Notes

Introduction

1. 1. Emily Flitter and James B. Stewart, “Bill Gates Met with Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past,” October 12, 2019, The New York Times.
2. 2. Bill Gates, “The Day I Knew What I Wanted to Do for the Rest of My Life,” GatesNotes, September 20, 2019.
3. 3. The Federal Reserve, “Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. Since 1989.”
4. 4. Will Wilkinson, “Don’t Abolish Billionaires,” The New York Times, February 21, 2019.

Chapter 1: Why We Love Billionaires

1. 1. Express staff, “Take Me to Your Leaders,” Idaho Mountain Express, July 8, 2021.
2. 2. Nathan J. Robinson, “Why Is the Pursuit of Money Such an American Obsession?” Current Affairs, December 11, 2021.
3. 3. Chase Peterson-Withorn, “From Rockefeller to Ford, See Forbes’ 1918 Ranking of the Richest People in America,” Forbes, September 19, 2017.
4. 4. “The Only Four Hundred,” The New York Times, February 16, 1892.
5. 5. Steve Forbes, “Our First 100 Years,” Forbes, September 19, 2017.
6. 6. Lydia Kiesling, “Rags-to-Riches Stories Are Actually Kind of Disturbing,” The New York Times Magazine, April 5, 2022.
7. 7. Carl M. Cannon, “Billionaires: Have Americans’ Views Changed?” RealClear Opinion Research, July 29, 2022.
8. 8. Jeffrey P. Bezos, “Statement by Jeffrey P. Bezos Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Amazon before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law,” July 29, 2020.
9. 9. Mark Zuckerberg, “Hearing Before the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, Testimony of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Inc.,” July 29, 2020.
10. 10. “The Gilded Age: Gilded Is Not Golden,” PBS, February 6, 2018.
11. 11. “Giving USA: Total U.S. Charitable Giving Declined in 2022 to $499.33 Billion Following Two Years of Record Generosity,” Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indiana University, June 20, 2023.
12. 12. Amanda B. Moniz, “Giving in America: A History of Philanthropy,” AASLH History News 72, no. 4 (2017): 28–32.
13. 13. Alexis de Tocqueville [translated by Henry Reeve], “Of the Use Which the Americans Make of Public Associations in Civil Life,” Democracy in America, vol. II, book 2, sect. 2, chap. V.
14. 14. National Park Service, Statue of Liberty, “Joseph Pulitzer.”
15. 15. Warren E. Buffett, “Comments by Warren E. Buffett in Conjunction with His Annual Contribution of Berkshire Hathaway Shares to Five Foundations,” June 23, 2021.
16. 16. Warren E. Buffett, “My Philanthropic Pledge,” 2010.
17. 17. Giving USA 2023: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2022, a publication of Giving USA Foundation, 2023, researched and written by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
18. 18. Forbes Wealth Team, “America’s Top Givers 2022: The 25 Most Philanthropic Billionaires,” Forbes, January 19, 2022.
19. 19. Colin Moynihan, “To Honor Gift, Public Library Will Add Donor’s Name a 6th Time,” The New York Times, February 28, 2019.
20. 20. David M. Rubenstein, “The Magna Carta Returns to the Archives,” Prologue Magazine, 42 (2010): 4.
21. 21. Chuck Collins and Helen Flannery, “Gilded Giving 2022: How Wealth Inequality Distorts Philanthropy and Imperils Democracy,” Institute for Policy Studies, July 2022.
22. 22. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, “Total Financial Assets Held by Private Foundations,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, June 30, 2023.
23. 23. National Philanthropic Trust, “Charitable Giving Statistics,” National Philanthropic Trust.
24. 24. Philip Rojc, “Major Philanthropy Sector Groups Are Dragging Their Feet or Outright Opposing DAF Reform. Why Is That?” Inside Philanthropy, May 23, 2023.
25. 25. Chuck Collins and Helen Flannery, “New Data Tells Us Where Donor-Advised Fund Dollars Go—And Don’t Go,” Nonprofit Quarterly, April 27, 2022.
26. 26. Patrick Radden Keefe, “The Family that Built an Empire of Pain,” The New Yorker, October 23, 2017.
27. 27. Robin Pogrebin, “Met Museum Removes Sackler Name from Wing Over Opioid Ties,” The New York Times, December 9, 2021.
28. 28. Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, “What America Thinks of Philanthropy and Nonprofits,” April 2023.
29. 29. Patrick M. Rooney, “The Growth in Total Household Giving Is Camouflaging a Decline in Giving by Small and Medium Donors: What Can We Do About It?” Nonprofit Quarterly, August 27, 2019.

