in the first decade of its existence.12 If anything, much of the West was still on its free-market high at the beginning of the new millennium, and a business-focused approach to solving the problems of the world seemed to be a natural outgrowth of wealth creation. Two writers for The Economist even coined the term “philanthrocapitalism” to describe how individuals and corporations could apply market fundamentals for social returns.13 At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2008, Gates gave a much-lauded speech on “creative capitalism,” arguing that businesses, nonprofits, and governments can collectively harness market forces so that people can work to reduce inequities without giving up profitability.
But talk of worsening inequality and rising billionaire influence in recent years has raised new questions about everything from political donations to philanthropy.14 One of the earliest and fiercest critics of the Gates Foundation is Linsey McGoey, a Canadian-born sociologist who teaches at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. In her book No Such Thing As a Free Gift, McGoey takes aim at philanthrocapitalism and, in particular, Gates, for his role in “shifting the global discourse on philanthropy in recent decades.” Through initiatives like the Giving Pledge, McGoey writes, Gates offers a “powerful antidote” to critics who point to the widening global wealth gap, because he and other billionaires can always say that they’re giving their money away.15
In his book Winners Take All, the journalist Anand Giridharadas criticizes all big philanthropy, including the Gates Foundation, for trying to “solve for” individual, intractable issues via technology, rather than fighting for ground-up social and economic justice or change. Giridharadas and others point out the irony of big philanthropy, which seeks to address the problems created by extreme wealth generation while doing little to change the underlying system that caused the problems in the first place: Is it fair that the very billionaires who created or exacerbated some of the world’s problems, or benefited from a lopsided system, be given the keys to act as agents of change with little or no oversight?16
Melissa Berman, formerly of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, helped wealthy people and big foundations think about how to make their giving most effective. She is an ardent defender of the role philanthropy can play, but also sensitive to the criticisms. To Berman, the Gates Foundation, from which her former nonprofit has received a grant, is not unique. Rather, she says it is a creature of an existing system that imposes Western values on developing countries without taking ground-level feedback into account. To single it out is to ignore the systemic problems that it’s not the foundation’s responsibility to solve.
Other supporters of big philanthropy point out that private foundation money should be free to pursue innovation and underwrite experimental efforts that governments can’t and businesses won’t, with the expectation that public funding will follow a successful project. An entity like the Gates Foundation can take risks and accept the possibility of failure precisely because its money is not accountable to shareholders or governments. Supporters commend the Gates Foundation and other big philanthropists for their willingness to drop a project that isn’t delivering results, because cutting it short and admitting failure is better than leaving money in something that isn’t working.
Critics acknowledge that being able to try different things and take risks with philanthropic dollars is a boon. But they argue that limiting the costs of a mistake by dropping a program doesn’t account for the havoc wreaked by the decision on end beneficiaries like nonprofits, which changed course in response to the flood of money and now have to reverse direction because a big philanthropist decided the metrics weren’t meeting its goals.
The foundation’s controversial work in U.S. education is an important example. Until Gates stepped up as a public advocate of Covid vaccines during the pandemic, the foundation’s efforts in America primarily involved attempts at reforming education. Both Gates and French Gates held deep convictions that access to education was the best way to give every child an equal footing. Since its earliest days, the foundation made it a domestic priority to improve the quality of education by pushing for smaller classrooms, which were thought to reduce dropout rates. It directed more than $2 billion toward school districts that agreed to establish smaller high schools, according to one estimate.17 As part of the effort, the foundation also earmarked funds for charter schools, which are privately run but publicly funded. A whole clutch of billionaires, including former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, Netflix founder Reed Hastings, and Facebook’s Zuckerberg, joined Gates in pouring money into such schools, assuming that they would provide a better alternative to traditional school systems. However, after two decades of the experiment, the data has been mixed, showing that students of charter schools perform, on average, no better than students who attend public school.
The foundation also spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a project tying teacher evaluation at least partly to student performance and test scores, with the participation of local governments. But the metrics eventually didn’t appear promising enough and the foundation pulled its funding, leaving many school districts with the additional costs. Another effort involved directing hundreds of millions of dollars to promote common core standards, under which states adopt the same assessment metrics for subjects like English and math. However, teachers were not initially trained to teach the curriculum, and as children began failing, states pulled back from using common core standards. By the time the foundation recognized the importance of training and tailoring teaching to local realities, it was too late. It has since deemphasized the program, acknowledging that national standards didn’t give individual schools enough adaptability.
