“The Bill Gates Problem…” by Tim Schwab

Whenever I mention my criticisms of Bill Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, I am usually met with quizzical looks, and in some instances by downright disbelief. Now I know I am not alone. Tim Schwab’s really excellent new book The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire (Penguin Business, 2023) provides a detailed and rigorous account of why we all need to be concerned about the harm caused by Gates, and others like him (those I frequently refer to as The Digital Barons). It is essential reading for anyone who has received, or is considering applying for, funding from the Gates Foundation. Although the book is not without its problems, and it should be noted that the right wing (and digital) press has been far less generous than I am about it (see, for example, reviews by Ben Wright and David Enrich), it is a timely and salutary account of why Gates’ work has been so hugely problematic for “international development” and in particular for the lives of the world’s poorest and most marginalised communities.

I have long been critical of Gates, but have only occasionally written or spoken in any detail about the reasons for this. The publication of Schwab’s book provides a catalyst for me to articulate my own concerns, and compare them briefly with some of Schwab’s very apposite observations.

A problem with Microsoft

I confess that I have never particularly liked Microsoft’s products, and ever since the mid-1980s I have always purchased Apple devices and software (apart from also using Linux and Open Office). Originally, I think this was probably because I was beguiled by the slightly anarchic image of Apple’s products at that time, and because they just seemed easier and more intuitive to use. I have so often found Microsoft’s products (especially software such as Excel, Sharepoint and Teams) to be so clunky and counter-intuitive! To be fair, I increasingly now also have serious concerns over Apple’s business model, especially with respect to their environmental impact, right to repair issues, and cost, but I must be open about my early bias against Microsoft. That having been noted, I nevertheless retain some very good friends who have worked, or are indeed still working, within Microsoft.

My main criticisms of Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s tended to be at quite an abstract level: that it seemed to be trying to create a global monopoly of operating systems and generic “office” software; that it was proprietary and “closed”; that it was too expensive for the world’s poorest to use (which is why there were so many pirated versions of its software in circulation across the world); that it was primarily a sales-led company; and that it was generating very large profits, often at the expense of those who could little afford it. These profits provided the foundation for Gates’ enormous wealth. To put this into perspective, Gates’ total net worth according to Forbes in 2023 was around $134 billion, although the actual amount he has earnt from Microsoft is impossible to calculate. According to the World Bank, only 60 countries in the world in 2022 had an annual GDP of more than this. Gates’ total wealth was about the same as the annual GDP produced by Morocco in 2022, and was more than that of countries such as Ethiopia ($127 billion) and the Slovak Republic ($115 billion), let alone the remaining 140 countries of the world who generated very much less.

At a more theoretical level, my intellectual background in Marxist theory, the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School (especially that of Jürgen Habermas – see my The Place of Geography, 1992), my commitment to reducing global inequalities, and my concerns with the increasingly dominant power of US Imperialism (and “American Exceptionalism”) all no doubt also helped to shape my opinions about Microsoft.

In the early 2000s, I had the privilege to lead Tony Blair’s Imfundo initiative based with the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), which was charged with creating partnerships to use ICTs for education in Africa. This brought me face to face in a very practical way with the harsh realities of the enormous inequalities that exist across the world, and how digital technologies might be used to reduce these. Microsoft’s business model did not sit well with our practice, and guided especially by my colleagues Bas Kotterink and Jason Monty we became proud advocates of Open Source “solutions” and the use of thin client Linux systems in Africa. I fondly recall the energy and enthusiasm of people such as Ed Holcroft (NetDay) and Shafika Isaacs (SchoolNet Africa) who contributed so passionately to this work, and also the commitment of private sector companies such as Cisco, Virgin and Marconi who seconded staff to work with us. Since my earliest research in rural India in the mid-1970s I had argued that “development” should be more about reducing inequalities than about increasing economic growth. My work with Imfundo convinced me even more of this “truth” (see my No end to poverty, 2007).