Chapter 2: The Ur Nerd of Capitalism

1. 1. Paul Allen, Idea Man (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2012), 61, 69–91.
2. 2. Nathan Ensmenger, “Beards, Sandals, and Other Signs of Rugged Individualism: Masculine Culture within the Computing Professions,” Osiris 30 (2015): 38–65.
3. 3. Bill Gates, “The Day I Knew What I Wanted to Do for the Rest of My Life,” GatesNotes, September 20, 2019.
4. 4. Ken Auletta, World War 3.0 (New York: Random House, 2001), 155.
5. 5. Allen, Idea Man, 9. Also see: Bill Gates, “Remarks of Bill Gates, Harvard Commencement, 2007,” The Harvard Gazette, June 7, 2007.
6. 6. Bill Gates, “An Open Letter to Hobbyists,” February 3, 1976.
7. 7. Associated Press, “Mary Gates, 64; Helped Her Son Start Microsoft,” The New York Times, June 11,1994.
8. 8. Cathy Booth, “Steve’s Job: Restart Apple,” Time, August 18, 1997.
9. 9. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021), 171–79.
10. 10. IBM Archives, “The Birth of the IBM PC.”
11. 11. Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 52–53, 62, 79.
12. 12. Stewart Brand, “Spacewar,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972.
13. 13. Thomas Streeter, “Romanticism in Business Culture: The Internet, the 1990s, and the Origins of Irrational Exuberance,” in Toward a Political Economy of Culture: Capitalism and Communication in the Twenty-First Century,” ed. Andrew Calabrese and Colin Sparks (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 286–306. Also see: Interview with Thomas Streeter, “Romancing the Internet,” Journal of Communication Inquiry, May 22, 2012.
14. 14. Andy Reinhardt, “What Matters Is How Smart You Are,” Businessweek, August 25, 1997.
15. 15. Laurence Zuckerman, “With Internet Cachet, Not Profit, A New Stock Is Wall St.’s Darling,” The New York Times, August 10, 1995.
16. 16. Paul Andrews and Michele Matassa Flores, “Internet Wars—Microsoft Vs. Netscape: Goliath Takes On David—Navigator Still Ahead—But Losing Ground,” The Seattle Times, March 11, 1997.
17. 17. Andrews and Flores, “Internet Wars.”
18. 18. Interview with Marc Andreessen, “Find the Smartest Technologist in the Company and Make them CEO,” McKinsey Quarterly, June 22, 2022.
19. 19. Survey of Current Business, “U.S. Digital Economy: New and Revised Estimates, 2017–2022,” The Journal of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, December 6, 2023.
20. 20. Occupational Outlook Handbook, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
21. 21. Author calculations, based on data from PitchBook.
22. 22. David Rensin, “A Candid Conversation with the Sultan of Software about Outsmarting His Rivals,” Playboy, July 1994.
23. 23. Streeter, “Romanticism in Business Culture.”
24. 24. Pierre Azoulay, et al., “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship,” NBER Working Paper No. 24489, April 2018.
25. 25. Roger Parloff, “This CEO Is Out for Blood,” Fortune, June 12, 2014.
26. 26. David Yaffe-Bellany, “A Crypto Emperor’s Vision: No Pants, His Rules,” The New York Times, May 14, 2022. Also see: David Yaffe-Bellany, “The Man Who Was Supposed to Save Crypto,” The Daily, November 18, 2022.
27. 27. Thomas D. Snyder, ed. “120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait,” National Center for Education Statistics, January 1993, 85–86.
28. 28. Robert X. Cringely [pen name], Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires, PBS documentary, June 1996.
29. 29. Bill Gates, “If You Want to Understand Silicon Valley, Watch Silicon Valley,” GatesNotes, November 19, 2018.
30. 30. Jordynn Jack, “ ‘The Extreme Male Brain?’ Incrementum and the Rhetorical Gendering of Autism,” Disability Studies Quarterly, 31 (2011): 3. Also see: “Q&A with Autism and Gender Author Jordynn Jack,” University of Illinois Press Blog, May 19, 2014.
31. 31. Allison Master, Sapna Cheryan, and Andrew N. Meltzoff, “Computing Whether She Belongs: Stereotypes Undermine Girls’ Interest and Sense of Belonging in Computer Science,” Journal of Educational Psychology 108, no. 3 (2016): 424–37.
32. 32. Sapna Cheryan, et al., “The Stereotypical Computer Scientist: Gendered Media Representations as a Barrier to Inclusion for Women,” Sex Roles 69 (2013): 58–71.
33. 33. Richard Waters, “Reid Hoffman, Mr. LinkedIn,” Financial Times, March 16, 2012.
34. 34. “Women in the Workplace 2021,” LeanIn.org.
35. 35. Ellen Huet, “Kleiner Perkins Trial Details Firm’s All-Male Ski Trip and Dinner Party,” Forbes, February 25, 2015.
36. 36. Joseph Bernstein, “Elon Musk Has the World’s Strangest Social Calendar,” The New York Times, October 11, 2022.
37. 37. Emily Chang, “Oh My God, This Is So F---ed Up: Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side,” Vanity Fair, January 2, 2018.
38. 38. Alex Williams, “As the Nerds Turn by Marc Andreessen,” The New Stack, June 24, 2014.

