Why Bill Gates is giving away his money faster
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 May 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
The Foundation says its goals are combating maternal and infant mortality, treating infectious diseases and lifting millions out of poverty.
The announcement comes at a time when the U.S. is drastically reducing foreign aid commitments under the Trump administration, and other wealthy nations are also cutting global health funding.
But in an interview with NPR about his decision, Gates said he remains optimistic that new scientific advances create opportunities to save lives.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All the money in the world can't buy you a flattering obituary. Bill Gates used to be the world's richest man, and he once responded on NPR to a question about how he wants to be remembered. |
| 0:11.9 | Here's another email. This is from Linda in Princeton. This is from a 2010 interview with the late Neil Conan, who hosted the call-in show Talk of the Nation. |
| 0:19.8 | I'm a big fan of Mr. Gates' philanthropic works. |
| 0:21.6 | This makes me wonder about his legacy. |
| 0:23.6 | Would he prefer to be remembered most of his work at Microsoft or through the Gates Foundation? |
| 0:28.6 | Well, I don't care about being remembered. |
| 0:32.6 | Of course, Gates made his fortune as a founder of the tech giant Microsoft. |
| 0:36.6 | And with his then-wife Melinda Gates, |
| 0:38.6 | he launched the Gates Foundation in the year 2000 to give that money away. I'll note here, |
| 0:43.5 | the Foundation is a supporter of NPR, but we cover it like any other organization. By 2010, it was |
| 0:49.4 | contributing nearly as much to global health each year as the UN's World Health Organization. |
| 0:55.4 | Over the years, the Foundation says it has helped save more than 80 million lives |
| 0:59.8 | by supporting work on vaccines, AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. |
| 1:04.7 | But the man who put his name on that multibillion-dollar philanthropic effort was saying, |
| 1:09.8 | he didn't care how history remembered him. |
| 1:12.4 | In fact, he said he didn't even expect the foundation to outlive him by that much. |
| 1:16.6 | So you don't intend this as a, the foundation itself is a legacy? |
| 1:21.1 | No, the foundation should spend all its money and go out of business. |
| 1:28.3 | And then other foundations will come along. |
| 1:31.3 | I can't craft in my will some words that anticipate the problems of the future. |
| 1:38.4 | Well, 15 years after that interview, Bill Gates is speeding up the timeline. |
| 1:43.9 | Last week, he announced that over the next |
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