Bill Gates vows to give away 99 per cent of his fortune by 2045

How many people did your BSODs kill Billy?

Using all his money and influence to advocate taxing the super rich significantly would be helpful.
- He does actually. https://observer.com/2024/09/bill-gates-bernie-sanders-tax-wealthy/
  He and warren are some of the smarter billionaires, they realize having infinite money is not actually very useful.
  Not to say there's any thing good about there being billionaires in the first place, but there is a spectrum.
  
  I don’t believe there is a spectrum at all. If you keep going to get to that level of wealth you have a fucked up mind. Most people would be content and stop.
  Now I could see that if you make something and go from nothing to selling for a billion then maybe, but even then I’d want rid of most of that wealth as I don’t need that much.

I'll give him credit for it when it fucking happens

Bill Gates is 69. By 2045 he's going to be 89. What's he going to do with all that money at 89 anyways, after he kept it all his life.
- These people usually give it to their children to establish modern nobility.
  
  Yeah I'm not worried about his children

Though it’s better than hoarding, a billionaire can’t even give away their money without wielding a dangerous amount of influence on all of our lives.

How about by tomorrow you sadistic evil fuck?
You may have spent billions to look pretty and nice to people but nobody should forget how he got those billions in the first place

Bill Gates deserves a lot of shit for creating the original big tech monopoly. But I'll say this about him: At least he's not hoarding his money to build a secretive compound to hold hundreds of kids he spawned with right wing crazy women for the purpose of creating a future master race.
- He could be rapping kids and that would still be less nefarious than having created windows
  So many bsods
- How do you know this? It would cost less than 1% of his wealth, and it was an objective of his good friend Jeffrey Epstein.

Gates is an unusual man who deserves a lot of praise. Most billionaires only want to build monuments to themselves. Gates has picked off a lot of projects that have virtually no chance of being funded by anyone or anything else. That's epic and legendary.

In 20 years, while still sitting on a mountain of money... All rich people are evil. The sooner people realize this, the better.
- I would hazard a guess that you live in a first world country, and therefore would be considered rich by those who do not. Therefore, by your own definition, you are evil.
  
  I earn like 30% more than the median income here. Colonisation is the cause of wealth disparity and it's disguisting but you can't compare normal people with a dude who have more money than entire countries. It's dishonest as fuck

I'll take whatever win I can get at this point. I just hope that it's actually going to good causes that will actually help people and not just bullshit money laundering "charity" shell games.
- People don't usually write public annual newsletters about their money laundering schemes.
  
  Lmao they do all the time
  
  Because people aren't usually rich enough to be able to set up tax exempt foundations.

Maybe pay some fucking taxes first, Bill.
- I'm fairly certain he pays every last cent he government asks of him.
  The problem is that the government has been unwilling to ask for more, and the current one certainly won't.
  He has been advocating for higher taxes for while though, like backing the Washington Income Tax initiative with his father:
  Bill Gates Sr., father of the Microsoft Corp. co-founder, and about two dozen other supporters of Initiative 1098 turned in 350,000 petition signatures Thursday in Olympia, many more than the roughly 241,000 required to get on the ballot. The campaign says it will turn in an additional 20,000 Friday. Gates said that it was time “to make our tax code fair for the middle class and small businesses.”
  
  He has been advocating for higher taxes for while though
  Yeah, that's called PR. The billionaires love living in a world where they can say they support something and take credit for that position in full knowledge that they'll never actually be held accountable for it.
  
  And that is exactly what he and his class makes sure of via their politics and clandestine political ~~bribery~~ lobbying efforts.

he has been milking that good will cow for decades
- And it's working. His charity is extremely visible, while the public doesn't understand how much he took and deadweight lost with his monopoly.
  It's like a burglar breaking your window, stealing your TV...
  ...
  Years pass...
  ...
  Here have a free TV! I am so generous!
  
  But his charity works abroad a lot, so isn't it more like a burglar stealing your TV, selling it and buying lifesaving drugs for third world children for the money?