Chapter 3: Rockstar to Robber Baron

1. 1. Jack Beatty, “A Capital Life,” The New York Times, May 17, 1998.
2. 2. David E. Sanger, “High-Tech Rebel,” The New York Times Magazine, September 11, 1988.
3. 3. James Gleick, “Making Microsoft Safe for Capitalism,” The New York Times Magazine, November 5, 1995.
4. 4. John Seabrook, “E-mail from Bill,” The New Yorker, December 26, 1993.
5. 5. John Heilemann, “The Truth, the Whole Truth, Nothing But the Truth,” Wired, November 1, 2000.
6. 6. Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), 136.
7. 7. Stuart Elliott, “Haven’t Heard of Windows 95? Where Have You Been Hiding?” The New York Times, July 31, 1995.
8. 8. Kristi Gates, interview in Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, Netflix, 2019.
9. 9. David Rensin, “A Candid Conversation with the Sultan of Software About Outsmarting His Rivals,” Playboy, July 1994.
10. 10. Paul Allen, Idea Man (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2012), 32, 91.
11. 11. Jane Pauley interview with Bill Gates, Today, NBC, 1989.
12. 12. Timothy Egan, “Microsoft’s Unlikely Millionaires,” The New York Times, June 28, 1992.
13. 13. Blaine Harden, “Microsoft Millionaires Still Pondering Wealth,” The Washington Post, August 3, 2003.
14. 14. “Racial Wealth Divide in Seattle,” Prosperity Now.
15. 15. Todd Bishop, “No Bull Bill: Bill Gates’ Blunt Legacy,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 23, 2008.
16. 16. Rensin, “A Candid Conversation.”
17. 17. Ken Auletta, World War 3.0 (New York: Random House, 2001), 152.
18. 18. Suzanne Taylor and Kathy Schroeder, Inside Intuit: How the Makers of Quicken Beat Microsoft and Revolutionized an Entire Industry (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2003).
19. 19. Lawrence M. Fisher, “Microsoft in $1.5 Billion Deal to Acquire Intuit,” The New York Times, October 14, 1994.
20. 20. David Einstein, “The Lawyer Who Took on Microsoft,” SFGate, March 20, 1995.
21. 21. Elizabeth Corcoran, “Microsoft Halts Merger with Intuit,” The Washington Post, May 21, 1995
22. 22. Kathy Rebello, “Inside Microsoft,” Bloomberg, July 14, 1996.
23. 23. Gleick, “Making Microsoft Safe for Capitalism.”
24. 24. Joseph Nocera, “The Microsoft Word,” The New York Times, December 24, 1995, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/03/specials/gates-road.html.
25. 25. Jim Clark with Owen Edwards, Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999), 15.
26. 26. Lawrence M. Fisher, “A Legal High-Wire Artist Takes On Silicon Valley Giants,” The New York Times, April 5, 1995.
27. 27. Andrew I. Gavil and Harry First, The Microsoft Antitrust Cases: Competition Policy for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 3.
28. 28. Nick Wingfield, “To Rebuild Trust, Facebook’s Zuckerberg Looked to Microsoft,” The Information, December 10, 2018.
29. 29. Daisuke Wakabayashi, “Google Employees Are Free to Speak Up. Except on Antitrust,” The New York Times, October 13, 2020.
30. 30. Om Malik, “In Silicon Valley Now, It’s Almost Always Winner Takes All,” The New Yorker, December 30, 2015.
31. 31. Jason Calacanis, “10 Things We Learned from Mitch Kapor,” LinkedIn, August 13, 2013.
32. 32. “Client Profile: Microsoft Corp,” summary, OpenSecrets, 2023.
33. 33. “Client Profile: Amazon.com,” summary, OpenSecrets, 2021.
34. 34. Tim Wu, “How Google and Amazon Got Away with Not Being Regulated,” Wired, November 13, 2018.
35. 35. Lina M. Khan, “We Must Regulate A.I. Here’s How,” The New York Times, May 3, 2023.
36. 36. John Jurgensen, “In Bill Gates’s Mind, A Life of Processing,” The Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2019.

