There is a photograph of Bill Gates—easily searchable on the internet, unmissable as a billboard—in which the Microsoft cofounder and billionaire philanthropist is standing facing the camera, his lips pressed into the service of a smile. There are four other men in the picture, taken in May 2011. Gates is second from right, dressed in a blue collared shirt and one of his usual sweaters. To his left stands a man with a buzz cut. To his right, at the center of the photograph, is a man with a tousled mop of salt-and-pepper hair, his arms folded. He is dressed in blue jeans and a half-zip sweater, the left arm of which is emblazoned with the American flag. On his feet are velvet slippers.1 This man is Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender, social parasite, poseur, and pariah who died by his own hand in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019. A month earlier, federal authorities had charged Epstein with sex trafficking of girls as young as 14, and the world was learning of his lurid activities and the astonishing array of high-profile men in his network. Of all the stars that studded Epstein’s dark universe, from academics and entertainers to bankers and billionaires, Gates was the brightest. He was also the most mystifying. Here was one of the most recognized names and faces in the world, a visionary technologist who helped kickstart the computing revolution, and a path-blazing philanthropist with the lofty ambition of saving lives. Why was a deity of capitalism consorting with one of its Mephistophelian bottom feeders?
There was no convenient label to affix to the relationship between Gates and Epstein, and no label would have hidden the smudges that began to blur the clear, unsullied outlines of the technology billionaire’s do-gooder image. The photograph, which surfaced in 2019, accompanied a story by The New York Times detailing multiple meetings between the two men. Two years later, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, Melinda Gates, his wife of 27 years, would divorce him. Theirs had sometimes been a difficult marriage; for years, talk of Gates’s womanizing had whirred in the background among those who worked with the former couple. But the public airing of his relationship with Epstein contributed to their breakup. As if to symbolically distance herself from the man who had betrayed her, even though she was tied to him forever by their shared philanthropy, Melinda inserted her maiden name in between her first and last names. She would now go by Melinda French Gates. Not long after their divorce, the world learned about the affairs he had conducted during his marriage. Once a model of rectitude, Gates had fallen into a slurry of ignominy. The large tear in Gates’s public image has forced us to reassess the man we knew, or thought we knew, a man so brilliant, so rich, and so munificent that he had for decades been feted and festooned like a king wherever he went. But the tear is also a portal to a broader discussion about our obsession with billionaires, the vise with which they grip our collective imaginations, and the repercussions of that cultural and social dependency on our society.
Few billionaires have been in the public eye for as long, and in as many guises, as Gates. He was an early template for a kind of billionaire that has captivated the world since the 1980s—the “boy genius” who drops out of college to start a technology company with little more than an idea, turns it into a world-changing business, and becomes fantastically rich in the process. Gates’s personal tics, social ineptitude, and occasional condescension helped bring to life the nerd, creating room in the public imagination for a version of masculinity wherein mind mattered more than muscle. Just twenty years after he cofounded Microsoft in 1975 with his high school friend Paul Allen, the software company rose so far above its rivals that Gates seemed to levitate atop corporate America. He was the richest man in the world and a business mogul in his prime. But his relentless push to dominate the business, even at the risk of trampling a nascent internet industry, rendered him a monopolist in the eyes of many. In 1998, the United States government slapped an antitrust case on Microsoft. A gleeful media anointed Gates a twentieth-century robber baron in the style of John D. Rockefeller Sr., the monopolist of the Gilded Age. The boy genius had become a corporate villain.
In 2000, Gates began to step away from his technology career. Piece by piece, in full public view, he shed his monopolist’s skin and metamorphosed into a kind of global benefactor. Given his deeply held belief in capitalism, whose rules had worked so winningly in his favor, his philanthropy was guided by the principles of the market. There was a huge unmet demand for global health “goods” that governments were often too disorganized, apathetic, or corrupt to provide. Private companies had little incentive to meet that demand because there were few profits to be had. Gates’s charitable dollars could thus be used to support what he called “relentless innovation” that would solve stubborn public health problems.2 The success of his strategy would be measured by the numbers—lives saved; crop yields improved. Over the next 20 years, Gates conducted a global philanthropic orchestra of such scale and ambition that it shook up multilateral organizations, astounded academics and activists, and transformed him in the public eye into a tireless savior of the poor.