Diane Ravitch, a former research professor of education at New York University and an outspoken critic of the Gates Foundation, once called the billionaire the nation’s unelected school superintendent. On her blog, Ravitch pointed out that by 2022, no one had expected that charter schools, given all the money spent on them, wouldn’t outperform public schools on average—and, in some cases, would actually do worse than public schools.18 Aware of that data, both Gates and French Gates acknowledged in annual letters that their efforts to reform education didn’t go quite as expected, but the foundation would continue funding innovative ideas. As of 2020, the foundation has turned its focus to math education in U.S. schools. On its website, there is no mention of its small school and common core efforts.
There are yet other critics—philosophers and political scientists—who argue that private philanthropy, which is subsidized by taxpayers because charitable deductions are essentially lost tax revenue, is antidemocratic because a massive entity like the Gates Foundation reports only to itself; with no voters or shareholders to hold it publicly accountable, it can ignore alternate points of view and direct outcomes in line with its preferences. In the book Just Giving, the Stanford political scientist Rob Reich makes the argument that large-scale philanthropy of the kind Gates engages in is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. It confers enormous power to its practitioners, allowing the wealthiest to have a say in the affairs of a country without being elected, and while gaining a virtuous image and points for civic gratitude.19 The political scientist Emma Saunders-Hastings has also written about the need for political scientists to study philanthropy because “elite influence can be undemocratic even when public-spirited in its motivations and even when it bypasses formal political institutions.”20
Melissa Berman refutes the notion that philanthropy is antidemocratic. Rather than attacking philanthropy, she said, society should lobby for changes in taxation policy. If taxation is more redistributive, people can have a say on what private money is best used for. “Philanthropy by definition is voluntary,” Berman said. “If it’s not then it’s called a tax.”
Joel L. Fleishman, the Duke University professor who has long set aside a part of his paycheck for charity, vigorously opposes any kind of mechanism that restricts individuals from doing what they want with their dollars. “One of my criticisms of the critics of philanthropy is that they don’t like the idea of people with a lot of money giving it away to whatever they want to give it for,” said Fleishman. “When people start substituting their own judgment or imposing it on the private money of others, it’s a problem.” He agrees with the critics that aspects of the underlying systems should be corrected, but “don’t take out your frustrations on philanthropy. I think philanthropy is doing good.”
The foundation itself is aware of the growing criticism and sensitive to it. In January 2023, it held a call with subscribers to its mailing list, and Mark Suzman, the foundation’s chief executive, addressed the topic in his letter. “Does the foundation have too much influence?” read the title. Suzman didn’t disagree that the foundation had a lot of influence, given that it had more funds at its disposal than any other philanthropy. “It’s true that between our dollars, voice, and convening power, we have access and influence that many others do not,” Suzman wrote.
He redirected the question to one of how and why the foundation uses its influence. Its very heft can bring attention to otherwise neglected or overlooked problems, according to Suzman, and its megaphone can be used for good. He insisted that the foundation doesn’t set the agenda but is merely carrying out the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2015. The question of whether the very act of directing billions of dollars toward causes they believe in can effectively shape a policy or disrupt existing methods of doing things, irrespective of the foundation’s intention, was addressed obliquely. Even if the absolute amounts appear large, the foundation’s contributions are a drop in the bucket compared to the budget of big governments. On separate occasions, foundation executives have acknowledged the entity’s influence but also minimized it by comparing it to the total spend of the U.S. government on social programs and pointing out that millions of lives still remain untouched.
More than once, the foundation has been accused of “neocolonialism,” an ism that is generally defined as the use of economic, social, and cultural power to maintain a grip and control or direct outcomes in other countries, especially those that were former colonies. The term has long been used to critique postwar multilateral agencies like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, whose efforts to “solve” poverty with Western expertise either backfired or produced mixed results at best. It doesn’t help that the Gates Foundation seems to borrow freely and extensively from those approaches to global development, where words like “partnerships,” “stakeholders,” “progress,” “prosperity,” “equity,” “transformation,” “solutions,” and “sustainability” convey a collaborative tilt and lofty aims, and where acronyms are intended to be phonetically viable, like ACT, REACT, and AGRA. It also doesn’t help that there are revolving doors between the foundation and the agencies.
