Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates has donated over $36,854,000,000 in his lifetime

youhavetocit.com

55 pointscyang0840 comments

Damn it, we just went over this article on HN a few days ago. The numbers are wrong, and if you correct the male circumcision number to 18.5 million rather than billion, the total drops by half.

See previous submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5191094

First I've seen this, but that donation jumped out at me immediately. How could a male circumcision program possibly use all of $18 billion?! 18 million makes much more sense.

I think the Gates Foundation is doing some amazing work.

But, uh, this blog post doesn't seem very well researched. It lists $18.5 billion for male circumcision in Africa, when the correct number is $18.5 million. Kinda makes me question the other numbers.

I imagine the $18.5 billion on male circumcision is wrong, but you are also wrong:

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Grants-2008/Pages/Population-...

That's a single $50 million grant. Back out, create a search for Africa+HIV and you immediately see hundreds of millions of grants, so I imagine the bulk of the misstatement is from conflating HIV programs with those only targeting male circumcision.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/grants/Pages/search.aspx

His TED talks were pretty good too, gives a good insight into the work.

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_unplugged.html

Yes, the donation for the Male Circumcision Consortium (MCC) was 'only' $18.5 million not billion.

The press release for this is here: http://fhi.org/en/AboutFHI/Media/Releases/081124_male_circum...

BTW, the press release says that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated the money. So this does not necessarily mean that the money came from Bill Gates. Plus, you would count it twice if you count his donations to the foundation and the donations from the foundation ...

Can someone please change the title to say "has donated", since "had donated" implies he is dead. Or that the took the money back.

That's not what the pluperfect tense implies in English. It simply means something that took place prior to a moment in the past [1]. There is still some ambiguity that could lead a reader to infer that Gates is finished donating money.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_aspect#English

To me it implies that the event took place prior to the end of his lifetime, which implies that his lifetime has ended.

"Has donated" carries the correct meaning and is unambiguous.

>It simply means something that took place prior to a moment in the past

True, but that implies that there exists such a moment with particular significance. Otherwise, you wouldn't use that tense. In other words, it leaves you thinking Bill Gates donated 36 billion dollars before X, where X is his death, an alien invasion, the collapse of the dollar, etc.

I don't know if there is a rule of thumb as to what tense to use, but "had donated" in this context feels plain wrong. That kind of dissonance is captured perfectly by this Mitch Hedberg quote:

>I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.

Like I said, "had donated" is ambiguous, however, inferring that this must mean Bill Gates either died or gave the donated money back is more than a bit of a stretch.

Well, yes, it's a bitch of a stretch because of our context, still the phrase is ambiguous, so it's better with 'has'

The phrase certainly can be fixed if it refers to some event like 'Bill Gates had donated 36 billion before he left Microsoft'

And absent of any intent on the speaker's part to contextualize vis-à-vis this prior moment in the past, it is the wrong tense.

Just to reiterate the other comments, "had" is wrong because you included "in his lifetime" to contextualise it -- this implies the period of time known as his "lifetime" is in the past, which is wrong because he is still alive, and so "had" is incorrect.

If one had said "Bill Gates had donated over $x [before he was 55]" it would be fine.

In languages English is derived from, there is also the presence of an "aspect" to a verb, which denotes when a verb ends. We carry this through in English with the difference between "had donated" "donated" and "was donating", where the action is either completed in the past, ambiguous, or could be ongoing. I don't know if this is the "proper" way to talk about it in terms of English grammar, since I'm not sure there is such a thing for such a diverse language, but it is in Ancient Greek and Latin. Your link does a good job for people who are mixing up the auxiliary verb "had" which can be a main verb, "to have" but is not in this case. The main action here relates to donating, not having.

Gates' donations are invested in problems that should have been dealt with by governments, whose tax money is spent instead on the semi-corrupt self interests of their leaders and their business cronies,[0] an economic-social structure which contributed much to the way in which Gates and other Global business billionaires have made their fortune. It's a twisted system, and conscience-cleansing philantropy by its current and past players only brings back a small portion of what should have been invested in the first place.

[0] http://www.wikileaks-forum.com/index.php/topic,5320.msg22368...

Conscience cleaning philanthropy, because he is responsible for so many deaths! Come on, this makes us sound silly.

Microsoft clippy? Windows XP update auto-restarts? The Microsoft Genuine Premium Plus Advantage Home Starter Business Pro Certified Product Activator? The Zune?

