Brutkey

Jeff Atwood
@codinghorror@infosec.exchange

Fuck yeah, Bill Gates. LET'S DO THIS. (Via The Information, email subscriber only newsletter, a few hours ago) https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/magazine/bill-gates-foundation-closing-2045.html

For the wealthy and powerful who want to change the world, Bill Gates has long been a North Star. His Gates Foundation and his efforts to spread the gospel behind the Giving Pledge—a vow taken by more than 240 billionaires to donate their entire fortunes—have defined much of modern philanthropy for the past quarter century. In those efforts, Gates pushed his peers to not only give more but give smarter.

And with one fateful new action this week—his decision to close the Gates Foundation in 2045, much sooner than expected—Gates has become something else: the resistance to President Donald Trump. Or at least he’s offering a model for how a smart resistance might assemble.

Between now and 2045, the Gates Foundation will dispense its entire endowment and much of Gates’ personal fortune, spending well over $100 billion. This spending will intensify his philanthropy in the coming years as the foundation’s investment horizon shifts from decades into the future to a faster-approaching one (at least in philanthropic terms).

Gates is partly making the change to spend more on health initiatives at a time when AI and biotech could vastly change medicine. There’s another obvious reason: It’s an obvious indictment of Trump and the person who has been Trump’s left-hand man, Elon Musk. The recent Musk-led cuts to U.S. foreign aid amount to murder, Gates said in an interview with The New York Times about the foundation’s future. And, no, I’m not grossly misparaphrasing him, who told the Times this: “The world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children.”

To combat Trump, Gates might’ve just cut the Democrats a big fat check. But political giving has never been his style, and why change now? The party is in clear disarray. Yet he is very much combating Trump in his decision to spend so much more in the coming years—doling out the funds directly to the on-the-ground efforts that matter most to him and to fill holes in support created by Trump. The billionaires who also want to fight against Trump might try Gates’ approach rather than entrusting their money to rudderless politicians.