The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is the world’s largest private charity, with more than 1,800 employees and a $67 billion endowment—larger than most countries’ GDPs.
The foundation frequently makes news for its work tackling poverty and public health crises, including initiatives to eradicate polio and help impoverished farmers deal with climate change.
On Tuesday, journalist Tim Schwab published a new book, The Bill Gates Problem, which argues that the charity doesn’t merit its high esteem. Rather, in Schwab’s view, the foundation is steered by the whims of its male founder, and though it operates at the scale of a nation state, it does so with limited transparency.
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“The foundation, as a rule, does not put itself or its leaders in a position where they might be pushed to explain contradictions in its work or forced to answer critical questions,” Schwab writes. None of the philanthropy’s executives would speak to him, nor did “anyone at the Gates Foundation.” (The organization also did not respond to an inquiry from The Daily Beast.)
Bill Gates has suffered a series of public relations disasters in recent years, particularly over his ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. (His spokesperson has said he “regrets ever meeting with Epstein and recognizes it was an error in judgment to do so.”)
He and Melinda French Gates divorced in 2021, in part, she later explained, because of his Epstein meetings. At the time, the couple announced that they would continue running their foundation jointly for a trial period of two years; if they failed to get along, she would step away. She remains involved today.
Speaking to The Daily Beast, Schwab said he landed on the subject of his book near the end of a challenging career as a freelance journalist. He sought a writing fellowship that would let him spend a significant amount of time investigating one topic. In Gates, he quickly found his muse.
Below, Schwab offers more insight into his process and findings. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Daily Beast: How did you home in on the subject of the book?
Tim Schwab: I looked across the media landscape of big missed topics by other journalists, and the Gates Foundation was just this kind of flashing siren. It has so much money, and it has so much influence on the world stage. Journalists write about it all the time, but it's almost always in this kind of one-sided fashion, just describing what the Gates Foundation is doing, its big donations and ambitious goals. It's not really understanding it as a structure of power that we should challenge or scrutinize.
The Daily Beast: What was your initial reporting process?
Tim Schwab: In 2019, I wanted to do a straight follow-the-money project, which was looking at every charitable grant the Gates Foundation had ever given away. The problem was, at that time, it was very difficult to do that, because all of the Gates’ charitable grants were not in one place. They weren't in one Excel spreadsheet. So my first email that I sent was to the Gates Foundation, asking if they could give me a list. And this turned into a months long back and forth, with me constantly reminding them that if they didn't just hand over this information, I would construct it myself. The information was available in their annual filings, it would just be a lot of work to extract all that data and put it into a spreadsheet.
The Daily Beast: What were some of your early findings?
It’s a paradox probably for most people, but the foundation is actually donating money to private companies. I looked at how much money Gates had given to the news media, how much money Gates was giving to companies in which the Gates Foundation itself had shareholding positions. Later on, as I got the book contract and started writing, I went a lot deeper and did a lot more work trying to get inside sources.
The Daily Beast: Was it difficult persuading people to talk?
Tim Schwab: Researchers talk about the “Bill Chill,” which is this chilling effect wherein people are afraid to bite the hand that feeds them. And because Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation fund so many groups, many of the people and institutions that know the Gates Foundation best are afraid to speak out for fear of losing funding or some kind of professional consequences. I reached out to a lot of current and former employees. Probably the most common response I got from people was along the lines of “Sorry Tim, I signed an NDA,” which was just astonishing to me. This is a humanitarian body that gets all kinds of tax benefits. Why would it have this culture of secrecy that some employees as they leave the foundation are required to sign NDAs?
The Daily Beast: Once you did more work on the foundation’s expenditures, was there anything particularly revelatory you found?
Tim Schwab: One analysis I did was looking at how much money Gates is giving to rich nations versus poor nations. It turns out the Gates Foundation gives very little money to these poor nations, almost all of its funding—almost 90 percent of it—is actually going to wealthy nations. This is sort of a quintessentially colonial model, where it’s funding the rich to help the poor.
The Daily Beast: Can you say more about that? When you say they’re funding rich nations, what does that look like? We’re talking about NGOs based in Washington, DC, for example?