Do it now motherfucker.
- It takes planning and must be done in stages? I suppose he does start with it now.
- Yeah, I mean, a quick Google search shows his net worth at 133b. 113b x 0.01 = 1.13 billion dollars.
  For context, bill is 69 yo, and the average US male lives to about 76 yo. That's a difference of six years, or 2190 days. That means that Bill would have to scrape by on just $519,000/day.
  
  That sounds an unbearable way to live. /S
- THIS. EXACTLY THIS.

Plenury indulgences or a carefully structured set of trusts that he will hold shadow control of? Either way i suspect the man sees the wall coming and wishes to avoid being pushed up against it and shot.

I'll take some

Bullshit, he's "transferring" his wealth to his own charity for tax reasons...
It's a trick to protect his money for his children.
- Not according to the opening sentence?
  The Gates Foundation plans to give away $US200 billion ($313 billion) over the next 20 years before shutting down entirely in 2045
  
  Sure. The Gates Foundation gives the money to the Totally Not A Tax Dodge foundation which quietly pays the Gates kids as much as they want. I'm sure it will be more elegant than that, but that's the basic grift.
  Meanwhile, Gates uses his reputation as a philanthropist, and all the soft power from controlling billions to further his own interests and cement his personal philosophy as the only option.
  The charity means that the American people have no control at all over how the money is spent, so the plebians have to beg at their door for money to be used in the way that Gates says it must be used.
  
  I'll believe it when I see it. He's evil and always has been.
  
  "plans"

too bad he vouched for vaccines to be only distrubted by the USA, which makes the cost high for poorer countries. people like him have an ulterior motives of what he is doing.

- what is bill gates sacrificing to do this? As far as I'm aware absolutely nothing at all.
  i think in order for this to be praised, in order for it to be good or generous there needs to be any amount of sacrifice. Is he downsizing his mansion for this? Does even one thing about his life change?
  this is just a way of buying good pr.
  
  He's sacrificing power and influence. That's what the big money people are all about, right?
- Damn, Erika must be hanging around the wrong spaces. Don't get me wrong, the liberalist ones are full of idealistic drivel like that, it's true, but any Marxist space will drill into you their famous quote:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theses_on_Feuerbach
  The document is best remembered for its epigrammatic 11th and final thesis, "Philosophers so far have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it", which is engraved on Marx's tomb.
- Bill gates isn't actually going to do this....
- Yeah
  Like the idiots who think philanthropy is an acceptable compromise to a fair society.
- Your "nothing wrong" includes frequent trips to Epstein's island. 😬
  I guess I'm just a crazy online Leftist for not thinking a nice donation to NPR is enough to even out molesting kids. I guess you want to give him a tote bag?
- I'm with you 100%.

Lol

Why wait, just do it already.
Individuals hoarding wealth is bad for society.
- Because he wants to benefit personally from his wealth and be seen as a good person.
  And the idiots will keep eating it up
  
  I mean, 99% of his wealth gone still leaves him with over a billion dollars. Might be more of a logistics and planning issue.
- Do you have a comprehensive plan on how to immediately spend 200Bn USD evenly and fairly only to the most impoverished people on earth in such a way that maximises longterm benefit more than spreading it out over 20 years?
  Also, if you sell off 200Bn USD worth of stocks in a day then you're not going to make 200Bn USD off the sales.
  
  Maybe he could have started by not stealing that money in the first place. We funded that shit with the window tax
  
  Yes, as a UBI. The average person is so poor that "means testing" it is just a waste of time and money. Poverty is very expensive - a high "interest rate" - so $1 donated today will have a drastically higher impact than $1 in 20 years, even adjusting for inflation.
  Also, Gates' wealth is now diversified enough that slippage would be minimal. And doing it suddenly without notice prevents speculators selling ahead of him and then buying back afterwards, which would essentially siphon off the wealth.
  
  you seem to be all over the thread defending gates. Do you really think this is how a good willed person helps people? by preventing vaccine patents, and using impoverished kids for testing.
  He's creating pathway to funnel his money where he wants it, his own family, with least criticism, and defended by short sighted stringent followers like you.

