Global Citizen International

WebWorker writes "Charities
Bill Grows Up
Elizabeth Corcoran, 10.04.04, 1:25 PM ET

SAN FRANSISCO - Bill Gates may have spent the last ten years on the top of the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list--but only now has he gotten comfortable with the altitude.

Last week, at the annual luncheon of one of Silicon Valley's longest-running philanthropic organizations, the Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) chairman struck a very Carnegiesque note when he urged others to open their eyes--and their wallets--to urgent needs around them.

"We need to get this new generation drawn into philanthropy," Gates told an audience of 1,500 Silicon Valley denizens Friday. "I think we can draw people into being more generous," he said.

The man who once shrugged off questions about what he would do with his wealth has taken to philanthropy in a big way. Forbes calculates that Gates has given 37% of his wealth--more than $28 billion--to charitable causes, largely via the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (By contrast, add up the donations made by billionaires Warren Buffett, Paul Allen, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison and Steve Ballmer and you get about $2.55 billion--not even the equivalent of a decent tip on a $28-billion tab.)

In two separate speeches given in the Valley on Friday, Gates credited his parents with spurring him into getting Microsoft involved in charitable giving--and then continuing to nag him until he personally got involved in giving. At the 50th anniversary luncheon of the Community Foundation of Silicon Valley, Gates described how his mother began asking him when his fledgling company of 30 employees was going to contribute to the greater Seattle area.

"Mom said, 'It's time you did a United Way campaign,'" Gates recalled. "And I said, 'I'm too busy--we're working day and night to write software,'" and so on. But his mother kept pestering him "until I came up with the right answers."

But even as Microsoft's contributions increased, Gates shied from getting personally involved in philanthropy. "I used to think it would be schizophrenic to say, 'Let's make money'' in the morning and then 'Let's give it away,' in the afternoon," he said, in a talk also on Friday to a group of students at the University of California, Berkeley. Instead, he insisted he would take up philanthropy in his "declining" years, after he had left Microsoft.

That plan began to change in the fall of 1995 when Microsoft began donating money and software to put computers in public libraries throughout the U.S. Gates made the program his own, ultimately fusing it into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which was established in January 2000. "With that success, I thought, 'Boy, I can do this,'" Gates said.

There were other factors at play, too. Microsoft had been battered by years of antitrust investigations and litigation by the U.S. government. Gates, who had become a lightening rod for much of the criticism, relinquished the job of Microsoft's chief executive in January 2000 but continued as the company's chairman and chief software architect.

Gates still devotes most of his time to working on software at Microsoft. At the end of Friday, he stopped at the Computer History Museum for an on-stage discussion with computer scientist and Stanford University president, John Hennessy. He showed a flash of his legendary touchiness when a member of the audience suggested that Linux software now runs 50% of the world's servers. "That's not the right number," Gates shot back. "First, start with the facts, then proceed from there." As for whether Linux threatens Microsoft, Gates noted: "Microsoft has had competitors in the past. It's a good thing we have museums to do*****ent this stuff."

But these days, Gates takes a broader view of "urgent" problems--and says he realized they could not wait for him to retire. "If you can solve a problem today--and avoid the compound effects that happen over time--it's way smarter than waiting." He says he realized he could use his money to address health problems that affect millions of people but where the commercial prospects are thin. Gates says he was stunned to learn he could instantly double the funding for researching ways to fight malaria with a $50 million donation. (He gave it.) "One million people die of malaria every year, 200 million people are suffering from it," he told his listeners. But malaria drugs are not the potential money-makers that, say, a new cholesterol drug could be, leaving a market gap that Gates feels philanthropy is suited to address.

Gates' words echoed an early philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie, who considered himself a pioneer in "scientific philanthropy," literally wrote the book on charitable giving in two 1889 essays later republished as a book entitled, The Gospel of Wealth. His points were bold: "The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth," he wrote. The smartest strategy was for the rich man to oversee how the funds were distributed during his lifetime.

"I think of philanthropy in two ways," Gates told the gathering at the Community Foundation. "From a purely rational perspective, if we can save lives, that's great. But if you can meet with people--you can take the statistics and map it to individuals. It's uplifting. I encourage you to do it. Drawing people in is what this is all about."

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