Bill Gates had his first extended moment in history at the end of the 20th century. He regularly appeared as the richest, but also the nerdiest, man on earth. His rarely eclipsed top ranking lasted for at least two decades. Perhaps bored by the idea of holding wealth, he eventually decided to leave the management of Microsoft — the source of his ever-growing fortune — to others as he carved out for himself a different place in history, a far nobler one.
This new role, nevertheless, depended on him being one of the richest men on earth. He now wanted to be seen as the most virtuous wealthy man on earth, the one who only thought about what his money and wisdom might produce for other people. After shamefully neglecting philanthropy for the first 20 years of his professional rise to the top, Gates suddenly embraced it. You could say he took possession of it, just as, when he was still CEO of Microsoft, he would sometimes take possession of companies with competing products to drive them out of the market.
Thinking about what he could do for others and giving them the means to meet their needs or achieve their ambitions clearly wasn’t enough. Gates would not be a passive philanthropist. His contribution would consist of telling people what they must do and how they must do it. Although to some, such as Anand Girardharadas or the Daily Devil’s Dictionary itself, it has been evident for some time, acute observers are just beginning to understand the extent of the damage produced by Gates’ commitment to spending billions of dollars for our collective health, education and welfare.
In yesterday’s column, we cited Alexander Zaitchik’s detective work in his New Republic article with the title “How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines.” Gates would probably argue that without the prospect of earning untold billions in the future thanks to their control of intellectual property rights, the incentive consisting of being paid generously to develop a global solution in the interest of humankind would simply fail to motivate the pharmaceutical giants who control the marketplace of critical drugs and vaccines.
Gates tried his hand at education and failed miserably. His role in defining the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 vaccine program produced a fiasco that could have been avoided. Gates is now focusing on agriculture, becoming, as a member of the Sioux nation, Nick Estes, reports in The Guardian, the “largest private owner of farmland in the US.” Gates is now particularly active in India’s agriculture, which is currently undergoing a major crisis.
In all these cases, Gates steps in with cash and convinces others, especially public authorities, to support his projects with government funding that will be used to fulfil his, rather than the public’s, agenda. He runs his experiments, always designed as top-down management ventures. He then watches them fail and walks away, presumably a wiser man. Worse, the public only remembers that he put up the cash, not that he played Dr. Frankenstein or the sorcerer’s apprentice. The devastation he creates remains. In the best cases, the damage is local. In the case of COVID-19 vaccines, it has been global.
