Interview with Tim Schwab, award-winning investigative journalist and author of The Bill Gates Problem

Tim Schwab, an award-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C., is in the news for his upcoming book on one of the world’s most powerful billionaires, Bill Gates. He has over the years reported on the Gates Foundation as part of an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship. Schwab’s reporting on the subject has appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, the British Medical Journal and The Nation. Titled “The Bill Gates Problem”, the book, which builds on an investigative series Schwab published in 2020 and 2021, will hit the stands on November 16 and is now available for pre-order. The Nation magazine had nominated his work on Gates for a Pulitzer. He talks to Open about the foundation and the need for greater transparency around philanthropies. “Newsrooms cover Gates extensively, but they almost always report on his good deeds and big donations as the world’s leading philanthropist. It is a one-sided narrative that, in many places, amounts to misinformation, if not mythology. We have never really had an open, honest debate about Gates’s work in philanthropy,” he says. He also talks about Gates’s activities in India, which he says is the largest destination for the Foundation’s funding outside of the United States and Europe. “The Gates Foundation is a political organisation, not an innocent charity,” argues the author.

Edited excerpts:

Why did you write this book?


I’m an investigative journalist, and the job of journalism, as one old bromide explains it, is ‘to afflict the comforted, and comfort the afflicted.’  Accordingly, Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation should be among the most scrutinised actors in the world by journalists. But they’re not. Newsrooms cover Gates extensively, but they almost always report on his good deeds and big donations as the world’s leading philanthropist. It’s a one-sided narrative that, in many places, amounts to misinformation, if not mythology. We’ve never really had an open, honest debate about Gates’s work in philanthropy. My book, hopefully, creates a space for that, to examine what he is actually doing, not simply what his PR team tells us he is doing.

Ultimately, I’m asking readers to see that the Gates Foundation is a political body, not an unimpeachable philanthropy. I’m asking readers to consider that Bill Gates is not so much donating money as he is buying influence, using charity to shape how we organise public health, public education and other public policies. It’s a totally undemocratic exercise of power by an obscenely rich guy in Seattle. He’s seeking to influence vaccine policy in India, agricultural development in Uganda and educational standards in the United States. It’s difficult to rationalise the power he wields in world affairs beyond the anti-democratic sentiment that ‘the richest guy is entitled to have the loudest voice’.

The perception that the majority of the world has about Bill Gates is vastly different from what you intend to capture in your forthcoming book. Are you taking stock of the likely repercussions and perhaps outrage? 

It’s true that Bill Gates is widely admired, but he’s also one of the most misunderstood people in the world. Most of the virtues we assign to Gates are fiction. We all take for granted that Gates is one of the most generous people to ever walk the earth, for example. But what we’ve lost track of is that no matter how much money Bill Gates gives away, his personal wealth continues to grow—-it has nearly doubled during his tenure as a philanthropist. Should we applaud Gates for giving away small sums of money that he doesn’t need and could never possibly spend?  Or should we interrogate why it is that this man sits on a $110 billion personal fortune, while so many people live in extreme poverty? Is Gates really generous—-or is he greedy?

In many ways, Bill Gates can be defined by these kinds of contradictions. Here’s another one: Gates is not just widely admired, but also widely feared. Many of the people who know the Gates Foundation the best—its employees and partners—are afraid to publicly criticise Gates’s work for fear of losing his patronage. This isn’t terribly surprising; of course, people are afraid to bite the hand that feeds them. In the book, I talk to many people labouring inside Gates’s charitable empire, many as anonymous sources, who are highly critical of Gates, even if they can’t be public with their concerns.

To your question, however, it’s also true that many people working for Gates have perverse incentives to act as his defenders and apologists, which could lead to, as you describe it, “repercussions” for my book. Historically, groups close to Gates have been unfriendly to me and my reporting. The foundation funds a massive network of organisations——newsrooms, NGOs, think tanks, and universities——that aren’t well positioned to independently appraise a book that is critical of their patron.

You have somewhat poked fun at the idea of “rich white people from wealthy nations setting themselves up as saviors of poor people of color”, especially in the context of what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation does. You state in an article in The Nation that the Gates Foundation positions itself at the centre of the global effort to deliver Covid vaccines to poor nations” and then spectacularly failed in that so-called mission. Could you please elaborate?