He has been making this kind of promise since the early 2000s, but never follows through. Just the goal post keeps moving to the right.
- While the goal post keeps moving, it's the opposite of your statement. As explained in the article:
  That target would represent a doubling in spending for the nonprofit, which has disbursed more than $US100 billion since it was co-founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates in 2000. Originally, the foundation was set to close 20 years after the Microsoft co-founder’s death.
  “I have decided to give my money back to society much faster than I had originally planned,” Gates, 69, wrote in a statement. “I will give away virtually all my wealth through the Gates Foundation over the next 20 years to the cause of saving and improving lives around the world.”
  
  https://lemm.ee/comment/20311950
- Supposedly he's already given away half, why is it unthinkable that he's planning to give away the other half?
  
  Because good people don't hoard wealth to begin with.
  He does this so people don't hate him for helping to destabilize the global economy.

Get fucked with a rusty rake bill, you helped stop the COVID vaccines from being patent exempt, among plenty of other awful shit, all for more money.
- He made windows.
- The vaccines were patent exempt, WTO adopted it officially in 2022, which the Gates Foundation endorsed shortly after Bill's initial objection.
  
  2022...I wonder how many people died to protect corporation's profits in two years of a global pandemic.

Yeah, don't fucking care. He already enjoyed it, and he's told us for years he doesn't give a shit about his kids inheriting all his wealth.
Want to make a difference Bill? Don't wait 20 years. Give it all away right now, to Washington State and its charities. (Don't worry that money would immediately go to into the greater economy.)
- Why Washington State?

Bill Gates looks so old these days.
- That happens when you get old
  
  But I thought being rich would stop that!
- On the upside, he's 69 years old. Noice funny number.

Give it away now instead you piece of shit. If he actually gave a shit he would have donated it all to charities already. It's just a billionaire farse, fuck him and the rest of em.
- he actually gave a shit he would have donated it all to charities already. It's just a billionaire farse,
  Just not his own goddamned ~~tax avoidance scheme~~ charity
  
  Yes, to actual charities.
- He is. He is already giving it all away. He's been doing it for 25 years and he will continue to do it for the next 20 years.
  You have to understand that his value grows over time and selling his stocks en masse would decrease their market value. He's been maximizing the amount of good done very effectively.
  
  His value grows from exploiting even more people.
  You keep repeating the claim that selling his stocks rapidly would tank their sale value. Let's see your math.

Bank Robber vows to give away his stolen funds by 20 years from now to charities of his choosing. He's one of the good ones! So uplifting!
- Bank robber? Stolen funds? Huh?
  
  I guess I will over-explain my snarky comment.
  I'm making an analogy with robbing a bank, something that everyone would agree is a criminal activity because:
  Bill Gates is a billionaire. Billionaires hoard wealth that they cannot possibly spend in their lifetimes and use that excess wealth to influence our political processes to get what they want. The existence of billionaires is violence, just not the sort of direct violence we all recognize.
  If you don't find that point convincing:
  The only reason Bill Gates is as wealthy as he is is due to Microsoft being so profitable. I think it's funny how quickly everyone has forgotten how anti-competitive and scummy Microsoft was during the 1990-2010s (and even today), and they definitely wouldn't be where they are today without those practices. If you believe in free markets, this should make you angry, because competition is good for the consumer. Anti-competitive practices could be seen as a type of theft here.
  A great deal of his wealth is unearned and comes at a cost to society in the form of an unfair technology market. He is the benefactor of a system who rewards those who have the most already, a system that allows your neighbors be homeless, sick and/or without basic necessities.
  Kind of like a bank robber has unearned wealth. A bank robber (who got away with it!) giving away their unearned wealth to their favored charities doesn't really belong in Uplifting News.
- Oh those poor US tech workers, living in ghettos, forced to rely on Windows XP and Microsoft Azure in order to survive. Woe is they. How could Bill have done this to them? /s
  
  Lol. As one of those tech workers I'll never forgive Bill for making slashes the wrong way in DOS.
  But also, his foundation does good work and I support it. The amount of hate he's getting in this thread just builds up the amount of eye roll I have for anyone who describes themselves as a "leftist"

~~Tax~~ Eat the rich!
Here's the thing. Even if he lives up to this promise, it's still him deciding where that money should go, and it won't be towards long term support of social safety nets for the commoners. He should just have been paying his fair share of taxes all along and into the future.
- Based on current spending, it will most likely be spent getting drinkable water to the majority of the world’s population.
  I don’t like how he got his money, but he’s been reasonably responsible with it since his divorce.
  That said, he has over $113b dollars. If he gives away 99% of it, he’ll still have over a billion dollars.
  