Are these not some of the greatest atrocities afflicted on mankind?

If governments use, in your words, tax money on semi-corrupt self interests then how would have taxing Bill Gates at a higher solved any of the problems you think should be handled by government? If governments are going to be inefficient and corrupt with a little money they are going to be inefficient and corrupt with a lot of money.

Because the rise of Microsoft caused malaria. Your logic here is fantastic.

"Gates' donations are invested in problems that should have been dealt with by governments"

-- What leads you to believe this? Do you think government is the most efficient way to solve these problems? Do you think Government has a responsibility to solve these problems? Why?

Based on what I have observed, government tends to be very inefficient when it comes to solving problems. Problems tend to be solved much more efficiently when individuals use their own resources to solve them.

Reading the rest of your comment, it appears you are advocating for a different sort of government/economic-social structure- perhaps a form that does not currently exist or has never existed. If so, you could simply state what you are advocating for, rather than criticizing the current system while offering no alternate solutions.

Even if you don't like Windows, you've got to admit that Gates is a good guy.

Indeed - or at least he's become one. Something good did come out of Windows after all...

Windows has been a good product for the average user since 1995, and has been great since Windows 7; it's just their business practices that were a problem. And to be honest, they were hardly the worst offender there either.

it's just their business practices that were a problem

Yes, agree. But everything is relative, right. All of a sudden the stuff they were doing doesn't seem that evil, and the hip kids from the block are suing the pants off everyone else that comes to play in their playground.

An interesting, speculative discussion would be to examine if the harm (if any) that came from Microsoft's monopolistic activities is out-valued by the good done by Gates in his foundation.

Where would the value captured by Microsoft and Gates have been redirected if MS didn't have a monopoly on the PC industry until recently? My guess is not fighting tropical diseases- but where?

This is a bad way to measure philanthropy, and I think Bill Gates would agree.

Anyone can dump money on a problem. But Bill Gates's money is still finite, and he has tried to make his money be the most efficient at solving given problems. He measures the stuff he does and sometimes finds out he goofed.

I'm not exaggerating when I say he's likely one of the top 5 people in the world at knowing how to spend billions of dollars to help people, because he has the most motivation of anyone in the world to know how to best spend billions of dollars.

Not anyone can dump money on a problem. You have to have the money first.

To be clear, though, I really respect the Gates foundation's philanthropy philosophy. They are about achieving quantified results rather than just doing something trendy.

The Gates Foundation has a trust endowment of $36 billion. Through June 30, 2012 it has made grants of $25 billion. Warren Buffet and others have contributed.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Pages/foundation-fact-s...

Unlike most super billionaires, Gates is actually actively spending the bulk of his wealth while he's still alive. Genuine philanthropy.

He and Buffett seem to share a skepticism of setting in motion a large charitable foundation that will outlive them. Hence, Gates wants to directly oversee the spending, and spend it at a high enough rate that it uses up most of the money in his lifetime, rather than setting something up in a will. Buffett even conditioned his recurring donation to the Gates Foundation on Bill or Melinda Gates still being alive and in control of the Foundation.

This is a dupe. And the numbers are wrong.

EDIT: Found it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5191094

How much of the Money donated by B&M Gates Foundation is Bill's personal money vs Money raised from donors? Not trying to diminish his donations, just genuinely curious how much money foundations like that raise form outside donors.

Depends on how you count. The endowment is mainly (all?) Gates's money, but a substantial proportion of the annual spending is funded by Buffett. That's because, rather than donate money to the Foundation outright, Buffett set up a recurring-donation program structured in a way so it feeds directly into the Foundation's annual program spending.

For 2011, it looks like the Foundation spent $3.4 billion total, of which the annual installment of Buffett's donation accounted for $1.5 billion, so a little under half.

I don't want to suggest that this has not been a good thing overall, but donations of this sort are a highly political act, and can't escape being in spite of any intention.

An interesting (I found) examination of the the effects of such a volume of donation coming from a single organisation can be found here:

http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-...

Again, not saying it's not a net good, just that it's perhaps not a perfect model to pursue either.

Haha - see the comments on the page. I have no idea where their weird twisted logic is derived from. I would much rather see the redistributive efforts occur through the Foundation than let it run through a public choice theory test.

"had"?

At least he has and hasn't just pledged to like most politician scum.

He donated most of the money to his charity, which he controls.

...which then donates money to philanthropic causes

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