Chapter 4: The Pivot

1. 1. Jared Cohon, “College Tour, Carnegie Mellon University,” Carnegie Mellon Today, February 21, 2008.
2. 2. Nick Wingfield, “Pamela Edstrom, Who Helped Shape Microsoft’s Public Image, Dies at 71,” The New York Times, March 31, 2017.
3. 3. Steve Hamm, “Bill Gates: ‘I’m Humble. I’m Respectful.’ ” Bloomberg, February 9, 1998.
4. 4. Steve Lohr, “The Chairman’s Vision,” The New York Times, June 16, 2000.
5. 5. Frank Rich, “Love That Bill,” The New York Times, March 7, 1998.
6. 6. Ken Auletta, World War 3.0 (New York: Random House, 2001): 131.
7. 7. Steven Levy, “Behind the Gates Myth,” Newsweek, August 29, 1999.
8. 8. John Jurgensen, “In Bill Gates’s Mind, A Life of Processing,” The Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2019. Also see: Gates, “The Day I Knew What I Wanted to Do for the Rest of My life,” GatesNotes, September 20, 2019.
9. 9. “When in Seattle, Bono Bunks with Bill Gates,” Reuters, May 2005.
10. 10. Robert A. Guth, “Stock Analysts Note Microsoft ‘Bye’ Sign: No Gates at Meeting,” Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2006.
11. 11. Guth, “Wealth of Ideas: Bill Gates Issues Call for a Benevolent Capitalism,” The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2008.
12. 12. Cohon, “College Tour, Carnegie Mellon University.”
13. 13. Robert A. Guth, “In Secret Hideaway, Bill Gates Ponders Microsoft’s Future,” The Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2015.
14. 14. David Pogue, “Reconsidering Bill Gates,” The New York Times, June 22, 2005.
15. 15. Tore Gjerstad and Gard Oterholm, “Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein Met with Nobel Committee Chair,” DNMagasinet, October 2, 2020. Also see: Khadeeja Safdar and Emily Glazer, “Jeffrey Epstein Appeared to Threaten Bill Gates Over Microsoft Co-founder’s Affair with Russian Bridge Player,” The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2023. Also see: Kate Briquelet, “Bill Gates Thought Jeffrey Epstein Was His Ticket to a Nobel Prize,” The Daily Beast, May 18, 2021. Also: Emails of Jeffrey Epstein obtained under Freedom of Information Request by The New York Times regarding the lawsuit by the U.S. Virgin Islands against Epstein’s estate.
16. 16. Philip Galanes, “The Mind Meld of Bill Gates and Steven Pinker,” The New York Times, January 27, 2018.
17. 17. Jurgensen, “In Bill Gates’s Mind, a Life of Processing.”
18. 18. Katherine Rosman, “Bill Gates: The Billionaire Book Critic,” The New York Times, January 2, 2016.
19. 19. Bill Gates, “The Future Our Grandchildren Deserve,” GatesNotes, December 20, 2022.
20. 20. Theodore Schleifer, “Bill Gates Will Never Be the Same,” Vox, May 18, 2021.

Chapter 5: Besties with Buffett

1. 1. David Von Drehle, “Meg Greenfield, Editor Extraordinaire,” The Washington Post, May 14, 1999.
2. 2. Remarks of Warren E. Buffett, “Afternoon Session—2000 Meeting,” Warren Buffett Archive, April 29, 2000.
3. 3. Bill Gates, “Testing Mattresses with Warren Buffett,” GatesNotes, June 6, 2017.
4. 4. Warren Buffett, email to the author, October 22, 2015.
5. 5. Warren E. Buffett, “Remarks at University of Nebraska, Lincoln,” Buffett Online, September 30, 2005.
6. 6. Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth (New York: Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2017).
7. 7. Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2019 to 2022, “Table 2. Family Median and Mean Net Worth, Selected Characteristics of Families, 2019 and 2022 Surveys,” Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, November 8, 2023.
8. 8. Bill Gates, “By 2026, the Gates Foundation Aims to Spend $9 Billion a Year,” GatesNotes, July 13, 2022.
9. 9. Gates, “Gates Foundation Aims to Spend.”
10. 10. John M. Goshko, “Ted Turner to Give U.N. $1 Billion,” Washington Post, September 19, 1997.
11. 11. Maureen Dowd, “Ted’s Excellent Idea,” The New York Times, August 22, 1996.
12. 12. Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Melinda French Gates discussed the initiative on Charlie Rose, June 16, 2010.
13. 13. Judith Miller, “He Gave $600 Million, and No One Knew,” The New York Times, January 23, 1997.
14. 14. “Going Big,” The Atlantic Philanthropies.
15. 15. Stephanie Strom, “Pledge to Give Away Fortunes Stirs Debate,” The New York Times, November 10, 2010.
16. 16. Hans Peter Schmitz and Elena M. McCollim, “Billionaires in Global Philanthropy: A Decade of the Giving Pledge,” Society 58, no. 2 (2021): 120–30.
17. 17. Calculations by the author.
18. 18. Warren E. Buffett, “Comments by Warren E. Buffett in Conjunction with His Annual Contribution of Berkshire Hathaway Shares to Five Foundations,” Berkshire Hathaway, June 23, 2021.
19. 19. Chuck Collins and Helen Flannery, “Gilded Giving 2022: How Wealth Inequality Distorts Giving and Imperils Democracy,” Inequality.org, July 28, 2022.
20. 20. Kerry A. Dolan, Forbes, June 5, 2022.

