Bill Gates shows us that philanthropy in the hands of a multibillioner like Gates is a political

tool. It's something that an individual like Bill Gates can use to shape politics and

public policy to bend it towards his own interests, his own narrow ideologies. I think we should

debate whether it's good for the world to let Bill Gates be a philanthropist in any way, in any domain, but certainly not with our money, with our taxpayer dollars.

Thank you. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Tim Schwab.

Tim is an investigative journalist and the author of The Bill Gates problem, reckoning with the myth of the good billionaire.

Now, I'm sure you've seen all of these glowing stories about Bill Gates and, you know, the work that him and his foundation are doing in the Global South or, you know, in education in the United States and, you know, how he's making the world a better place. But you've probably seen more recently some of the stories

about the other side of Bill Gates. His role in vaccine apartheid during the COVID pandemic

when he was advocating for intellectual property rights instead of getting vaccines to everybody

as quickly as possible. His relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, his recent divorce from his wife, Melinda French Gates, and the

stories that have come out since then about his inappropriate relationships with women

at the foundation and at Microsoft. Bill Gates has been able to craft this image of himself as

this fantastic person as the good billionaire, as Tim Schwab would say. But in his book, Tim makes

it clear that that image is not entirely accurate and that we need to interrogate it for a number

of reasons. First of all, because Bill Gates has created this model that other rich people and

tech billionaires in particular can follow when they want to

rehabilitate their images. And we see that happening now with Jeff Bezos putting more money

into his foundation and Mark Zuckerberg doing the same with his wife. And surely others will be

doing the same as they are increasingly facing this scrutiny and this backlash from the

public will put their money into philanthropy to try to say, oh no, I'm a good person now. Don't look

negatively at me. Don't criticize me because I'm giving money to whatever cause I feel is important.

But there's another thing that stands out from Tim's book as well. And that's that these problems that we have with the tech billionaires as they exist today are not a new thing.

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