Bill Gates Explains His Plans to Close the Gates Foundation in 2045 : David Wallace-Wells / NY Tiimes

Article shared by Kul Gautam

Bill Gates Legacy

Congratulations and Gratitude to Bill & Melinda Gates on the 25th anniversary of BMGF.

Gratitude to Bill Gates for his commitment to devote the rest of his life & his wealth to achieving 3 goals:

* No mother, child or baby dies of a preventable cause
* The next generation grows up in a world without deadly infectious diseases
* Bringing hundreds of millions of additional people out of poverty & putting more countries on a path to prosperity.


What a contrast with the world's richest man gleefully putting USAID and other global health programs in the wood chipper, triggering millions of deaths & disability of the world's poorest children. And the world's most powerful leader happily pouring more money for guns and less for butter both domestically and globally.


Says Gates bluntly, "I'm sad to see defense budgets being increased, because that's money that's not going to human welfare either domestically or to help the poorest in the world. It's a tragic thing".


Having already invested over $100 billion in the past quarter century, Gates announces winding up the Foundation in 20 years, by 2045, after investing another $100 billion from BMGF's endowment and Bill Gates' personal wealth.


Gates wishes his epitaph not to be "He Died Rich".


*A master of data and statistics, Gates' moral math is inarguable.He says, "I think there's a logic to solving tuberculosis. I mean, it's criminal not to solve TB. It's criminal not to solve H.I.V. It's criminal not to eradicate malaria". And very presciently, he says: "the most important thing of all the things we're doing is the malnutrition work. If you avoid kids being malnourished, you cut childhood death in half by that alone".
*Going beyond his pet interest in global health, Gates speaks about ending the debt trap that is shackling many developing countries. "There are now 3.3 billion people living in countries where interest payments outweigh spending on either education or health", he says: "we should be doing what we did at the turn of the century, which is debt relief for all of these countries, to give them a clean balance sheet. But there isn't the will right now".
*"Well, there's definitely a poverty trap that when you're poor and you have ill health, you have high population growth". This is a sermon many of us heard from UNICEF's James Grant when he championed child survival as an effective means to control population growth, much to the annoyance of some family planning and population control enthusiasts.
* A promoter of "Effective Altruism", Gates is an incorrigible optimist as he says: "I think it's objective to say to you that things will be better in the next 20 years". I tend to agree with Gates on this - but with three caveats: the real possibility of a nuclear armageddon, a climate catastrophe, and the potential danger of the misuse of the double-edged sword of artificial intelligence.
Kul


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Summary
To mark its 25th anniversary, the Gates Foundation has announced it will permanently close by December 31, 2045. Over the next 20 years, it plans to spend over $200 billion, including most of Bill Gates’s personal fortune, to accelerate progress in global health, poverty reduction, and development. Gates frames the move as a “bolus dose” of philanthropy — spending now to maximize impact while innovation, especially A.I., is transforming public health and education. The decision comes amid deep cuts to U.S. foreign aid, a general decline in global humanitarian funding, and a shift away from the elite optimism that once fueled global development. Despite this, Gates remains adamantly optimistic, insisting that massive progress is still possible and calling failure to act “criminal.”

Quotes

“The world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children.”
“It’s very dangerous to suggest that this work is played out.”
“The idea that I could write some set of goals that somebody would either honestly try to interpret or misinterpret 50 years from now — that’s kind of silly.”
“This money should go back to society in the way that it has the best chance of causing something positive to happen.”





Bill Gates Explains His Plans to Close the Gates Foundation in 2045
Today the Gates Foundation celebrates its 25th anniversary by announcing its plans to close up shop.. Established in 2000 — when Melinda French Gates was just 35 and Bill Gates was 44 and the ...
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Kul Chandra Gautam


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