The Bill Gates Problem

Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire

By: Tim Schwab

Narrated by: Tim Schwab

Length: 15 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

This program is read by the author.

New York Times Editors' Choice

A powerful investigation of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation, showing how he uses philanthropy to exercise enormous political power without accountability

Through his vaunted philanthropy, Bill Gates transformed himself from a tech villain into one of the most admired people on the planet. Even as divorce proceedings and allegations of misconduct have recently tarnished his public image, the beneficence of the Gates Foundation, celebrated for spending billions to save lives around the globe, is taken as a given. But as Tim Schwab shows in this fearless investigation, Gates is still exactly who he was at Microsoft: a bully and monopolist, convinced of his own righteousness and intent on imposing his ideas, his solutions, and his leadership on everyone else. At the core, he is not a selfless philanthropist but a power broker, a clever engineer who has innovated a way to turn extreme wealth into immense political influence—and who has made us believe we should applaud his acquisition of power, not challenge it.

Piercing the blinding halo that has for too long shielded the world’s most powerful (and most secretive) charitable organization from public scrutiny, The Bill Gates Problem shows how Gates’s billions have purchased a stunning level of control over public policy, private markets, scientific research, and the news media. Whether he is pushing new educational standards in America, health reforms in India, global vaccine policy during the pandemic, or Western industrialized agriculture throughout Africa, Gates’s heady social experimentation has shown itself to be not only undemocratic, but also ineffective. In many places, Bill Gates is hurting the very people he intends to help.

No less than dark-money campaign contributions or big-business political lobbying, Bill Gates’s philanthropic empire needs to be seen as a problem of money in politics. It is a dangerous model of unconstrained power that threatens democracy and demands our attention.

A Macmillan Audio production from Metropolitan Books.

©2023 Tim Schwab (P)2023 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

“In Stage One of the neoliberal revolution, we cut taxes, encouraged tech monopolies, deregulated everything, and built up a set of billionaires like the world had never seen before. Stage Two will come when we learn to love all these changes—because those billionaires are fine people doing good in our sadly privatized world. Thanks to Tim Schwab’s devastating account of the Gates Foundation, however, that day of rationalization may never arrive. Read it and learn the brutal truth: there is nothing altruistic about the world’s favorite billionaire.”—Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas

“Tim Schwab has written the definitive critique of Bill Gates as bully-philanthropist. Schwab uses the case of Gates to tell a compelling and carefully researched story that raises disturbing questions about the lack of accountability of power-philanthropy.”—Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor, The American Prospect

“This is not the story of one bad man, so much as a demonstration of the inability for anyone—no matter how smart or rich—to solve the world’s problems from the top down with money and technology. As this well-argued and immensely engaging account of Bill Gates’s forays into world-saving by fiat make clear, the problem with Big Philanthropy is the Big Hubris that comes along with it.”—Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Richest

Billionaires should not exist

This is such a thorough assessment of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and it shows in great detail the absolute hubris of billionaires.

This book is a must-read for anyone curious about billionaire philanthropy.

This book was incredibly well researched and eye opening. It’s a brave undertaking considering the power the Gates foundation wields to neutralize dissent in many ways. I hope it tips the scales towards a more just distribution of wealth and power. Thank you Tim!

Accurate and fair

The only way this could have been better is if the author worked at MS or BMGF. He left some stuff out but a great start to the process of scrutinizing one of the greatest grifters of all time.

Necessary outlook

Relevant, balanced and coherent approach to extreme wealth, philantropy and the way this is played out today.

Well researched & raises important questions

Meticulously researched, this book lays a path for further scrutiny of how the public entities are being co-opted by private interests. Bravo.