#BillGates:
“I don’t know that President Trump is aware that these cuts will, in the case of #HIV, mean hundreds of thousands of babies infected and literally over a million people dying.”

“I don’t think Trump’s aware of what happened there [i.e. #USAID] or Secretary #Rubio, or the #Congress.”

Examples of a demented Trump being used as a puppet by ideologues and grifters like #ElonMusk, #StephenMiller & #RussellVought.

#GatesFoundation #philanthropy

2/End

@verdantsquare

The best thing Gates could invest in is saving/restoring US democracy.

The sitting administration, like the other world autocracies, is a petrostate with no interest in addressing Climate Change. In fact, it wants to undo progress to date and deny/hide Climate Science.

We The People will hopefully vote otherwise, but the machinery of voting by the time that happens will be compromised, and that's unlikely to fix the problem. At this point, the only votes that count are those of billionaires.

If the greedy billionaires line up behind profit at the expense of all else, and the less greedy billionaires fritter away their funds on issues that are individually important but that collectively sap any hope of a long-term future for humanity, we're just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Even if we cured cancer and solved myriad other societal ills, if the Climate Crisis isn't solved, society will melt down anyway and humans may well go extinct, so what was the point?

Also, unless he puts unexpected safeguards on things, I'll bet quite a bit of this goes to using or investing in AI, which at this point means a hugely more energy-intensive and fresh-water-consuming world at a time when we can least afford it. In effect, it's an investment in hastening the Climate problem.

I'm sure he'll put some of it into specific Climate efforts, but the thing is this: While it's useful to do some amount of research on climate, we know what we really have to do and are not doing it. A sustainable future means ramping down energy use and consumption-based economics.

The problem with research isn't that it might not produce some wonderful discovery, but that we don't know that it will, and we don't know the timeline. As such, we need to start in earnest doing things we DO know how to do and that we DO know the timeline for. He is not promising to do that.

I see no serious leadership on Climate here, just a giant hunk of monetary inertia on a path that is sinking humanity. I'd love it if someone could convince me otherwise, but I'm not optimistic. I certainly don't think it's the sort of thing where just "trusting the process" is enough.

And it comes laced with familiar #humanitarian confidence, as #BillGates & his team now believe that their central goals can be achieved in much shorter time. But it is also disconcertingly definitive: The #GatesFoundation will close its doors, permanently, on Dec. 31, 2045, at least several decades before originally intended. In the meantime, it will be spending down its endowment, as well as almost all of Gates’s remaining personal fortune.

For all its pragmatic #PublicHealth spade work, the #GatesFoundation has also served as a kind of valorous abstraction—the seeming embodiment of “the Golden Rule,” in a phrase that #BillGates likes to use, & the face of an increasingly anachronistic era of elite optimism.

“You could say this announcement is not very timely,” Gates says, but the timeline isn’t short: He is committing the foundation to 20 more years of generous #aid, >$200B in total, targeting #health & #human #development.

Established in 2000 — when Melinda French Gates was just 35 & #BillGates was 44 & the world’s richest man — the #GatesFoundation quickly became one of the most consequential philanthropies the world has ever seen, utterly reshaping the landscape of global #PublicHealth, pouring >$100 billion into causes starved for resources & helping save tens of millions of lives.

The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning w. Myth of Good Billionaire
https://mastodon.social/@persagen/113431415130220166

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-bill-gates-problem-tim-schwab/1142995565

* bully/monopolist convinced of own righteousness
* intent on imposing his ideas/solutions/leadership
* Gates’s philanthropic empire a dangerous model of unconstrained power that threatens democracy

Ecosocialist Bookshelf, November 2024

* dangerous billionaire

Update. And finally, here's the new #GatesFoundation #OpenAccess policy itself. It wasn't released until now.
https://openaccess.gatesfoundation.org/open-access-policy/2025-open-access-policy/