The Gates Foundation also caught the eye of Vandana Shiva, an Indian environmental activist who has made it her life’s work to protect biodiversity, indigenous knowledge, and the livelihood of small farmers. Shiva has her share of critics—in a 2014 profile of her in The New Yorker magazine, Mark Lynas, an environmental expert, told the writer that Shiva was “blinded by her ideology and her political beliefs,” making her both “so effective and so dangerous”—but she has developed a strong following among radical leftists in Europe and elsewhere.21 Roughly a decade ago, she began targeting Gates and the foundation, lambasting it for its dogmatic, play-God approach. She is among those who say that the foundation replicates the power dynamics of colonialism by imposing its agricultural and health preferences on developing countries without considering local knowledge and customs. “Gates has created global alliances to impose top-down analysis and prescriptions for health problems,” Shiva wrote in her book Oneness vs the 1%: Shattering Illusions, Seeding Freedom. “He gives money to define the problems, and then he uses his influence and money to impose the solutions.”22
In 2013, Peter Buffett, a music composer, philanthropist, and a son of Buffett, made a similar point. In a New York Times opinion piece, Buffett called out the emerging industry of “philanthropic colonialism,” where acts of giving by the wealthy in the name of upliftment and improvement in the quality of life only perpetuate the existence of an inherently unequal system. Rather than push for systemic change, Buffett wrote, causes like microlending and financial literacy only bring people into a cycle of debt, interest, and repayment.23 In later discussions, including with the philosopher-rabbi of the “effective altruism” movement, William MacAskill, Buffett appeared to be directly critiquing the “data-driven” approach that was au courant in philanthropy, arguing for an approach that was based more on intuition than simply data.
Additionally, the Gates Foundation has come in for criticism for its unquestioned belief in the power of technology to solve problems. Tied to its technological bias, critics say, is the foundation’s dependence on experts to determine courses of action even when their training, typically acquired in the West, is not necessarily directly applicable or viable in the developing world. Those who have worked with the foundation reflected on what one Harvard-trained academic who studies public health called “a cult of authority,” relying on experts within a very narrow circle of top universities, and on global advisors who “speak in a voice that shows a lack of hesitation.”
Some of the harshest criticism in that vein comes from agricultural and development economists and other philanthropists who have followed the Gates Foundation’s work in Africa. In 2006, the foundation unveiled a program called Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA. Modeled on India’s Green Revolution in the 1960s, which used scientific innovation to improve crop yields and made the country self-sufficient in food, AGRA is criticized because of its Western, scientific approach that focuses single-mindedly on increasing crop yield as the way to lift millions out of poverty. Although the goal is admirable, it is incomplete, they say. Critics point to the Indian experience—which ultimately wasn’t a cure-all given that it reduced biodiversity and high rates of poverty remained—as an example of why local input is necessary; but so far, the foundation appears to have ignored calls to incorporate local knowledge into its work in African countries.
Unlike many other private foundations, which nonprofits can seek grants from, or MacKenzie Scott’s approach, which is to find nonprofits and give them the money to use as they see fit, the Gates Foundation is scriptwriter, director, and producer. It develops ideas and strategies about how to enact change, and then finds partners to implement them. If foundation executives determine that telemedicine is the best solution to build a public health system in a poor country, their next step is to search for partners who can help carry out that plan. Being an active participant also means that the foundation partners up with nonprofits, governments, multilateral agencies, and top researchers to think through the right approaches to tackle a problem. The collaborative approach has allowed the foundation to piggyback on the knowledge of others while providing financial support and minimizing the risk that something they backed would fail completely.
However, the foundation’s approach to making grants and keeping tabs on how those funds are being used and how successful a program is, can be intimidating to nonprofits. Grants for specific projects are typically tied to milestones and quantifiable metrics to assess progress. The goals must be agreed upon with partners so that both sides know beforehand what will be deemed a successful outcome. In exchange for funds, foundation executives demand a level of reporting, documentation, and individual treatment that can be burdensome for small nonprofits, which might not have the most sophisticated systems to provide that feedback.
Gates and French Gates long held the reins despite the foundation’s size and constantly expanding influence. Major decisions needed their approval. Until 2021, when the couple split up, they were two of only three trustees—the third being Buffett—who sat atop the foundation. The three met in their official roles about once a year, every May, to approve budgets and long-term plans. Its unusual board structure often drew criticism from philanthropy experts who said that the concentration of power was troubling at such a massive and influential foundation and highlighted the need for governance changes.
By comparison, foundations of comparable size and influence have a much more professional structure. The Wellcome Trust, a U.K. based foundation founded in 1936 that focuses on healthcare, with an endowment and employee count comparable to that of the Gates Foundation, has ten board members. The Rockefeller and Ford foundations too have far larger boards. Of course, the founders of those entities have long since died, allowing their successors to build institutions run entirely by professionals.
“As living donors, Bill and Melinda Gates make all of the foundation’s critical strategic decisions, and the organization’s impact depends as much on its cochairs’ reputations and moral authority as it does on their money,” wrote Alex Friedman and Julie Sunderland in an opinion piece for Project Syndicate in 2021. Both Friedman and Sunderland are former senior foundation executives. Friedman is a former chief financial officer for the Gates Foundation, hired in 2007 to help the entity grow and manage its finances better after the Buffett gift. Sunderland led the foundation’s investment partnerships with the private sector until 2016. “This conflation of the personal and the institutional is a serious problem for all private foundations with living donors,” the authors wrote, before going on to propose reforms that would rectify the top-down nature of the foundation.24 The authors called for stronger governance mechanisms and more transparency in their filings.