Chapter 6: Melinda without Bill

1. 1. Bill Gates, “Melinda Has a Terrific Book Coming Out,” GatesNotes, April 9, 2019.
2. 2. Emily Glazer and Khadeeja Safdar, “Melinda Gates Was Meeting with Divorce Lawyers Since 2019 to End Marriage with Bill Gates,” The Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2021.
3. 3. O. Casey Corr, “Melinda French Gates: A Microsoft Mystery—She Married High-Profile Bill Gates, But Wants Her Life Kept Private,” Seattle Times, June 4, 1995.
4. 4. Patricia Sellers, “Melinda Gates Goes Public,” Fortune, January 21, 2008.
5. 5. Julia Reed, “Melinda Gates Focuses the World’s Largest Foundation on Gender,” The Wall Street Journal, November 2, 2016.
6. 6. OECD, “Philanthropy and Gender Equality: Insights on Philanthropy for Gender Equality,” OECD Development Centre, 2019.
7. 7. David Marchese, “Melinda Gates on Tech Innovation, Global Health and Her Own Privilege,” The New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2019.
8. 8. Abby Schultz, “20 Minutes With: Haven Ley of Pivotal Ventures,” Barron’s, November 16, 2020.
9. 9. Melinda Gates, “Here’s Why I’m Committing $1 Billion to Promote Gender Equality,” Time, October 5, 2019.
10. 10. Melinda Gates, “How to Start the Conversation About Gender Equality,” The New York Times, March 7, 2020.
11. 11. Melinda Gates, The Moment of Lift (New York: Flatiron Books, 2019), 208–9.
12. 12. David Rensin, “A Candid Conversation with the Sultan of Software about Outsmarting His Rivals,” Playboy, July 1994.
13. 13. Timothy Egan, “It Takes Time to Build Xanadu,” The New York Times, January 12, 1995. Also see: Valeria Safranova, “Who Gets Xanadu 2.0, the Gates Family Mansion?,” The New York Times, May 5, 2021. Also see: James Wallace, “The House that Bill Gates Built,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 14, 1997.
14. 14. Sellers, “Melinda Gates Goes Public.”
15. 15. Robert Smith, “Hanging Out with Bill Gates,” Microsoft blog, July 4, 2007.
16. 16. T Magazine, “Eight Creative People Recommend Their Favorite Classic Books,” The New York Times Style Magazine, December 19, 2016.
17. 17. James Wallace and Jim Erickson, Hard Drive (New York: Wiley, 1992), 415.
18. 18. David Kirkpatrick, “Inside the Deal that Made Bill Gates $350,000,000,” Fortune, July 21, 1986.
19. 19. O. Casey Corr, “A Microsoft Mystery: She Married High-Profile Bill Gates, But Wants Her Life Kept Private,” Seattle Times, June 4, 1995.
20. 20. Emily Flitter and Matthew Goldstein, “Long Before Divorce, Bill Gates Had Reputation for Questionable Behavior,” The New York Times, May 16, 2021.
21. 21. Emily Glazer, et al., “Bill Gates Left Microsoft Board Amid Probe into Prior Relationship with Staffer,” The Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2021.
22. 22. Khadeeja Safdar and Emily Glazer, “Jeffrey Epstein Appeared to Threaten Bill Gates Over Microsoft Co-Founder’s Affair with Russian Bridge Player, The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2023.
23. 23. Matthew Haag, “$56 Million Upper East Side Mansion Where Epstein Allegedly Abused Girls,” The New York Times, July 8, 2019.
24. 24. Vicky Ward, “The Talented Mr. Epstein,” Vanity Fair, March 1, 2003.
25. 25. Alexa Mikhail,” Melinda Gates Took a Masterclass on Relationships to Prepare to Date After Divorce. Here Are the Key Pieces of Advice,” Fortune, October 15, 2022.
26. 26. Emil N. Siriwardane, Emily R. McComb, and Eren Kuzucu, “Investing at Pivotal Ventures,” Harvard Business School Case 221-033, October 2020 (revised December 2020).
27. 27. Gates, The Moment of Lift, 87–88.
28. 28. Melinda French Gates, “Decisions Are Still Being Made for Women, Instead of By Them. We’re Suffering As a Result,” Time, June 21, 2022.