  He's been buying up huge swathes of farm land in the middle of the country. Not everything he's doing has been philanthropy
  
  There are books on him exposing how half of his charities are frauds. Given his past records humanity should be wary of putting this man anywhere near anything drinkable or useful
  
  Behind the bastards has a good two parter on him. I wouldn't say he's been responsible with it.
- ...or paying his employees more.
  Funny how we don't have a popular term for the portion of an employee's deserved wage that turns into "record shareholder profit."
  Imagine if all corporations were required to put a line item on check stubs showing how much you made them.
  
  That term is wage theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft
  
  Who do you think Bill Gates' employees are right now? Do you think he's still the CEO of Microsoft? Are you referring to the Gates Foundation? If so, have you got data on what they're paid?
- This is him avoiding estate taxes, change my mind.
  
  How much would his estate taxes be vs giving up 99% of his fortune?
- While I'm all for taxing the rich more than the current system of not at all, I think in the long term it would be better to instigate or modify systems so that we don't get these exceedingly greedy people going unchecked in the first place. How about a cap on the ratio between the highest and the lowest paid employee in any organisation for a start? Boss wants a raise, everyone gets a raise.
  
  I think in the long term it would be better to instigate or modify systems so that we don’t get these exceedingly greedy people going unchecked in the first place.
  Absolutely.
  The problem is that we live in liberal-democracies [as in, a certain type of democracy] where systematic mass media bias and financial corruption of the political system are ingrained from the start. It's not merely coincidence that almost every country has ended up like this. It's the inevitable trend of capitalism, a system that rewards corruption and that can't be leashed without worker power.
  The bottom line is that such reforms would be nice, and I support any viable effort at making them happen, but at the end of the day, we're asking the owning class to give themselves less money. And unless you have mass worker-class power to threaten them, their answer is going to be "no" with a dash of "protesting is now more illegal". Historically speaking, the owning class don't give up any serious concessions without going to violent war.
- Yeah but that’s communism, so no way it would’ve ever happened. The average American voter thinks they can become billionaires some day.
  
  Does the word communism even have meaning any more, or is it just something to yell when confused people get confused?
  
  "Communism" like we ever had real communism.

Don't advertise scum. This guys is trying to literally spend 99% of his fortune to wipe off all the shit he has done.
- Such heinous crimes such as:
  Saving hundreds of millions of people from Malaria...
  
  I think they're referring to Microsoft violating monopoly laws.

...and still be a billionaire.
Why should oligarchs get to decide where the proceeds of their exploitation get spent?

I've been sending his chain emails along since the 90s so he owes me some serious interest.

Is this supposed to impress anyone?
- I find it lovely that he's racked by guilt over his legacy and tries to do something about it.
  
  Racked by guilt? His company is helping commit genocide by providing AI tools to automatically designate civilians as targets for military strikes.
  I'd rather he keeps his money and uses his influence to stop that. He chooses not to do so every day.

Bill + Melinda Gates Foundation is a fun litmus test for leftists because you either have to claim (and secretly hope) Gates is a fraud or admit that not all billionaires are evil.
To the average non-leftist it is very obvious he cares about humanity and is doing his best to help it.
- Bill + Melinda Gates Foundation is a fun litmus test for leftists because you either have to claim (and secretly hope) Gates is a fraud or admit that not all billionaires are evil.
  There's no contradiction. Having that much money hoarded in the first place is a gross misallocation of social resources gained by not paying workers what their labor is worth, not to mention all the horrible acts Microsoft has committed to gain that profit. A leech who pays a few percent to charity is still antisocial and should be removed from society.
- The foundation exists because of Melinda.
  Bill is, and always has been, a sociopath. It’s a requirement to becoming a billionaire outside of inheritance. He ‘cares’ about humanity because it’s a useful vector through which to launder his reputation.
  A truly uplifting story would be if he were advocating to prevent billionaires from existing. Any society which tolerates that level of wealth concentration is suicidal.
  