Amid calls to professionalize its governing structure, especially after the couple’s divorce, the foundation created a more formal board of trustees. Suzman, the foundation’s chief executive, took the seat occupied by Buffett, who stepped down in 2021. In January 2022, it added Strive Masiyiwa, a London-based Zimbabwean billionaire businessman and philanthropist; Minouche Shafik, an international development expert and president of Columbia University; and Tom Tierney, a cofounder of the philanthropic consulting firm Bridgespan Group, to the board. That summer, it added two more board members: Ashish Dhawan, a former private equity investor with an India-focused incubator for nonprofits, and Dr. Helene D. Gayle, the president of Spelman College. Suzman acknowledged that the foundation had long had an unusual structure, and addressed fresh criticism that its new trustees didn’t truly represent diverse perspectives because they came from the same academic and professional backgrounds as the majority of the foundation’s staff. The new trustees, Suzman said, possessed “amazing expertise and background that could really add value to helping us make better strategic decisions.” However, Suzman was very clear that the Gates Foundation was “unequivocally” a family foundation that wasn’t about to change its mission and priorities.25 In the summer of 2021, the foundation had said that if, after two years, either Gates or French Gates decided that they couldn’t work together as cochairs, French Gates would step down but receive personal funds from Gates to pursue her own work. She remained in her role until mid-2024 and left with $12.5 billion. In a note to employees, Suzman said that the foundation would change its name to “the Gates Foundation to honor Bill Sr.’s legacy and Melinda’s contributions, and Bill will become the sole Chair of the foundation.” Gates’s father had been instrumental in shaping his son’s philanthropic efforts, and he was the third cochair of the foundation until his death in 2020 of Alzheimer’s disease. For all the criticisms, though, the foundation is undeterred. Paul Schervish, a professor emeritus at Boston College who has long studied philanthropic models, likened the Gates Foundation to an elephant, and the critics to mosquitoes. “The mosquitoes won’t bring down the elephant and you may not hear the elephants doing much except swishing their tails.”
In 2017, two years after the United Nations announced the 17 Sustainable Development Goals agreed to by its member states that the world should try to meet by 2030, the Gates Foundation put together its own initiative called Goalkeepers. It brought together what it called “a global collective of collaborative and diverse changemakers,” a jumble of public sector officials and private sector innovators whose mission was to accelerate progress toward the U.N. goals. Since then, the foundation has handed out annual Goalkeepers Global Goals awards to recognize the work of “remarkable individuals taking action to help achieve the Global Goals by 2030.”
In 2019, one of the recipients was Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, for his work on improving sanitation in the country. With more than 1.4 billion people, nearly two-thirds of whom live in rural areas, open defecation, good hygiene, and safe handling of fecal matter are among the country’s toughest challenges. Millions of people defecate in fields, open pits, side streets, and rivers. Hindu belief holds that a dip in the Ganges River washes away all sins; yet, Hinduism’s most sacred river remains a toxic spew of human and animal excrement, sewage, plastic debris, and industrial effluents. Despite decades of efforts to clean it up and some success under the Modi government, it is one of the world’s most polluted rivers. When Modi took office, improving sanitation was among his priorities. In 2014, his government launched the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (Clean India Mission). By 2019, the government claimed to have built more than 100 million toilets. That year, the Gates Foundation, which works closely with the Indian government, presented its award to Modi at the U.N. General Assembly in New York.
The move attracted a lot of opprobrium from academics, civil rights leaders, and even Nobel laureates for its tone-deafness, given the controversial nature of Modi’s rule. Since coming to power, Modi has conducted an exclusionary politics, according to his critics, and he stands accused of cracking down on dissenters, oppressing minorities, and emboldening groups tied to his political party to pursue their goal of turning India into a Hindu majoritarian state. (At the same time, Modi is worshipped by millions of Indians who laud his efforts to promote economic growth and lead India onto the global stage.) Several critics pointed out the irony of presenting an award to a leader whose anti–human rights record went against the very ethos of the foundation: that all lives have equal value. At least one India-based employee resigned from the foundation, registering her protest in an op-ed column.26 The former employee, Sabah Hamid, wrote that she had not been consulted until much later, by which time, executives in Seattle had already made up their minds. “That this endorsement of Mr. Modi would not do the Gates Foundation any good did not seem to be up for discussion,” Hamid wrote. In response to the controversy, the foundation said that the award was narrowly focused on Modi’s record in improving sanitation. However, it did not share the process by which it had arrived at its decision or whether it had tested the Indian government’s claims.