Chapter 7: Global Savior, Big Philanthropist

1. 1. Stefan Riedel, “Edward Jenner and the History of Smallpox and Vaccination,” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings 18, no. 1 (2005): 21–25.
2. 2. Helen Branswell, “Bill Gates Slams ‘Shocking’ U.S. Response to Covid-19 Pandemic,” Stat, September 14, 2020.
3. 3. Erin Banco, Ashleigh Furlong, and Lennart Pfahler, “How Bill Gates and Partners Used Their Clout to Control the Global Covid Response—With Little Oversight,” Politico, September 14, 2022.
4. 4. Mohit Mookim, “The World Loses Under Bill Gates’s Vaccine Colonialism,” Wired, May 19, 2021.
5. 5. Melinda French Gates, “Melinda Gates on Whether Oxford Should’ve Allowed Their Vaccine to Be Open-Sourced,” Washington Post Live, January 27, 2021.
6. 6. Bill Gates, “Remarks Prepared for National Museum of American History,” December 1, 2015.
7. 7. Bill Gates, “Here’s My Plan for How to Improve Our World—And How You Can,” Wired, November 12, 2013.
8. 8. Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 75.
9. 9. John W. McArthur and Krista Rasmussen, “Who Actually Funds the UN and Other Multilaterals?,” January 9, 2018.
10. 10. Kirstin R.W. Mathews and Vivian Ho, “The Grand Impact of the Gates Foundation,” EMBO Reports 9, no. 5 (2008): 409–12.
11. 11. “Funding to Universities by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,” University Philanthropy Research by the Cape Partnership, August 2021.
12. 12. Julia Belluz, “The Media Loves the Gates Foundation. These Academics Are More Skeptical,” Vox, June 10, 2015.
13. 13. Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008).
14. 14. Kavita Ramdas, “Philanthrocapitalism Is Not Social Change Philanthropy,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2011.
15. 15. Linsey McGoey, No Such Thing As a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (London: Verso, 2015), 24.
16. 16. Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (New York: Vintage Books, 2019), 3–11.
17. 17. Valerie Strauss, “How Much Bill Gates’s Disappointing Small-Schools Effort Really Cost,” The Washington Post, June 9, 2014.
18. 18. Diane Ravitch, “Carol Burris: The Think Tank That the Charter Industry Relies On,” Diane Ravitch’s Blog, August 6, 2023.
19. 19. Rob Reich, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 143.
20. 20. Emma Saunders-Hastings, “Plutocratic Philanthropy,” The Journal of Politics, 80, no. 1 (2018).
21. 21. Michael Specter, “Seeds of Doubt,” The New Yorker, August 18, 2014.
22. 22. Vandana Shiva, “Bill Gates’ Global Agenda and How We Can Resist His War on Life,” Counterpunch, September 24, 2020.
23. 23. Peter Buffett, “The Charitable-Industrial Complex,” The New York Times, July 26, 2013.
24. 24. Alex Friedman and Julie Sunderland, “How to Fix the Gates Foundation,” Project Syndicate, May 28, 2021.
25. 25. Transcript of interview with Mark Suzman, “Reflecting on the Evolution of the Gates Foundation: A Q&A with Mark Suzman,” February 4, 2022.
26. 26. Sabah Hamid, “Why I Resigned from the Gates Foundation,” The New York Times, September 26, 2019.
27. 27. “All Sources of Funding from Private Funders to All Locations in India, All Years,” Candid.
28. 28. Narendra Modi (website), “PM Modi’s Candid Conversation with Bill Gates,” press release, March 29, 2024.
29. 29. Manjari Mahajan, “Philanthropy and the Nation-State in Global Health: The Gates Foundation in India,” Global Public Health 13, no. 10 (2018): 1357–68.
30. 30. Manoj Mohanan et al., “Effect of A Large-Scale Franchising and Telemedicine Program on Childhood Diarrhea and Pneumonia Outcomes in India,” Health Affairs 35, no. 10 (2016): 1747–1939.
31. 31. Angus Chen, “A New Health Care Project Won Awards. But Did It Really Work?” NPR, October 22, 2016.
32. 32. Alexander Burns and Nicholas Kulish, “Bloomberg’s Billions: How the Candidate Built an Empire of Influence,” The New York Times, February 15, 2020.
33. 33. Alexa Cortés Culwell and Heather McLeod Grant, “The Giving Code: Silicon Valley Nonprofits and Philanthropy,” Open Impact, October 2016.
34. 34. Steve Snyder, “Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Lays Off Members of Education Team,” The 74, August 9, 2023.
35. 35. Sophie Alexander and Mary Biekert, “Jack Dorsey’s Celebrity Network Is Helping Him Give Away Billions,” Bloomberg, November 21, 2021.
36. 36. Pierre Omidyar, “How I Did It: EBay’s Founder on Innovating the Business Model of Social Change,” Harvard Business Review, September 2011.
37. 37. David Gelles, “How Tech Billionaires Hack Their Taxes with a Philanthropic Loophole,” The New York Times, August 3, 2018.

Chapter 8: The Gates Keepers

This chapter draws partly from my own previous reporting for articles published in 2014, 2017 and 2021.