Working in DFID at that time also made me acutely aware of changes taking place in the global structuring of Official Development Assistance (ODA), particularly the role of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs; see IMF and World Bank, 2001), and the Paris Declaration, (2005) and Accra Agenda for Action (2008) (see OECD). I felt that things were beginning to change, and that the global donor community was at last repositioning itself to try to work collaboratively with, and more in the interests of the world’s poorest countries. I have absolutely no doubt that many of the then senior leadership team within DFID believed in this agenda. Hence, I could not help but feel that private foundations that could do what they wanted undermined the ongoing global efforts towards responding to the real needs of poor people and countries, rather than imposing our own ideologies and practices on them. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (created in 2000 from the merger of the William H Gates Foundation formed in 1994 and the Gates Learning Foundation) was thus hugely problematic to me in its conceptualisation. Whilst I can understand the founders’ desire to do something different about poverty and try to overcome many of the long-standing problems of “aid”, it struck me that to create what seemed to be a parallel system was only going to make matters worse. From talking with colleagues at DFID working in the health sector, I also became all the more convinced of these distortions through the negative impacts of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, that had been created in 2000 with substantial support from Gates.

Meeting Bill Gates

In 2009 I had the opportunity as part of a small group of people working in the field of ICTs and development to meet with Bill Gates. I remember greatly looking forward to this opportunity to discuss some of my experiences with him, to explore why he had not yet really supported the use of digital tech in “development”, and to try to persuade him of the potential for Microsoft to use its considerable expertise to do “good” in the world through digital tech. Most of the people at the meeting seemed to be completely in awe of Gates. Perhaps my own enthusiasm at this opportunity served to fuel the sense of disillusionment and disappointement that I felt afterwards. 

He was so arrogant; he did not brook any real discussion. He swiftly closed down any attempt to engage in critique. He just wanted us to accept what he said as being “the truth”. He conveyed the impression that because he had been successful in business it was only right and proper that he should know how to solve poverty. He seemed to know very little about the actuality of the lives of the world’s poor. He implied that he had a right to try to change the world in his own image because of his success and wealth. He appeared to have no comprehension at all that digital tech drives global inequalities and its use can cause immense harm. In short, I found the brief meeting to be extraordinary and disappointing. 

Despite this, having heard that he was an avid reader, I remember arranging for my recent edited book on ICT4D to be sent to him in the naïve expectation that he might read it and learn something. Unsurprisingly, I never heard back…

I have often thought about this encounter, not least because it fundamentally influenced my subsequent attitudes to both him and his Foundation. At the centre of my concerns was that Bill Gates is funding development practices based primarily on his own (flawed) vision of the economic growth model, with apparently little understanding of the impacts that this has on inequality and its negative effects on the lives of many of the world’s poorest people – especially with respect to the use of digital tech. I was therefore delighted to read such similar thoughts in Tim Schwab’s critique in The Bill Gates Problem (pagination from 2023 Penguin Business edition):

• The Foundation is “… an institution that thrives on the grotesque economic inequalities that govern the globe, that counts on the rest of us to be too poor or too stupid to say no to its largesse” (p.18).
• “Why have we allowed Bill Gates to take so much power from us for so long”? (p.19).
• “The simple fact is Bill Gates doesn’t have expertise, training, or education in most of the topics where he asserts it” (p.127).
• “While Bill Gates is widely celebrated as the most generous man on earth, during his tenure as the world’s leading philanthropic donor, he has managed to nearly double his personal wealth” (p.178).
• “Bill Gates’s public persona is very much wrapped up in his identity, as a businessman and then as a philanthropist. But underpinning his success, in Gates’s own mind, is his superior intelligence” and “most journalists have embraced the Gates-as-genius narrative” (p.202).
• “Giving away money is not supposed to magnify the asymmetries in power that govern society, but to collapse them. And this is precisely why, in many respects, Bill Gates mght be better described as a misanthrope – if he does not hate his fellow man, then he certainly views himself as superior” (pp.242-3).