The criticism notwithstanding, Gates is a hero in India, twice over. There are so many software developers of Indian descent at Microsoft’s U.S. offices that “Indian” no longer meets the software giant’s diversity criteria for some managers. Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, under whose leadership the company touched a market valuation of $3 trillion, hails from India. Microsoft’s largest data center outside the United States is in the Indian city of Hyderabad. The IT campuses it has built in the South Asian country employ around 20,000 people. Gates, who has visited India dozens of times over the decades, has often said that the quality of engineering talent in the country has been great for Microsoft. On one of his earliest trips to India for Microsoft, Gates remarked to a colleague how surprised he was that so many people in the country spoke English, apparently unaware of its legacy of British colonialism.
Ingrid Srinath, who formerly led the Centre for Social Impact and Philanthropy at Ashoka University, a privately funded institution on the outskirts of Delhi, agreed that Gates is very much a hero because of Microsoft and the country’s general technology bias, but also because the Gates Foundation’s presence is so significant, even if its hands are tied in what it can do because of the Indian government’s restrictions on foreign funding for domestic nonprofits. Gates is also a role model for India’s emerging billionaire class, whose wealth has spurred their philanthropic ambitions. Indian billionaires like Nandan Nilekani, a cofounder of the IT giant Infosys who helped the government build a biometric ID system called Aadhaar, have signed the Giving Pledge. With private philanthropy slowly becoming a more professional undertaking, criticisms of the big philanthropy of Gates haven’t yet reached the country, Srinath said. In India, “philanthropy is an unadulterated good.”
During Microsoft’s bruising antitrust battle with the U.S. government in the late 1990s, the company’s public relations team regularly ran opinion polls to monitor Gates’s image around the world. But in any global poll, they had to interpret the results after discounting the data from India, because Gates was so admired that the feedback from Indian poll respondents would skew the results. As he moved away from his Microsoft duties to philanthropy, Gates’s engagement with India only deepened. In the fall of 2000, Gates visited a maternal and child health clinic in New Delhi, where he administered polio drops to children. Soon after, he announced a $25 million donation to polio eradication efforts. The Gates Foundation’s first foreign outpost was India, where it set up an office in 2003. It is also the foundation’s largest operation outside of the United States. With roughly 80 employees, the foundation has its India headquarters in a lush, green area of New Delhi. India, with its massive population, has long attracted the attention of the global development community, acting as a crucible for innovation in global public health and agriculture. For decades, especially after India won its independence in 1947, large multilateral agencies such as UNICEF and the World Bank were involved in providing aid and support to the South Asian country, but more recently, the focus of Western experts has moved to sub-Saharan Africa.
The Gates Foundation’s early interest in India was therefore no surprise. The country is attractive to Gates because it presents the challenges in global health and development that are closest to his heart: vaccines, public health, child nutrition, sanitation, and agricultural productivity. India has been the second-largest recipient of Gates Foundation grants after the United States. Between 2015 and 2018, the Gates Foundation was the top private source of funding in India, at $1.1 billion—twice as much as the next biggest donor, Infosys.27 At least as of 2018, India was the foundation’s largest focus; second was Nigeria. As of that year, the bulk of its funds earmarked for gender equity issues went to India, in particular reproductive health and family planning.
The foundation’s work in the country started in 2003 with a program to combat HIV/AIDS called Avahan, a Hindi word that roughly translates to “challenge.” The virus disproportionately affected sex workers, truckers, and men having sex with men in a few southern Indian states, and drug injectors in the northeastern part of the country. Assuming that the virus was spreading because people didn’t have access to condoms and didn’t know how it spread, the foundation began distributing free condoms to female sex workers and set up clinics. But former foundation workers and those who studied the program said it was a modest success at best, partly because staffers failed to anticipate how cultural beliefs and gender norms—such as a female sex worker having no agency if a male client refused to use a condom—would impede their efforts. By 2009, the foundation had poured $338 million into the initiative. By its own assessment, the impact of the program was unclear, but it said there were encouraging signs based on data they collected using their own paradigm. Ultimately, its model wasn’t sustainable or transferable to other regions, including to the Indian northeast, where the mode of transmission was through shared needle use. In some African countries, the youth population was far more affected by HIV/AIDS than were sex workers, and the sources of infection and the modes of transmission, such as neonatally, were different, which meant the foundation had to develop different strategies. The foundation also participated in the Indian government’s campaign to eradicate polio, a feat of coordination between volunteers and community health workers, some sponsored by the Seattle organization, going to the deepest corners of rural India to administer oral polio vaccines. India was declared free of the wild polio virus in 2014.
