The author of a book on Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation talks to Michael E. Hartmann about the reaction to his book, the degree to which the foundation is representative of establishment philanthropy in America, the recent announcement that the foundation will increase its spend-out rate, and what happened to the (once-)cooperative grantmaking relationship between Gates and Warren Buffett.
Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared in, among other outlets, The Nation, The Baffler, and the Columbia Journalism Review, and he also writes on Substack. His 2023 book The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire, as our review of it in The Giving Review puts it, “convincingly and comprehensively makes a case that Gates is neither who you think he is, nor is he who he wants you to think he is, nor is he who he says to others and thinks he is to himself.”
In fact, there is “a growing number of efforts that wealthy philanthropists deploy to advance their goal of protecting, conserving, and enhancing the privileges of the billionaire class by reminding us just how good they really are,” Schwab writes in a 2023 Baffler article, “Big Philanthropy.”
Gates Foundation grantmaking in particular “has empowered an army of advocates to amplify this message, giving more than $500 million in charitable donations to groups that help advance the philanthropic sector’s interests, publicize its good deeds and big donations, and set the acceptable boundaries of debate,” Schwab continues.
“Gates and his fellow billionaires,” according to the Baffler piece,
have carte blanche to use charity as a money-in-politics tool, like lobbying and campaign contributions, but with virtually no oversight. In this perversely unregulated system, the richest people on earth pay the least in taxes and are celebrated as saints, even as their donations are directed to projects that advance their own political interests, including enlarging the special-interest political power of the new philanthropist class. It’s an extraordinary entitlement and Big Philanthropy knows it needs to vouchsafe both hearts and minds to lacquer its claim on these privileges, lest Congress get any big ideas, or, even before that, the public puts ideas in the head of its elected representatives.
Schwab was kind enough to join me for a recorded conversation last week. The 14-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second will appear tomorrow. During the first part, which is here, we talk about the reaction to his book, the degree to which the foundation is representative of establishment philanthropy in America, the recent announcement that the foundation will increase its spend-out rate, and what happened to the (once-)cooperative grantmaking relationship between Gates and Warren Buffett.
Schwab’s The Bill Gates Problem “is really a critical reappraisal of Bill Gates’ philanthropic career. It’s looking at his exercise of philanthropy as an expression of power,” he tells me. “The Gates Foundation is an unregulated political actor, not an innocent philanthropy.” The book is
a close study of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation, but it’s a case study for a larger problem of extreme wealth. When we allow people to become this wealthy, we know how they’ll use it. You can buy influence through campaign contributions or through lobbying—or, as Bill Gates shows, through philanthropy.
The book’s reception has been hampered by the fact that almost all media outlets that would likely otherwise cover or review it, according to Schwab, don’t have “the independence or the integrity to really give a fair shake to a critical take on the Gates Foundation” and “much of the philanthropy press has largely ignored my book. You’re one big exception, so it’s nice to be here today.”
Including through the use of program-related investments in the pharmaceutical field, the foundation “is doing things that I do think are really unique and that are pushing the envelope in ways that maybe other philanthropies aren’t,” he says, “but maybe the other philanthropies will follow, because I do think that Gates is really a leading sort of tip of the spear … pushing new frontiers about what philanthropies can do.”
Asked whether Bill Gates is political or partisan, Schwab answers, “[W]e’re at an interesting moment to answer that question because right now, for the first time in his philanthropic career, he’s on the outside of a presidential administration. He doesn’t have the access to Trump that he’s had with every other president.” Gates, Schwab adds, provides
an interesting counterpoint as people today think about Elon Musk and the enormous power that he’s bought his way into through his great wealth. But, you know, I do think it’s important to understand the through-line with someone like Bill Gates, who himself has been a very powerful figure … in domestic politics and policy formulation, you know, a decade or more before Elon Musk.
Schwab calls Gates’ announcement that the foundation is going to increase its spend-out rate “a bit of a red herring. … [H]is big announcement was that he’s going to give away almost all of his wealth by 2045. I mean, Gates has always told us he’s giving away all of his wealth … There’s nothing new in this announcement, I don’t think.”
Schwab urges that people “reflect on the fact that Gates is constantly reminding us of his generosity, yet his personal wealth continues to grow over the years. Those two things are really in conflict,” adding that “probably the bigger reason that Gates is always making these self-aggrandizing announcements about his generosity is really, it’s about public relations—and that’s a very-important function of philanthropy for Bill Gates. It’s really to burnish his reputation.”
On the relationship between Gates and Warren Buffett—who’s decided to do philanthropy through his own entities rather than through infusions of his massive wealth to the Gates Foundation, as he’d originally planned—Schwab says, “Maybe a decade ago, news started trickling out that Buffett was not super happy with the enormous bloat of the Gates Foundation,” including “all of the staff they were hiring. They weren’t just giving away money. They were trying to become this institution of expertise,” relying on McKinsey and the Boston Consulting Group” and “just becoming this massive bureaucracy.” Buffett “wasn’t really happy with that spending.
“Then you fast forward to the pandemic,” Schwab continues, during which Gates “promised to deliver vaccine equity, his big plan working with and through Big Pharma. Instead, he delivered vaccine apartheid,” with the richest countries getting access to the vaccines and the poorest going “to the back of the line.”
As well, there was the “hard-to-explain relationship with Jeffrey Epstein,” as Schwab puts it, along with allegations about Gates’ personal misconduct, including arising out of his treatment of women, and his divorce.
“I would say,” though, “do not underestimate Bill Gates,” Schwab says.
In the last six months we’ve seen that he has a Netflix documentary, he has a memoir come out, he puts out this big announcement—spin—about giving away two hundred billion dollars. He has a very effective p.r. arsenal to make people pay attention to him and to really praise what he’s doing.
In the conversation’s second part, Schwab discusses Melinda French Gates’ grantmaking, as well as potential aggressive policy reforms of philanthropy and whether they could ever be cooperatively pursued by those of different worldviews.
This article first appeared in the Giving Review on June 25, 2025.
