Bill Gates is giving away $310b. Can his plans survive the Trump era?
Twenty-five years ago, Bill Gates, then the world's richest man, announced that he would start giving away his fortune to save lives and reduce poverty abroad and at home. Since then, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which the Microsoft co-founder established with his then-wife, Melinda French Gates, has donated more than $US100 billion (to global health, development and education. Now Gates, who turns 70 this year, is doubling down. Over the next 20 years the Gates Foundation, renamed last year after his 2021 divorce, will give away a further $US200 billion.
On December 31, 2045, by which time Gates would be 90, it will shut down permanently. By then, Gates has committed to have spent 99 per cent of his fortune, leaving himself enough money, as he once quipped, 'for my tennis racquet'. In a letter announcing what he called 'the last chapter of my career', Gates quotes Andrew Carnegie, the 19th-century steel magnate and philanthropist, saying: 'The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.'
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