1. 1. Anupreeta Das and Craig Karmin, “This Man’s Job: Make Bill Gates Richer,” The Wall Street Journal, September 19, 2014.
2. 2. Craig Torres, “Convicted Felons Handle Gates Fortune,” The Wall Street Journal, March 7, 1993.
3. 3. Andy Serwer, “One Family’s Finances: How Bill Gates Manages His Money,” Fortune, March 15, 1999.
4. 4. Margaret Newkirk, “Gates Foiled by Georgia’s Powerful Vidalia Onion Regulators,” Bloomberg, August 4, 2015.
5. 5. Anupreeta Das and Craig Karmin, “Two VIP Billionaires Teamed Up to Run Hotels. It’s Been a Slog,” The Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2017.
6. 6. Eric O’Keefe, “Farmer Bill,” The Land Report, January 11, 2021.
7. 7. Samuel Stebbins, “Who Owns the Most Land in America? Jeff Bezos and John Malone Are Among Them,” USA Today, November 25, 2019.
8. 8. April Glaser, “McDonald’s French Fries, Carrots, Onions: All of the Foods that Come from Bill Gates Farmland,” NBC News, June 9, 2021.
9. 9. Anupreeta Das, Emily Flitter, and Nicholas Kulish, “A Culture of Fear at the Firm That Manages Bill Gates’s Fortune,” The New York Times, May 26, 2021.
10. 10. Das, Flitter, and Kulish, “A Culture of Fear.”
11. 11. Adam Farence, “Pony Power: Bill Gates Sells Wellington Equestrian Estate for $26M,” The Real Deal, March 4, 2022.
12. 12. Karen Matthews, “Rare First Printing of U.S. Constitution Sells for $43M,” AP, November 19, 2021.
13. 13. Brian Bandell, “Billionaire Bill Gates Buys Up All of This South Florida Street,” South Florida Business Journal, July 5, 2016.

Chapter 9: Cancel Bill

1. 1. Ronan Farrow, “How an Elite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein,” The New Yorker, September 6, 2019.
2. 2. Brian Schwartz, “Years After Serving Jail Time, Jeffrey Epstein Found a Way to Meet with Microsoft’s Bill Gates to Discuss Philanthropy,” CNBC, August 14, 2019.
3. 3. Also see: Robert M. Braceras, Jennifer L. Chunias, and Kevin P. Martin, “Report Concerning Jeffrey Epstein’s Interactions with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” Goodwin Procter LLP, January 10, 2020.
4. 4. Michelle G. Kurilla, “Harvard Asked Its Lawyers to Review the University’s Ties to Epstein. Here’s What They Found,” The Harvard Crimson, May 2, 2020.
5. 5. Katherine Moussouris, Holly Muenchow and Dana Piermarini v. Microsoft Corporation Case No. 2:15-cv-01483-JLR.
6. 6. Dave Gershgorn, “Amid Employee Uproar, Microsoft Is Investigating Sexual Harassment Claims Overlooked by HR,” Quartz, April 4, 2019.
7. 7. Emily Glazer, et al., “Bill Gates Left Microsoft Board Amid Probe into Prior Relationship with Staffer,” The Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2021.
8. 8. Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 58–61.
9. 9. Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories (New York: Oxford Academic, 2014), 54–72.
10. 10. Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Karen M. Douglas, “Conspiracy Theories as Part of History: The Role of Societal Crisis Situations,” Memory Studies 10, no. 3 (2017): 323–33.
11. 11. Bill Gates, “The Next Outbreak? We’re Not Ready,” March 18, 2015.
12. 12. Ike Sriskandarajah, “Where Did the Microchip Vaccine Conspiracy Theory Come from Anyway?” Reveal, June 5, 2021.
13. 13. Jay Greene, “The Billionaire Who Cried Pandemic,” The Washington Post, May 2, 2020.
14. 14. Matthew Smith, “World’s Most Admired,” YouGov, September 22, 2020.
15. 15. KK Ottesen, “Bill Gates on Climate Change, Covid and Whether He Has Too Much Influence,” The Washington Post, February 26, 2021.