  A truly uplifting story would be if he were advocating to prevent billionaires from existing.
  Hell, he has all the means he needs to get ACTUAL progressives elected. The man is a piece of shit through and through.
- What is your argument that it is not an advertising budget
- Billionaires are evil, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are all consciously evil. They're "evil" like cancer.
  Of course, many of them are consciously evil, too, but obviously that part is a choice.
- For the average supporter of the trump regime, it's a globalist conspiracy—Gates is seen as a symbol of elite overreach, vaccine mandates, and technocratic control.
  
  True. And as much as I hate to ally with a group that I see as mostly ingorant and foolish...
  If I must to choose between Bill Gates and an ignorant Trump supporter - one of the two categories has ever helped me change a flat tire on the side of the highway.
  I think they're largely wrong for why they dislike Gates, but they're not wrong that he's on the opposite side of an unprecedented self-propegating wealth gap and class war, from the rest of us.

Why not hate on the billionaires who aren't giving away billions of dollars?
- We do.
  Being on lemmy.dbzer0.com I'm surprised your feed isn't covered in people demanding the removal of all billionaires. The existence of billionaires is the problem, not what they spend that money on or what percentage they donated.
- Tankies can't have us cracking their fragile absolute values.
- Because he isn't doing anything either. He promised to get rid of it in 20 years.
  First, he's a psychopath, I don't trust a word he says. Additionally, in 20 years he'll be almost 90. Aka huge chance he'll be actually dead of old age.
  And last, you don't get to fuck the world for decades and then suddenly become a good person because you promise to stop being a shitstain in another 2 decades.
  
  He's been consistently donating his wealth for years.
  He's not saying he will do nothing foe 10 years

The most whitewashed billionaire in existence. Insane people still buy into this slush fund campaign.
Bill Gates is more evil than Elon Musk.
- How so? Specifically?
  Cause Musk is actively trying to destroy democracy and kill poor people.
  
  Different user: I don't think it's worth arguing about which is "more evil", especially at this billionaire level of antisocial behavior. What's the point? They're both intolerable, causing death for profit.
  
  Also different user. His life's work had been to create the most evil corporation the world has ever seen. The largest monopoly. It's still allowed to run and controls entire governments all around the world. Most companies, schools and government functions of many countries are completely tied to Microsoft cloud and their software and have no choice. This has essentially halted all technical progress and research on many fields because the results can't be productised. The loss and corruption is endless.
  It's been going on and ramping up for over forty years. It's still going on.
  Forty years is a good "why" for why musk is nothing compared to this evil.
- For real, but since Old Evil Billionaire is piling on New Evil Billionaire, he becomes Sweet Old Philantropist. Gates made his fortune by stabbing everyone on the back and charging them for the knife.
- What has Gates done recently?
  
  Trying to get a monopoly on vaccines through a "nonprofit" and do neocolonialism.
  https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-the-world-loses-under-bill-gates-vaccine-colonialism/
  Global health czar Bill Gates had other thoughts. Maintaining his steadfast commitment to intellectual property rights, Gates pushed for a plan that would permit companies to hold exclusive rights to lifesaving medicines, no matter how much they benefited from public funding.
  Given the enormous influence Gates has in the global public health world, his vision ultimately won out in the Covax program—which enshrines monopoly patent rights and relies on the charitable whims of rich countries and pharmaceutical giants to provide vaccines to most of the world. A chorus of support from pharmaceutical companies and the Trump administration didn’t hurt.
  Should we be surprised that a monopolist-turned-philanthropist maintains his commitment to monopoly patent rights as a philanthropist too?
  Bill Gates is about as "nonprofit" as OpenAI.