Tim Schwab: The Gates Foundation is funding universities, think tanks, NGOs, news, media, even governments. And most of that funding is going into wealthy nations, mostly to the United States, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. For example, I looked at the Gates Foundation's work in India, where it has a sprawling group of public health initiatives in two of the poorest states. But much of the work it’s doing there is organized through a Canadian university and through an American aid group.
The Daily Beast: Why is that problematic? Is it less effective?
Tim Schwab: I think it’s problematic on a number of different levels. It is essentially kind of a colonial model. It’s not empowering the poor people on the ground to solve their own problems. The foundation has this half-billion-dollar headquarters in Seattle. And it's Bill Gates, it’s his staff of MBAs and pharmaceutical industry alums. There are McKinsey consultants and Boston Consulting Group staffers. And the Gates model is sitting in these war rooms and figuring out how to solve the problems of poor people. So there's a question of whether it's really empowering or disempowering as a model of change. There’s also an enormous amount of cost in the funding model. If the foundation is putting billions of dollars into groups based in Washington, DC, that means high-priced salaries, that means expensive real estate—very large sums of money just get lost in the administrative bureaucracy.
The Daily Beast: Are there elements of their work that you were impressed by, where you actually think they are making a real positive impact?
Tim Schwab: One of the questions I asked a lot of sources is what they thought the biggest accomplishments of the Gates Foundation are, and almost everyone just kind of gestured generally to the money they're giving away, or how they’re making the world pay attention to poverty—that Bill Gates is putting his celebrity, his bully pulpit, behind these diseases. A number of sources also talked about a meningitis vaccine that the Gates Foundation helped fund. And so it’s not that the Gates Foundation has never done anything good or has never helped people. It’s not even that the Gates Foundation has never saved lives. It’s that the Gates Foundation is operating in a totally unaccountable, undemocratic, and non-transparent manner.
The Daily Beast: Were there any questions that were unanswered for you, even after reporting the book?
Tim Schwab: Oh, there's so many questions that remain unanswered. You know, how is the Gates Foundation going to spend all the money that might be coming down the pike? Warren Buffett and Bill Gates supposedly are going to be giving most of their private wealth to the Gates Foundation when they die. If that’s the case, you're talking about, you know, $100 billion or $200 billion. How are they possibly going to be able to spend that money? The Gates Foundation is mostly in the business of giving money away, but its endowment is already growing every year, since it’s generating billions of dollars in investment income
The Daily Beast: One of the things I found interesting in the book was your argument that too much money is in some ways a hindrance, because by law the foundation has to give away at least 5 percent of its endowment per year.
Tim Schwab: Yes, it does. There aren’t many checks or balances around private philanthropy, but one rule we do have is that charities actually have to give away money. To the Gates Foundation, that's this huge spending burden. They have to get billions of dollars out the door every year. A big chunk of money gets eaten up just by all the administrative bureaucracy. [Editor’s note: the organization spent $807 million on operational expenditures last year.]
The Gates Foundation has become bigger and bigger to try to manage all of its charitable relationships. So today, it has nearly 2000 employees, you know, a never-ending stream of professional consultants that are coming in and out of the foundation. It sounds odd to say that it's hard to give money away or to give money away effectively. But the way that the Gates Foundation does it, I think, is particularly ineffective.
The Daily Beast: Can you elaborate on that a little more?
Tim Schwab: The foundation isn’t just writing checks to its charitable recipients. It's giving them a check and a checklist of things to do that align with the Gates Foundation's preordained priorities and agenda. And, you know, grant recipients that I talked to said they have to almost hire a full-time employee just to manage the relationship with Gates, because there are so many phone calls and emails and requests for information.
The Daily Beast: Is there anything I didn't ask you about that you want to highlight from the book?
Tim Schwab: One thing that was surprising to me was this issue of taxes. You know, we give billions of dollars in tax breaks to Bill and Melinda French Gates because they donate money to their private foundation. At the same time, governments around the world are contributing billions of dollars to help support some of the Gates Foundation's largest charitable projects. These massive public-private partnerships do things like distribute vaccines and medicines to poor people. So all of us taxpayers are really on the hook. Bill Gates, in a sense, is spending our money. And to me, that's a real trigger for accountability. If he's spending our money, we should have a say.