The Gates Foundation has maintained a high profile in India and a constant presence at the side of the Indian government, even as other foundations including the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, which have long histories in India, have practically folded their operations. Over the years, Gates’s visits have been highly publicized, and he has been received much as a rockstar would be. Heads of industry, state chief ministers, and top government officials routinely line up to meet him. In media interviews with India’s top journalists, he is careful to be diplomatic and deferential, and to underscore that the foundation only works alongside the Indian government, not independent of it. In 2023, he wrote on his blog of a successful sit-down with Modi. In March 2024, just weeks before India’s general election, the Indian prime minister sat down with Gates for a fireside chat about technology and artificial intelligence, during which the philanthropist talked about the foundation’s work in India and how impressed he was with the Modi government’s digital infrastructure plans, and Modi invited Gates to try out his free “NaMo” app, through which users can get information about the Indian government’s initiatives.28 Long aware of the government’s close watch on which domestic nonprofits get foreign funding, the billionaire has routinely said that its decisions and priorities are set by the government, but that his philanthropic dollars and private-sector participation can fund innovation and research in those areas.
The Modi government can be didactic. In 2018, it launched the National Nutrition Mission because one of the chronic problems India faces is malnourishment, which has long-term implications for the workforce, including productivity and mortality. The Gates Foundation and other agencies partnered with the government to carry out its mission. However, the visuals they created of nutritional and balanced diets contained images of eggs—a cheap and plentiful source of protein. The government directed the foundation and others to remove the eggs from those images, which have become a flashpoint in the country, especially in states led by Modi’s political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, because many Hindus consider them animal products. It had to comply by redoing the posters.
At the same time, the close association with Gates has acted as a legitimizing force for Modi, who has an ambitious agenda to move India up the ladder to the status of a middle-income country. To do so, it needs to improve the lot of its poorest citizens, bringing healthcare services, eliminating diseases, improving sanitation, providing vaccines, increasing access to digital financial services, harnessing new technology to improve education, all while trying to do so in a sustainable manner given climate change. By bringing its scientific thinking and technological expertise, the foundation can help the government achieve those goals.
Manjari Mahajan, who studies public health, philanthrocapitalism, and digital governance at the New School for Social Research, has followed the foundation’s work closely in India. To Mahajan, the Modi government and the Gates Foundation each understands its role in a delicate dance. In 2015, Gates and French Gates were among four foreigners to receive one of India’s highest civilian honors, the Padma Bhushan, for their work in health and development. Mahajan has suggested that there were far bigger reasons for the award than the foundation’s work on HIV/AIDS and health. In her view, the Indian government was cementing its ties to Gates as much for its health efforts as for the recognition that the Microsoft cofounder stood for much more: “Here philanthropy for global health was tacitly, if not explicitly, understood as being part of a larger global assemblage that included not only viruses, vaccines and well-meaning foundations but also multinational technology corporations, H1B visas, and software engineers,” she wrote in a 2017 paper. “The Padma Bhushan was to them less a sign of the government being beholden to the foundation or Microsoft, and more an indicator of a pragmatic appreciation of the [Gateses].” At the same time, Mahajan wrote, the foundation saw the Indian government as less a “weak victim and more a player in its own right within global exchanges.”29
The same narrow, vertical thinking that the foundation used to defend the Goalkeepers award it presented to Modi has led to other challenges in India. One example is the foundation’s telehealth program in the Indian state of Bihar. In 2010, it signed an agreement with Bihar’s chief minister, Nitish Kumar, to launch a telemedicine health program that would address some of the state’s most pressing diseases and conditions, including tuberculosis, leishmaniasis, diarrhea, and malaria, by using a combination of telemedicine and local franchises. By harnessing the power of modern technology and introducing “social franchising”—a concept popular in the global development community that is similar to the McDonald’s franchisee model, except that the product being delivered is healthcare, not burgers—the goal was to transform the way healthcare is delivered in the state, especially to its rural residents. The foundation committed more than $23 million to the project, which may have been doomed from the start. Gates Foundation staffers, sitting in Seattle, had mapped out how it would all work and recruited a nonprofit to administer the telehealth program. But several studies later found that assumptions made about the demand for diagnoses made over shaky internet connections, and the number of franchisees available to participate in the project and their incentives, hobbled the experiment.30
The program also sputtered because of its focus on treating individual diseases rather than addressing public health as a whole, said Manoj Mohanan, the public health expert. Each of the foundation’s teams that focused on these diseases was supposed to work with the others on the telemedicine project. But the TB team decided to pull out halfway through the implementation after realizing that the model wouldn’t work for them since TB was more prevalent in urban locations. “You can’t have broad efforts to change the system when the foundation has targeted verticals” in terms of their disease focus, said Mohanan, who was part of a team of independent experts that the foundation commissioned to review the program in Bihar that, after three years, didn’t produce the impact it had been hoping for.31
The foundation’s focus on certain geographies in India also tends to create imbalances because health challenges aren’t confined within borders. Salaries, resources, and opportunities in the states they focus on go up, meaning that neighboring states can see an outflow of talent. More broadly—and this experience is not unique to India—the foundation’s priorities and funds can determine which nonprofits get that money. An organization attempting to address malaria, a focus of the foundation, might get more funding than one that is focused on other mosquito-borne diseases or on diarrhea. A public health professional in Vietnam who has worked with the Gates Foundation dubbed it the “Gates effect.”
