Is there such a thing as a “good” billionaire? In his 2023 book, “The Bill Gates Problem,” investigative reporter Tim Schwab explores that question in depth and responds with a resounding “no.”

Perhaps the most iconic tycoon of his generation, Bill Gates elevated Microsoft from a two-man startup in his Harvard dorm room to a softwear behemoth whose Windows operating system runs most of the planet’s computers. In the process, he became the world’s richest person for 20 out of the 23 years between 1995 and 2017. (He’s still worth about $150 billion). Then he surpassed his storied business career with an even more impressive one as a philanthropist, establishing the Gates Foundation and transforming himself into one of the most admired people on the planet.

Yet his personality, goals, and methods have changed little over the past five decades. Self-made billionaire businessmen are typically characterized by ruthless ambition, narcissism, and an all-consuming will to dominate, and Gates is no exception

According to Schwab, “He remains the same domineering, brusque bully at the Gates Foundation that he had been at Microsoft, a cauldron of passions that freely erupts.” Worse, his drive for power and belief that he’s the smartest guy in the room have led him to contort, for the worse, the fields in which he has focused his major charitable efforts — world health, agriculture and education.

The reality of Gates is at odds with his public persona. While at Microsoft, he was seen as a brilliant, boyish nerd. As head of the Gates Foundation, he’s widely viewed as a soft-spoken, magnanimous benefactor who seeks to use his intellect and fortune to remove the blight of world poverty. That’s no accident. A big chunk of his and his foundation’s fortune has been spent on public relations campaigns to create and burnish that image.

Gates wasn’t personally a great technological innovator at Microsoft. But he was a hyper-aggressive businessman, who figured out how to piggy-back the discoveries of others and to employ intellectual property laws to monopolize the emerging softwear industry and squelch would-be competitors.

Microsoft’s anti-competitive tactics ultimately made it the target of a federal antitrust suit by the U.S. Justice Department. Under a settlement agreement reached with the DOJ in 2001, Microsoft agreed to share its application programming interfaces with third parties.

Nowadays hardly anyone remembers the robber-baron incarnation of Bill Gates. Instead, they think of his herculean charitable efforts. He certainly isn’t the first super-rich person to use philanthropy to whitewash the dark chapters of his business career. John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford and the Sackler family, among others, had already traveled that well-trodden path.

But no one before had done it on the scale of Bill Gates, with a charitable foundation endowed at $54 billion. Schwab’s beef with Gates, however, is less the man’s self-created mythology than with the way he’s used his own and the public’s money (contributed through lavish tax breaks and governmental funding) to impose top-down “solutions” to the world’s, and particularly the Global South’s, most urgent problems – disease, famine and illiteracy.

By acting with the smug arrogance worthy of a viceroy of the British Raj, Gates and his small coterie of highly paid expert consultants, have foisted “go big” programs on the Third World that have ignored the unique geographical, climatic, social and political factors of the beneficiary countries, and have crowded out smaller, but potentially more promising, locally sourced programs that are actually designed to deal with the problems of the poor at the retail level.

For instance, in public health, Gates decided that vaccinations for common infectious diseases, such as malaria, HIV and respiratory infections, were a magic bullet.

Though vaccinations can certainly save many lives, they’re effective only if widely administered. Nonetheless, rather than working with vaccine researchers to come up with cures that would be placed in the public domain, manufactured locally in countries where they were to be administered, and distributed at low cost to large populations, Gates opted to partner with major pharmaceutical companies, which would own the patents and could charge what the market would bear. Big-pharma pricing structures made important vaccines, notably those for COVID, largely unavailable in many of the world’s poorer countries, resulting in millions of avoidable deaths.

In the field of agriculture, especially in Africa, Gates has promoted genetically modified organisms which can withstand the application of chemical pesticides. GMO seeds can only be purchased from the manufacturer and cannot be reused from one season to the next. Not only are the GMO seeds, produced and marketed by industry giants like Monsanto (Bayer), more expensive to buy, they are designed to be used with other costly inputs, such as chemical fertilizers and pesticides, in large-scale monoculture farming. Small farmers, who can’t afford the purchase them, are quickly forced off their land, increasing their poverty. Moreover, monoculture and the repeated application of chemicals to the soil have been shown to have adverse environmental effects and ultimately to lead to lower crop yields.

In education, Gates, himself the product of private schools, championed the use of technology, common-core curricula, standardized testing, public charter schools, and merit pay for teachers as the panacea for all that ails public schools in the U.S. His boundless faith in these solutions belied the data as to their effectiveness, and push-back from a coalition of parents and teachers ultimately stymied his drive to make them the common currency of American public education.

“Hubris,” the Greek word for extreme or excessive pride, fits Bill Gates like a glove. Schwab’s ultimate question is whether we, as a country, want to leave it to a handful of prideful billionaires like Gates to decide how to spend the scarce public funds we allocate towards the amelioration of society’s greatest ills.

Elliott Epstein is a trial lawyer with Shukie & Segovias in Lewiston. His Rearview Mirror column, which has appeared in the Sun Journal for 17 years, analyzes current events in an historical context. He is also the author of “Lucifer’s Child,” a book about the notorious 1984 child murder of Angela Palmer. He may be contacted at epsteinel@yahoo.com

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