The primary vehicle for his philanthropy is the Gates Foundation, formerly known as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which was founded in 2000 with initial bequests of $22 billion in Microsoft stock. Six years earlier, on New Year’s Day, Gates had married French Gates, whom he had met at Microsoft and who was eight years younger. The auburn-haired engineer, a native of Dallas and valedictorian of her all-girls Catholic school, was as even-tempered as Gates was combustible, and as restrained in her manner as he was explosive. She left Microsoft in 1996 after giving birth to Jennifer Katharine Gates, the first of the couple’s three children. Two others, Rory John Gates and Phoebe Adele Gates, would follow. Focused on raising their children, she was an occasional presence at the foundation in the first few years of its existence, but would eventually put her own imprint on it, helping to steer it and becoming the ambassador for its work on family planning and gender equity.
In 2006, the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett announced that he would transfer the bulk of his multibillion-dollar fortune to the Gates Foundation. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, had met Gates in 1991 and the two became fast friends. Twenty-five years older than Gates, Buffett introduced him to the philanthropic ideas of Andrew Carnegie, the nineteenth-century steel magnate and another of the era’s robber barons. One of the most significant outcomes of their philanthropic partnership was the Giving Pledge, an unusual and highly publicized effort in 2010 by the two men, along with French Gates, to get other billionaires thinking about charitable giving. Billionaires who took the pledge committed to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropy, either during their lifetimes or at death. Coming as it did right after the 2008 financial crisis, the Giving Pledge was morally compelling—America’s wealthiest wanted to give back to society. But it was also a nonbinding commitment, effectively impossible to enforce or track, and in the end, perhaps little more than a showcase for a billionaire’s generous intentions.
Today, the Gates Foundation has enough global heft that it can shape development agendas through its grant-making, particularly in low-income countries. It donates as much money to international organizations as some individual countries do. Along the way, Gates became a so-called thought leader, courted by world leaders and cheered by the press. Almost avowedly apolitical, he warmed to the role, speaking about topics like diseases, public health, vaccines, sanitation, agriculture, climate change, and, of course, technology. Long a canny user of the media to promote his business and philanthropic interests, Gates has a phalanx of handlers who work constantly to smoothen and polish his image, like taking sandpaper to a jagged frame. The billionaire has received an embarrassment of prizes, but the biggest of them all—the Nobel Peace Prize—has eluded him. To boost his candidacy for the big prize, some of his handlers for years strategically launched publicity campaigns when the world was nearing a public health milestone that the Gates Foundation was involved in.
At the same time, criticisms of the foundation’s bigfooting abound. Its activities have been described as antidemocratic, neocolonial, technocratic, and top down, but its influence, which derives from Gates’s star power and the roughly $7 billion the foundation has given away annually in recent years, is untrammeled. Even as the deployment of his fortune took the spotlight, its source remained hidden. Gates has an estimated net worth of over $120 billion, but most of it is no longer in Microsoft shares. His trove of wealth contains stocks, bonds, hotels, farmland, real estate, and even a bowling alley, managed by an investment firm called Cascade Asset Management.
His divorce from French Gates landed like a grenade in the typically placid world of philanthropy. The two had been partners in life and largesse, and their marriage, embedded in the foundation’s origin story, was essential to its functioning. Little got done without their approval. Hundreds of nonprofits that relied on Gates Foundation grants, and foundation employees themselves, fretted about their future until it was clear that the two, in an odd power-sharing agreement, would remain at the helm as before. French Gates has since sought to build a separate identity as a philanthropist focused on women’s rights, and on May 13, 2024, three years after they announced their breakup, she said she would resign from the foundation to carry on her work independently. The story of her personal and professional journey, including the pain of being married to a philandering, brilliant, and imperious man, and her struggle to be seen on an equal footing with him, has informed the public’s perception of Gates in recent years. Like rust ruining iron, news of his personal conduct too has corroded his image and upset some of his closest friends, including Buffett. He has also become the subject of conspiracy theories about vaccines and the intentions of powerful men, as social media draws untruths and twisted truths to the mainstream. The boy genius who had turned into a ruthless monopolist only to turn into a benevolent philanthropist had shape-shifted yet again. And this time, Gates’s image had turned into something darker, blurrier, and more divisive, making him an unexpected receptacle for one of the biggest debates roiling society—the influence of billionaires in an increasingly unequal world. The evolving image of Gates is thus much more than a story about one man, or a tale about capitalism and philanthropy. It is a story about American society and the peculiar cultural and moral ecosystem within which we operate. It is a story about how we embrace images mediated by the press and popular culture, from nerds to narcissists, and turn caricatures into truths. It is about our worship of billionaires, in whose spectacular success we see so much of the promise of America, and the articulation of the ideas we hold dearest: the rugged, frontier-pushing, fortune-seeking, self-made individual; the ragpicker turned rajah; the even, fertile earth upon which we plant the seeds of our dreams, where the harder you toil and the greater your skill and luck, the higher your ascent and the bigger your harvest. Gates’s story is also a story about the swift rise of technology billionaires and their reign over our lives. It is a story about America’s long-standing tradition of generosity supercharged by billionaire money. It is a story about how billionaires actively and constantly manipulate their money and power to hide in the shadows or shine on the stage to achieve their preferred outcomes in collective goods such as education and the environment, as well as in business, politics, policy, and philanthropy. Plutocrats, whether we know it or not, are our shadow rulers—private actors shielded by their wealth—and we are unwitting accomplices to the perpetuation of this system.