Billionaires have long endowed university chairs, funded hospitals, given support to religious or humanitarian causes, or written checks for restoring museums and monuments. Often, such occasions are splashy affairs written up by the press. The University of Chicago renamed its famous economics department after Ken Griffin, after the hedge fund manager donated $125 million in 2017. The following year, Michael Bloomberg, the cofounder of financial information giant Bloomberg LP and former mayor of New York City, gave $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins, his alma mater, to be used for financial aid. As of 2023, it remained the largest single gift to a college or university, according to Forbes. There are low-key donors as well, such as Charles Feeney, who made his fortune running duty-free shops and founded the Atlantic Philanthropies, popularizing the concept of “giving while living.”
But Gates was among the first, or at least the most high-profile, billionaires to approach philanthropy as a professional enterprise, tilting the entire field toward the idea of strategic giving, and bringing a business-capitalist and technological mindset to determine where one dollar “invested” would produce the greatest social return. Philanthropy thus became an accessible and deployable tool for many billionaires who are fluent in the language of returns, markets, and capitalism. His focus on the idea that issues like poverty can be “solved” resonated with technology billionaires. Gates tapped into the general feeling among billionaires that governments are inefficient, and that philanthropy can be nimble where the public sector is lumbering. By creating the Giving Pledge with Buffett, Gates also gave the extremely wealthy an opportunity to make public and moral commitments about giving away their fortunes—without any real accountability—in an age when rising inequality has raised numerous questions about the fairness of the system.
“What is the social return on a dollar has become a major paradigm,” said Amir Pasic, dean of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, which launched in 2013 and bills itself as the first institution dedicated to the study and teaching of philanthropy. Pasic said that the Gates Foundation made an impact quickly, because of both its size and its style of giving. Its endowment dwarfed those of the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, which had been preeminent in global philanthropy for decades and had long set the agenda.
Michael Kurdziel, who works with family offices, as the private firms that invest the money of billionaires are known, said that the Gates Foundation had a big impact on how the wealthy think about philanthropy. “The notion of, ‘I’ve acquired the wealth and now I wanna sort of work toward donating that wealth and having the influence through those donations’—that definitely comes through, especially in the U.S.,” in his conversations with billionaires, Kurdziel said. By contrast, he said, the wealthy don’t draw the same kind of inspiration from philanthropic organizations with more of a political bent, such as Open Society Foundations, founded by the billionaire investor George Soros in 1993. Even Bloomberg Philanthropies, the grant-making entity for Bloomberg, which contributes to a variety of causes from education to the fight against climate change, is perceived as a politically focused entity designed to support his causes.32 That’s not surprising given Michael Bloomberg’s presidential run in 2020 on the Democratic ticket—even though he is one of the most active philanthropists around, having given away more than $17 billion.
Trevor Neilson, one of the early employees of the Gates Foundation, built an entire business around philanthropic strategy. He created the Global Philanthropy Group, which worked with 40 or so philanthropists to build out their strategy. “I was going around to philanthropists saying I did this for Bill Gates, I could do this for you,” Neilson said. He and his partners at the firm marketed themselves as consultants who could get top-notch professionals to work at philanthropic foundations. They would first create a strategic plan for the philanthropist that often predated the buildout of the foundation. Next, they would do the research and identify potential philanthropy partners, build advisory boards, hire people, and get the outfit up and running. Neilson used his brief but formative experience at the Gates Foundation to tell others: “Gates is the model to emulate if you’re trying to build a strategy for philanthropy.”
In Silicon Valley, where wealth creation has exploded—in 2021, there were 85 billionaires in the Bay Area and more than 163,000 millionaire households—the number of private foundations and the variety of philanthropic approaches have also expanded. According to a 2016 study, the number of foundations in the region with more than $10 million in assets has doubled since 2000, with 28 percent of them founded in the last 10 years.33 The push in the Valley is to find “disruptive” solutions that have the most impact, the study said. But while the names of philanthropic endeavors run the gamut from venture philanthropy to effective altruism, the conceptual underpinnings don’t stray too far from the return-on-investment philosophy that has defined Gates’s approach.
