Why Bill Gates is giving away his money faster
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All the money in the world can't buy you a flattering obituary. Bill Gates used to be the world's richest man, and he once responded on NPR to a question about how he wants to be remembered. Here's another email. This is from Linda in Princeton. This is from a 2010 interview with the late Neil Conan, who hosted the call-in show Talk of the Nation. I'm a big fan of Mr. Gates' philanthropic works. This makes me wonder about his legacy. Would he prefer to be remembered for most of his work at Microsoft or through the Gates Foundation? Well, I...

I don't care about being remembered. Of course, Gates made his fortune as a founder of the tech giant Microsoft. And with his then-wife Melinda Gates, he launched the Gates Foundation in the year 2000 to give that money away. I'll note here the foundation is a supporter of NPR, but we cover it like any other organization. By 2010, it was contributing nearly as much to global health each year as the UN's World Health Organization.

Over the years, the foundation says it has helped save more than 80 million lives by supporting work on vaccines, AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. But the man who put his name on that multi-billion dollar philanthropic effort was saying he didn't care how history remembered him. In fact, he said he didn't even expect the foundation to outlive him by that much. So you don't intend this as a, the foundation itself as a legacy? No, the foundation, uh,

should spend all its money and go out of business. And then other foundations will come along. I can't craft in my will some words that anticipate the problems of the future. Well, 15 years after that interview, Bill Gates is speeding up the timeline.

Last week, he announced that over the next 20 years, the foundation will spend down more than $200 billion, virtually all his accumulated wealth. And then it'll close. Consider this. Bill Gates has thoughts on how to save lives, the state of global health, and what the uber-rich owe the world. We'll talk to him after the break. ♪

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It's Consider This from NPR. Bill Gates has a lot of ambitions for his foundation before it closes its doors in 20 years. In his letter announcing its last chapter, he says the goal is to save and improve as many lives as possible in that time, to end preventable deaths of moms and babies and lift millions of people out of poverty.

On the day he made the announcement, I asked him why he decided to accelerate his giving. Well, I've learned a lot in the last 25 years, including the incredible impact that these resources can have. And so, you know, I know there'll be lots of rich people in the future and the needs are very urgent today. I want to spend at an even higher level than we are right now because I see the pipeline of innovations. Some are

you know pretty straightforward like vitamins for pregnant women or things that are complicated like ai health delivery or gene editing to cure hiv so with that in mind

You know, I'd like to make sure we do as much as we can in these 20 years. And I've built a strong organization. Hopefully, I'll be able to help guide it during all of those 20 years. But if not, it's got a strong culture and I'm sure it'll do well. The amount of money we're talking about can be hard to imagine. So can you give us...

an example of what specifically you'll be able to do in the next couple of decades with $200 billion plus that you would not have been able to do with the mere tens of billions of dollars that you had been planning to spend over that next 20 years? Well, one of the areas we work in is agriculture. It's, you know, health is by far biggest, about 70%. And then education is about 15. But agriculture, some people are surprised that

that we can do incredible things to improve seeds and educate farmers so that even in Africa, where today the productivity is the lowest and they face climate change and population growth, we want to get kids even more nutrition despite all of that. So we do better seeds, better chickens, better cows, and that's an area we're growing our spending a lot.

This idea of curing HIV, you know, curing sickle cell, a few kids have been cured of sickle cell, but it costs millions of dollars for each case. And we want to do that for less than $100. So it's very advanced science, and it'll take us even spending full speed, maybe eight to 10 years to get that done. But

I'm able to say to those scientists who are incredible, please go full speed ahead. You've mentioned some ambitious goals like curing HIV, but less ambitious goals like treating HIV have seen dramatic cuts since the Trump administration has ended many of its foreign aid programs like USAID. So does your announcement have anything to do with the government pulling back on foreign aid spending? Are you trying to fill that gap? No, my decision, uh,

came after thinking about this for several years. And it's really timed with the year I turned 70 and our 25th anniversary. And so it's kind of strange that here we are in the middle of a global health emergency where the US made gigantic abrupt cuts and some of the European countries are also making cuts because of the demands to raise their defense spending. And so, you know, I can't overstate how awful it is

to be in a period where the number of children who die is going to go back up. It went down from 10 million to 5 million. We cut it in half. Since the year 2000, right? Since the year 2000, exactly. And it was supposed to keep going down. But with these cuts, millions will die. So I'm going to try and make the case that

that a lot of this money should be restored. There's a lot of benefits that have come from this less than 1% of the U.S. budget. On vaccines specifically, a lot of your work has been about getting these life-saving vaccines into developing countries. And the last time you were on this program back in February, you told my co-host Scott Detrow that you were hoping to meet with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has questioned the science around vaccine safety and effectiveness. You said you were optimistic about

and hopeful about finding common ground. Have you been able to meet? Were you able to find common ground? No, I'm still hoping to get that meeting. You know, since then, there have been some headcount cuts. So I'm worried. You know, the U.S. medical research has been hugely beneficial to the world. So, you know, I...

I think the U.S. commitment to medical research is great. We've got to make sure it continues and we'll try and influence it in the right direction. You recently told the New York Times, the world's richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world's poorest children. That's a reference to Elon Musk leading the effort to defund USAID. Have you spoken with him about that?

No, although he's a genius and, you know, expert in a lot of things. You know, I've been out and met these people. I've been to Nigeria and seen their great work. I've been to the Democratic Republic of Congo. And so this is one where I think he made a mistake. What responsibility do you believe comes with enormous wealth? Well, trying to avoid killing children, maybe.

So, I've been involved in what's called the Giving Pledge that Warren Buffett and Melinda and I created to get philanthropists to share their thoughts, to encourage better giving, more giving. And philanthropy is on the increase, not just in the United States. You know, I'm trying to set an example by giving 98% of

The money I have, Warren Buffett's been an inspiration to me. Even before I met him, he'd written an article about how giving too much money to your children isn't necessarily good for them or society as well.

You're a notorious optimist. And sometimes when people who listen to the news every day ask me about the state of the world, I say, well, there's, you know, the Bill Gates view, which is that more people have access to clean water and education and fewer children are dying and more people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You've in this very conversation said millions more children are going to die in the coming years than otherwise would have.

And so how do the cuts of the last few months shape your outlook on the state of the world? Yeah, I think the tragedy that this is so far away means that

people don't feel it. And I think the basic religious principle of treating other people well still applies. So you're going to see me speaking out a lot about these budget things. But no, I'm not pessimistic because I think the case is so strong that we can get the money back and then take advantage of pipeline of innovation, including a lot driven by advances in AI.

Microsoft founder and global health philanthropist Bill Gates, thank you so much for speaking with us today. Thank you. This episode was produced by Alejandro Marquez-Hanse and Connor Donovan with audio engineering by Simon Laszlo Janssen. It was edited by Patrick Jaron-Watanana. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro.

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