Read: has donated shares of Microsoft to his own foundation.
Maybe we can give Gates the benefit of the doubt but for everyone else, this is just a tax scheme.
Maybe we can give Gates the benefit of the doubt but for everyone else, this is just a tax scheme.
What I know, however, is that I've been missioned in Africa by the gate foundation and that most money is wasted. Most stats are bullshitted.
What I know is that Gates have been misbehaving most of his life and that suddenly he is giving so much money he won from this time.
What I see is that a lot of people like you are very eager to forgive everything he has done, all the benefits he got from it, just because he is giving back what he took.
It's because of this that we can't improve our systems. A bit of PR and voila, all misdeeds are forgiven. Bad guys become saints. And people like you will spend their energy defend the story.
Everything I've read indicates Gates takes his philanthropy very, very seriously and is having a real impact on improving people's lives. I'm sure his foundations are not perfect and have problems, but I also believe they are a net benefit to the world.
Interesting to contrast with someone like Steve Jobs. His company arguably produced much better products impacting (shockingly) many more people, but he didn't give a dime to charity (as far as I know). Could have long philosophical arguments about who had the more positive impact on humanity overall.
The problem is that he controls that narrative.
See, that's the problem here.
You have completely forgotten how bad it was.
The fact the industry and society did well despite that is not relevant.
Over the years, my views towards Microsoft have softened.
Donate $1B, and only $100M is used for the actual solution of the problem while $900M sits accumulating more wealth.
The vacation home comes 7-8 years later, after the money has been "washed" a few times.
This would be like me automating commits at a startup with some hardcoded boilerplate commit messages to make it look like I was working the full "expected" day while in actuality, I was completing everything in 20 minutes.
In the end of the day - malaria is being eradicated. This is GOOD. However, your "Foundation" actually profited while doing it and sets the false narrative that it took sacrifice to achieve such means. This is disingenuous in two ways:
(1) A $100M task is now seen as a $1B task.
(2) Brings into question the charity ideals. We, as peasants, are supposed to look up to this sizable donation if we follow media sentiment. I donate to charities and kickstarters of my own - the difference is I'm poor and I'm not making money off these donations. Its an actual sacrifice.
There are sites like charitynavigator that help those who would like to donate check how valid a cause really is, but when you are talking "Foundations" where the amounts are in figures
And you know the money is being used for this, how?