Early in the pandemic, as many governments fumbled the response effort, Bill Gates parlayed his foundation’s decades of work on vaccines into a leadership position on the global stage, essentially taking over the WHO response effort to deliver vaccines to poor nations. Gates insisted that his years of expertise and his close partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry would deliver equitable access to vaccines. Instead, Gates’s efforts presided over what became known as “vaccine apartheid”.  Pharma followed the money, selling vaccines to the highest bidders in the richest nations. The poor people that Gates promised to protect were left unvaccinated. And, of course, Bill Gates was never held accountable for these failures. He was never forced to explain what went wrong. When the next pandemic comes, the last person on Earth we should listen to is Bill Gates. The lesson, more generally, is that we need to move away from Gates’s model, in which public health for the poor is a privilege administered (ineffectively) by billionaire philanthropists.

You argue in your article that of the 30,000 charitable grants the Foundation has awarded over the past two decades, more than 88 percent of the donations—$63 billion—have gone to recipients in the wealthiest, whitest nations, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and European countries”. What does this say about the power of public relations and reality?

Yes—-yet another defining contradiction of the Gates Foundation. If you look at the foundation’s marketing materials, its conferences, or its website—-these are larded with images of people of colour, especially women and children. Yet the foundation is driven by the passions and ideologies of a white American billionaire, Bill Gates, not the needs or desires of its intended beneficiaries. We can also follow the money: almost all of Gates’s charitable donations go to rich nations, not to poor nations. Gates genuinely believes that he and a small team of elite experts can meet at the Gates Foundation’s half-billion-dollar headquarters in Seattle and come up with solutions for Black and Brown people in distant lands. Gates then calls on NGOs, universities and think tanks in wealthy nations to execute his charitable campaigns. Powerful hubris and dangerous colonialism are driving this approach, and it should be no surprise that Gates hasn’t been very effective. He is not making the world a more just or equal place.

In the book, I report that India is the largest destination for the Gates Foundation’s funding outside of the United States or Europe. The foundation has given six hundred charitable grants totaling close to $1.5 billion to groups based in India. The foundation also has an office in Delhi. At the same time, Gates often calls on groups from the Global North to oversee its work in India. In recent years, for example, the Gates Foundation has underwritten a suite of far-reaching public-health interventions in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. To lead this work, Gates called on the Canada-based University of Manitoba and the US-based CARE. So, we once again see this problem of Gates empowering rich (white) institutions to solve the problem of poor (brown) people. A whole book could be written about Gates’s work in India. Hopefully, someone will do that soon.

What are the key takeaways from your book slated for release in November?

I can’t repeat this enough—-because I’m pushing back on decades of one-sided reporting—-the Gates Foundation is a political organisation, not an innocent charity. It should be scrutinised, regulated and taxed as a political actor, not a philanthropy. The foundation is shaping public policy. It is meeting with governments and pressuring them to direct billions of taxpayer dollars—our money— into the foundation’s charitable interventions. Bill and Melinda Gates are personally inserting themselves at the highest level of world affairs, like their participation at the G-20 meetings in India. No one elected Bill Gates to lead the world on any topic, yet here he is claiming leadership over a dizzying array of issues.

The name of my book is “The Bill Gates Problem,” but it might be better titled “Our Bill Gates Problem.” It’s really up to all of us to decide what kind of world we want to live in. We can become fatalistic and decide that the world will always be defined by extreme inequality, and our best bet is to hope that our billionaires are good billionaires, and our oligarchs are good oligarchs. Or we can understand that we have agency, that these are choices we make, that another world is possible.

Allowing men like Bill Gates to become obscenely wealthy is a choice that we make. Likewise, allowing Gates to turn his great wealth into unregulated political power through philanthropy—-that, too, is a choice we make. As a new generation of billionaires follows Bill Gates’s lead, preparing to turn their outsized personal wealth into political influence through philanthropy, it is vital that we understand, debate and solve “The Bill Gates Problem.”

Tim Schwab, award-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C