The 400 people on Forbes’s list of America’s richest individuals have an estimated collective net worth of about $4.5 trillion. That’s roughly 3 percent of the total wealth held by Americans, and nearly a trillion dollars more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 percent.3 Nine of the top 10 U.S. billionaires each have estimated fortunes of more than $100 billion. (For context, there are around 100 publicly traded companies in the S&P 500 stock index with market values of $100 billion or more.) If the average American family saved every cent of its $68,000 annual income, it would take more than 14,000 years to build a fortune of just one billion dollars. During the coronavirus pandemic, the rising stock market lifted the collective net worth of billionaires by 40 percent, even as millions of small businesses and livelihoods were decimated, and others were saved only because of government help. An individual billionaire might represent the promise of capitalism, but their growing numbers and wealth represent its cruelty. Even billionaires who have committed to giving more of their fortunes away find that descending the ladder of wealth is not unlike trying to run down an up escalator.
Asked about their success, many billionaires speak in terms of the American dream, selling a curated and emotionally resonant story of their arduous path to the top while omitting the messier, more complicated, more collective, more humbling—and more truthful—details that fill out the narrative. Aside from their talent and determination, hundreds of billionaires benefited from any number of advantages they had, including their race, class, and gender; education and networks that gave them a leg up; a timely insight from a schoolteacher or professor; a plan birthed within the cocoon of a comfortable job; government research that spurred the development of an idea; tax breaks, subsidies, and other policies favorable to their industries; and the sustained fattening of profit margins at their companies, often achieved by cutting worker pay and benefits.
We could choose to challenge these accounts rather than relying on the billionaires themselves to explain the nearly inexplicable, or accepting the idea that every dollar in a billionaire’s pile is deserved, or that extreme wealth is ordained and there is no fighting the Fates, but as a society we don’t. This stasis begets several questions. Why do we equate wealth with nobility and virtue, and often view the intentions of billionaires with an uncritical eye? Why do we get so easily swayed by the public personas of powerful people, placing them on pedestals so high as to make their downfalls that much more shocking? Are we so comfortable in the prison of our imaginings, satisfied merely as voyeurs and dreamers, that we don’t want to navigate our way to reality? Is the astounding accumulation of wealth in recent decades justified by the scattershot philanthropy of billionaires, which is sometimes driven by their personal interests? Is ever-widening inequality a natural outcome of the vaunted individualist tradition of America or a symbol of dysfunctional capitalism? At what point does the argument that the fortunes of billionaires are covalent to the societal value they have created break down? Are certain fortunes “morally worthy?”4 Who gets to decide what, if anything, billionaires owe to society?
Gates is the perfect prism through which to refract these thorny, moral questions into a myriad of themes—billionaires, wealth, and inequality; technology and pop culture; media and image; philanthropy, power, and influence. Seemingly switching between an entitled hero and a hubristic villain, and every shade in between, he is a protean creature, a Zelig who, according to his critics, has leveraged his money and his fame to go from one guise to the next. Because of the way his distinct turns on the public stage map onto the wider preoccupations of our society, Gates allows us to hitch a ride into our collective self, an opportunity to investigate the cocoon within which we exist, which so confounds and conditions us that we don’t often recognize how our cultural, social, and economic beliefs contribute to and sustain a lopsided society. Looked at from the other direction, the little narratives about Gates’s hubris, attitude, and behavior coalesce into a “grand narrative” of our society, to borrow a term from the French postmodernist philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. In tracing the arc of his evolving image, we might find a reflection of who we are, and why we are the way we are. Policy is prescriptive and politics are divisive, but as a society of immigrants, dreamers, and builders, there is room for a collective rethink of how our shared values built this ecosystem, and where to go from here.