Doesn't that leave him still with something like $2 billion? I'm not knocking the philanthropy, but also, his safety net is going to remain about $2 billion dollars larger than ~~mine~~ most every other human being on this entire planet. And it will continue to accrue value at a higher rate than inflation as long as the good ol' American engine keeps on chugging along as normal.
From his vantage point, this sacrifice will likely impact neither his daily lifestyle nor his long-term comfort one iota.
It's a great thing he's doing, and I want to be clear about that. He's giving a boatload of money to charity. And I also don't know what else he might be doing with the remainder. I might be being an asshole. I haven't even read the article. I just saw that fuckin guy and the shining headline and had a strong reaction.
(Edited)
- I wouldn't for a second think or hope that he endures the distress of poverty or feeling needy given where he started - he has tried to do good with his fortune and that is good enough for me...he is doing what he can for the world around him and should be comfortable as he does so. I hope to find my own (much less extravagant) comfort some day.
- and thats the thing there are some who could realistically give away 99% of thier wealth and still individually be rich beyond belief. I hope it spawns some Rockefeller thing where the rich realize they can eat thier cake and have it to, they can be unbelievably rich and donate unbelievable ammounts of wealth, leaving a huge, arguably postive mark on history.

The sad thing is that even if he gives away 99% of his wealth he will still be obscenely rich. Multitudes richer than the average man.
- That’s not necessarily sad. It can show all these billionaires that they will still be ridiculously wealthy without hoarding
  
  Ridiculous wealth is still a hoard.
  
  I'm pretty sure a billionaire hoards by definition
  
  But they'll drop hundreds of places on the leaderboard!

He should open low cost private schools and libraries. We’re going to need them.
- Pretty sure most of his funding goes to poor countries
  
  Yeah to trial untested vaccines there.
- Don't even have to build new buildings in a lot of towns. Just renovate the Carnegie buildings that are still there.

Sure, I'll do it after I'm dead.
Or maybe not. Guess you'll have to outlive him to find out if he's just a scummy billionaire like the rest.
Someone's public relations department is working overtime so Billy boy doesn't get eaten.
- He'll be 90. That's not all that unlikely
- ? This isn't the giving pledge, which is ALSO still active. The Gates Foundation is massively increasing its budget so it won't survive in perpetuity, trying to fill a portion of the gap created by the death of USAID.
  There are many things to be mad about. This is not one of them.
- Making good the enemy of perfect.
  
  Like him buying all farmland he can get hands on? That's not ancient history. Or him monopolising vaccines? That kind of "good"?

enters the lottory
What? Is that not how this works?

Good guy bill, saw him also giving shit to Musk as well recently
Bill Gates accused Elon Musk of killing poor children as he announced Thursday that he would donate his remaining fortune to his charity
What a turn around from the 90's
- Don't get fooled, nothing changed he just step up his pr game
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielshapiro/2021/01/14/americas-biggest-owner-of-farmland-is-now-bill-gates-bezos-turner/
  
  what’s to be fooled with? i appreciate that he donates and advocates to help people with his money
  there are plenty of other billionaires you’ll never hear of and they’ll never have to hear you complain because they don’t step into the limelight at all and just horde their money instead

.... Can I have some?
- I think if you go to Africa and start an NGO working with Malaria, then yes.

Here’s the thing
The billionaires stole their wealth from us.
They think we just want our money back.
When we just want billionaire blood.
- I’d also like my money.
  
  We’re never getting it all back. They are still stealing.
  How much did they steal from your retirement accounts since January?
  If we want justice we have to make it.
- Lol. Careful with that edge, Eugene
  
  Edgy? It's a banal statement at this point, the reception of Brian Thompson's assassination goes to show that broader society enjoyed watching the owning class get shot.
  
  It’s my axe! I’ll cut myself if I want.
  But I always kinda thought Eugene was a roadie and he was carrying an important strat.

And people believe him.
- Even if he does he'll still have more money than most people earn in their whole life.
- It is an obvious lie, right? Everyone can see that? It's blatant manipulation to improve his image while still maintaining a standard of life for him and his family of a KING for the next thousand years.
  That is, if he's not just lying. You tracking his net worth daily with all the billionaire accountant tricks? Nope. I didn't think so.
  
  Hey, guys! I'll give all "my" billions I made from hard work. In 2045 HE WILL BE 90! Thank you for the great sacrifice, Sir Gates!
  https://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gates/?list=rtb%2F

Where do I sign up