Chapter 10: Why We Hate Billionaires

1. 1. Kathryn Kvas and Vignesh Seshadri, “How to Become a Billionaire in 2021,” The New Yorker, March 18, 2021.
2. 2. Carl M. Cannon, “Billionaires: Have Americans’ Views Changed?” RealClear Opinion Research, July 29, 2022.
3. 3. Jesse Walker, Stephane J. Tepper, and Thomas Gilovich, “People Are More Tolerant of Inequality When Expressed in Groups,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 43 (2021).
4. 4. Jeff Grabmeier, “People Love the Billionaire, but Hate the Billionaires’ Club,” Ohio State News, October 18, 2021.
5. 5. U.S. Census Bureau, “Real Median Household Income in the United States,” FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, August 16, 2022.
6. 6. Martin-Brehm Christensen, et al., “Survival of the Richest: How We Must Tax the Super-Rich Now to Fight Inequality,” Oxfam International, January 2023.
7. 7. John Weinberg, “The Great Recession and Its Aftermath,” Federal Reserve History, November 22, 2013.
8. 8. U.S. Census Bureau, “Real Median Household Income in the United States.”
9. 9. Justin Wolfers, “Piketty’s Book on Wealth and Inequality Is More Popular in Richer States,” The New York Times, April 23, 2014.
10. 10. Idrees Kahloon, “Thomas Piketty Goes Global,” The New Yorker, March 2, 2020.
11. 11. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “Exploding Wealth Inequality in the United States,” Washington Center for Equitable Growth, October 20, 2014.
12. 12. Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, “The Rise of Income and Wealth Inequality in America: Evidence from Distributional Macroeconomic Accounts,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 34, no. 4 (2020): 3–26.
13. 13. Ben White, “Soak the Rich? Americans Say Go for It,” Politico, February 4, 2019.
14. 14. Richard A. Epstein, “A Plague of Billionaires?” Hoover, April 18, 2022.
15. 15. Warren E. Buffett, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” The New York Times, August 14, 2011.
16. 16. Marc Benioff, “We Need a New Capitalism,” The New York Times, October 10, 2019.
17. 17. Kaya Yurieff, “Mark Zuckerberg on Billionaires: ‘No One Deserves to Have That Much Money,” CNN Business, October 4, 2019.
18. 18. Ben White, “Corporate America Freaks Out Over Elizabeth Warren,” Politico, October 23, 2019.
19. 19. Eli Saslow, “The Moral Calculations of a Billionaire,” The Washington Post, January 30, 2022.
20. 20. William H. Gates and Chuck Collins, Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortune (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003; repr. 2004).
21. 21. Federal Reserve, Survey of Consumer Finances.
22. 22. Kerry A. Dolan, “America’s Self-Made Women List 2023,” Forbes, June 1, 2023.
23. 23. Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
24. 24. Alan B. Krueger, “The Rise and Consequences of Inequality in the United States,” Remarks as Prepared for Delivery, January 12, 2012.
25. 25. Raj Chetty et al., “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940,” Science 356, no. 6336 (2017): 398–406.
26. 26. Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman, “Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges,” Opportunity Insights, October 2023.
27. 27. Michael Dell, Direct from Dell: Strategies that Revolutionized an Industry (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999), 3–11.
28. 28. Catherine Clifford, “How a College Dropout Grew Whole Foods into the Company Amazon Just Bought for $13.7 billion,” CNBC, August 28, 2017. Also see: Nick Paumgarten, “Food Fighter,” The New Yorker, December 27, 2009.
29. 29. Henry S. Farber, et al., “Unions and Inequality over the Twentieth Century: New Evidence from Survey Data,” NBER Working Paper No. 24587, May 2018.
30. 30. Travis Baker, “New Highway Tunnel Means Bill Gates Gets What He Wants,” Kitsap Sun, December 22, 2006.
31. 31. Seattle Post-Intelligencer staff, “Gates’ Money Wasn’t Enough,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 4, 2004.
32. 32. Richard Wilk and Beatriz Barros, “Private Planes, Mansions and Superyachts: What Gives Billionaires Like Abramovich and Musk Such a Massive Carbon Footprint,” The Conversation, February 16, 2021.
33. 33. Michael Waldman, “Billionaires Provided 15 Percent of Funding for the Midterms,” Brennan Center for Justice, November 22, 2022.
34. 34. Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Shane Goldmacher, “Koch Network Raises Over $70 Million for Push to Sink Trump,” The New York Times, June 29, 2023.
35. 35. Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski, “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire,” ProPublica, April 6, 2023.
36. 36. Justin Birnbaum, “America’s Richest Sports Team Owners 2022,” Forbes, September 27, 2022.
37. 37. Michael Kavate, “A Half-Billion from Detroit’s ‘Shadow Mayor’ Latest Sign of Donors’ Power in Cities,” Inside Philanthropy, March 30, 2021.
38. 38. Jeff Ernsthausen and Justin Elliott, “How a Tax Break to Help the Poor Went to NBA Owner Dan Gilbert,” ProPublica, October 24, 2019.

Conclusion

1. 1. World Health Statistics 2022: Monitoring Health for the SDGs, Sustainable Development Goals,” May 19, 2022.
2. 2. World Malaria Report 2022, December 8, 2022.
3. 3. Ray Sipherd, “Bill Gates: For Polio the Endgame Is Near,” CNBC, December 14, 2017.
4. 4. Apoorva Mandavilli, “A Multibillion-Dollar Plan to End Polio, and Soon,” The New York Times, June 9, 2021.
5. 5. Robert Fortner, “Has the Billion Dollar Crusade to Eradicate Polio Come to an End?” BMJ 374, no. 1818 (2021).
6. 6. Maria Di Mento, “Bill Gates Made 2022’s Biggest Charitable Donation: $5 Billion,” Associated Press, December 30, 2022.
7. 7. Steven Levy, “Bill Gates Is Upbeat on Climate, Capitalism and Even Politics,” Wired, March 18, 2021.
8. 8. Bill Gates, “By 2026, the Gates Foundation Aims to Spend $9 Billion a Year,” GatesNotes, July 13, 2022.