Bill Gates’s Money
Whatever the fallout from the federal antitrust suit, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will be one Gates institution left standing.
Where the Money Goes
$1 billion over 20 years to establish the Gates Millennium Scholarship Program, which will support promising minority students through college and some kinds of graduate school.
$750 million over five years to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which includes the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, Unicef, pharmaceutical companies and the World Bank.
$350 million over three years to teachers, administrators, school districts and schools to improve America’s K-12 education, starting in Washington State.
$200 million to the Gates Library Program, which is wiring public libraries in America’s poorest communities in an effort to close the “digital divide.”
$100 million to the Gates Children’s Vaccine Program, which will accelerate delivery of lifesaving vaccines to children in the poorest countries of the world.
$50 million to the Maternal Mortality Reduction Program, run by the Columbia University School of Public Health.
$50 million to the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, to conduct research on promising candidates for a malaria vaccine.
$50 million to an international group called the Alliance for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer.
$50 million to a fund for global polio eradication, led by the World Health Organization, Unicef, Rotary International and the U.N. Foundation.
$40 million to the International Vaccine Institute, a research program based in Seoul, South Korea.
$28 million to Unicef for the elimination of maternal and neonatal tetanus.
$25 million to the Sequella Global Tuberculosis Foundation.
$25 million to the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which is creating coalitions of research scientists, pharmaceutical companies and governments in developing countries to look for a safe, effective, widely accessible vaccine against AIDS.
One of the ways in which the very rich are different from you and me is that they become public property.
Just about everyone has an opinion about Bill Gates’s business tactics, products, motives, character, house—and about what he should be doing with his immense fortune.
Before he began giving money away, people complained that he was a miser. Now that he is giving money away, they complain that he’s doing it too late, that he isn’t giving enough, that he hasn’t a clue about what he’s getting into, that the projects he is financing are too conservative, too liberal, too big, too small, too safe, too risky, too conventional, too splashy.
Or they say he’s only doing it to avoid taxes, or to expand Microsoft’s markets, or, especially, to improve his image in light of the government’s high-profile antitrust suit.
“Bill Gates can’t win,” says Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation and a longtime adviser to Gates on the subject of philanthropy.
“It’s like 19th-century anti-Semitism. If the Jews didn’t mix into German society, people said they had a parochial, shtetl mentality. If they did mix, people said they were trying to pass. More important than why he’s doing this is what he’s doing. The proof will be in the pudding.”
In January, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation edged past Britain’s Wellcome Trust to become the largest in the world, with assets of $21.8 billion. Even the greatest philanthropists of the past did not give away as much in real dollars over their entire lifetimes as Gates has at the age of 44.
Gates has always said that, like Carnegie, he will give away most of his fortune before he dies. He plans to make sure his children are well taken care of but doesn’t want to leave them the burden of tremendous wealth.
