On May 13, 2024, Melinda Gates announced her departure, along with $12.5 billion, from the organization that will be known moving forward simply as “the Gates Foundation.” With the foundation in transition, the time is ripe to take stock of the role it played in the world during its first quarter century. Two new books—Tim Schwab’s The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire and Amy Schiller’s The Price of Humanity: How Philanthropy Went Wrong—And How to Fix It—offer some of the most extensive critical assessments yet of the Gates Foundation’s philosophy and the political implications of the mammoth power it has grown to wield over the lives of everyday people across the globe.
The Gates Foundation’s early reputation was glistening. In 2005 alone, Bill was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and the couple appeared with Bono on the cover of Time, where they were deemed “The Good Samaritans” and crowned Persons of the Year.
This was in some respects a historical anomaly. Controversy tends to follow American foundations of this scale, particularly at their beginnings. John D. Rockefeller was famously denied a charter by the US Congress when he attempted to incorporate his foundation in 1913; policymakers saw a ploy to distract from Standard Oil’s ongoing antitrust case and had little faith that the robber baron would truly segment his foundation’s work from the interests of his business. The Ford Foundation, in the decades after it became the country’s largest, following Henry Ford’s death in 1947, was the subject of continuous political scrutiny, culminating in a set of legal reforms in 1969 that placed new restrictions on the biggest foundations.
Yet when Bill and Melinda Gates launched their foundation in 2000—their reputations smarting, like Rockefeller’s a century earlier, from a high-profile antitrust investigation—little pushback followed. Writing in the 1990s, the historian of philanthropy Peter Dobkin Hall concluded that the post-1980 era was one of unusual acceptance of philanthropic power, perhaps unprecedented since the 1700s. Rather than scrutinizing, Hall wrote, “the power centers all along the political spectrum are busying themselves with establishing and building up the privatized instrumentalities of public influence.” The spirit of the times was perhaps best embodied in Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World, the 2008 treatise by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green arguing for a privatized, business-inspired approach to solving social problems. (Bill Clinton wrote the foreword.)