These are just a tiny sample of the content and style of Schwab’s critique, but based on my brief conversation with Bill Gates, and listening to some of Gates’ wider rhetoric, they resonate completely with my own experience and understanding. To be sure, Schwab does not sufficiently justify his own position, and has been widely criticised for his anti-capitalist stance, for his claims around neo-colonialism, for over-generalising based on scant evidence (despite the book’s 104 pages of detailed supporting notes), and above all for not proffering an alternative vision for the future. I would also add to these criticisms that the book is written very much from a USA’n perspective in which the voices of the world’s poor are largely, although not completely, absent. However, this was not his point in writing the book, which was above all else to lay bare some of the evidence and contradictions concerning Gates’ life, his business tactics, his political influence, his philanthropy and his exercise of power without accountability.

And the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The Gates Foundation has been built largely on Bill Gates’ own ideology, experience and practice, and it closely reflects his own approach to business and power. I have always found it difficult to accept the comments from people I have spoken with who work in or near to the Foundation who deny this, and who claim that Gates only provides the funding and lets them get on with delivering the development. It was therefore very refreshing to read Schwab’s detailed account of the ways through which Gates does indeed influence the policies and practices of the Foundation. At the most basic level, people who are critical of the approach and style of Gates and his Foundation are unlikely to apply to work there, let alone be appointed. However, even I was surprised at the extent of Schwab’s revelations about the levels of secrecy and control that pervade the Foundation for those who are indeed employed there. A real problem for anyone wanting to find out about the Foundation is that so few people are willing to speak truthfully on the record about it, and it may be that not everything Schwab suggests is therefore recognisable to its employees, or to those who are so eager to accept its funding. However, the overall thrust of his argument again seems to accord with my own experiences and those of people I know who have worked with the Gates Foundation.

The most important issue for me is the way that the Gates Foundation seeks to provide direction, or control, over the individuals and organisations that it funds. However, it is not a sine qua non that all foundations should necessarily behave in the same way. One of the potentially valuable things about non-governmental funding (be it through foundations or charitable trusts) is that it can be a bit anarchic and its recipients need not necessarily be tied by the parameters and reporting mechanisms required through tradiutional bilateral aid systems. Mackenzie Scott (former wife of Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame), for example, has a notoriously hands-off, trust-based approach that has raised many eyebrows amongst traditional philanthropists, in part because of her aversion to micromanagement (Candid, 2023; the Chronicle of Philanthropy). Her style is very far removed from that of Bill Gates.

I have often thought that the Gates Foundation is a bit like like a virus that gets inside an organisation in which is it interested, and then seeks to control it. This comparison has always struck me as being appropriate, not least because of the Gates Foundation’s strong support for vaccines and several of the large pharmaceutical companies. I have never therefore sought funding from Gates, and one of the reasons why I resigned from my role as Chair of the Intellectual Leadership Team and Non-Executive Director of the DFID and World Bank funded EdTech Hub in 2019 was because the Gates Foundation was also about to become one of its funders. I saw the writing on the wall, and was not willing to be party to this decision.

In conclusion: please never accept funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

I have written this post for two main reasons: first to encourage others to read Tim Schwab’s accomplished book to help them make up their own minds as to whether or not Gates is indeed a “good billionaire”; and second to try to encourage anyone thinking of applying for funding from the Gates Foundation to think again. In a very practical sense, the best way to decompose and decapacitate the Gates Foundation is to refuse knowingly to accept its funding. I add the word “knowingly” because it is often difficult to tell exactly where research funding comes from. This will be difficult for many organisations and researchers because of the extent that they already rely upon the Foundation for support. But is not that itself an indication of how dangerous the Foundation actually is? The Foundation will cease to exist in its present form if no-one is willing to accept its tarnished money. Do we really want a world built in the image of Bill Gates? If not, we need to work consciously and assiduously to undermine what the Foundation is trying to do, and take apart the power structures that it has created. Above all we need to forge a new development discourse built around reducing inequalities rather than maximising economic growth.

Let me leave the last word to Tim Schwab with the closing words of his book:

Billionaire philanthropy, as practiced by someone like Gates, preys on our cultural biases to disguise its influence. It makes us believe that a billionaire’s giving away his vast fortune is an unimpeachable act of charity that must be exalted, rather than a tool of power and control that must be challenged.

Tim Schwab (2023) The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire (Penguin Business) p.362.