Traditionally, philanthropists set up foundations to handle their charitable contributions, which allows them to maintain a tax-free status as long as they donate 5 percent of their endowment to charity every year. But many billionaires in Silicon Valley are doing things differently, mingling their for-profit and nonprofit investments through the creation of limited liability companies. Such entities don’t get the full tax benefits of philanthropic foundations but allow the owners more flexibility to determine where and how their fortunes should be directed, including to political campaigns or lobbying activities. There are also fewer reporting requirements than traditional foundations.
A prominent example is the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Although the couple consulted with Gates and sought his advice when deciding what form their philanthropy should take, they were among the early adopters of the LLC model. Founded in 2015, the entity describes itself as a new kind of philanthropic organization whose mission is “engineering change at scale.” In 2023, the entity laid off dozens of people after deciding that its approach to education-related causes wasn’t working, and that its strategy needed a refresh and clarity.34
In 2021, during the throes of the pandemic, Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter and Square, the payments app, announced that he would be earmarking $1 billion for Covid relief through an LLC called #startsmall. The organization has since made donations to nonprofits working on girls’ health and education, and Dorsey has also directed tens of millions of dollars to charitable outfits run by Hollywood celebrities including Rihanna and Sean Penn, a friend.35 In the interest of transparency, he created a public Google document to track his donations that anyone could look up. Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, also combined for-profit and nonprofit investments through one firm, the Omidyar Network, after deciding that a business-based model was the best way to carry out his philanthropic objective of “making the world a better place.”36 Among the entity’s priorities: reimagining capitalism. In a 2011 article for Harvard Business Review, Omidyar argued that the LLC structure allowed for more risk-taking than a traditional foundation and compared it to the venture capital business.
Emerson Collective, the LLC organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, blends philanthropic grant-making, venture capital investing, and even art to make an impact in its chosen areas, including immigration, health, education, journalism, and the environment. Powell Jobs, with an estimated net worth of $12 billion, took the name for her organization from Ralph Waldo Emerson, drawing from the core message of the Transcendentalist movement led by the nineteenth-century essayist and philosopher—that the individual could move beyond physical limitations to find oneness with God. French Gates’s firm Pivotal Ventures and Yield Giving, the primary philanthropic entity for MacKenzie Scott, are also LLCs. The latter entity, however, is mainly focused on grant-making to nonprofits.
The funds earmarked for charity can sit in endowments or in donor-advised funds, which have become extremely popular among the wealthy in the Valley. In 2014, after the action camera manufacturer GoPro went public, the company’s founder and chief executive, Nicholas Woodman, along with his wife Jill Woodman, gave $500 million to a donor-advised fund overseen by a nonprofit called the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The move was seen by many as a cynical ploy to save on taxes Woodman would have incurred from his IPO riches.37
Some of the other approaches to philanthropy include the venture capital–based model espoused by Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder. “What pattern shapes these philanthropic investments? The venture investing model: a selected and unique entrepreneur, a bold plan frequently with intelligent risk, the potential assets and skills to execute the plan, and favorable market conditions,” Hoffman and his wife wrote in their Giving Pledge letter. (Eli Broad, who made his fortune as a home builder, also called his model “venture philanthropy” in his 2010 Giving Pledge letter.) Jeff T. Green, who made his fortune in digital advertising and has an estimated net worth of more than $4 billion, calls his approach to giving “Dataphilanthropy,” seeking to fund and assess programs, the success of which can be verified by data.
One of the biggest philanthropic ideas to take hold in the Valley in recent years, especially among younger billionaires, is “effective altruism,” which uses metrics and evidence to determine where a dollar will do the maximum good. Before his downfall, Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was one of the more high-profile so-called effective altruists, talking about his philosophy often in public and using his philanthropic activities to build FTX’s reputation. The movement, which owes its origin to the philosopher Peter Singer, takes an unsentimental, utilitarian approach to charitable giving—essentially applying quantitative standards to subjective goals. Those ideas have been updated by William MacAskill, a thirtysomething Oxford-educated philosopher, who has become a rabbi to the tech crowd.
Once again, the concepts aren’t that different substantively from what has driven Gates and his foundation. Neither is the lofty nature of ambition. Among the most high-profile practitioners of effective altruism are Dustin Moskovitz, a cofounder of Facebook and Asana, which builds task management software, and his wife, Cari Tuna, a former reporter at The Wall Street Journal. The mission of their organization, a limited liability entity called Good Ventures, is to “help humanity thrive.”