Is Bill Gates a savior or a villain?
“He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.”That immortal line from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” kept running through my head as I was reading “Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World,” by Anupreeta Das, a reporter at the New York Times. It’s a book that you should definitely not judge by its cover, which features a benign, smiling portrait of the Microsoft co-founder as a 39-year-old from the shoulders up, his awkwardly buttoned shirt considerately cropped out by the designer.Subscribe for unlimited access to The PostYou can cancel anytime.SubscribeThat’s pretty much the last act of generosity toward Gates that you’ll find in this volume, which often feels like an extended list of all the major and minor complaints that Das could find not only about Gates but also about billionaires, nerds and the broader practice of philanthropy.In truth, there’s a lot to commend about Gates. He was voted the world’s most admired man in each of the first six years of YouGov’s “world’s most admired” survey, from 2014 to 2019, beating out Barack Obama. Even before he turned to philanthropy, his stellar reputation in India was so entrenched that, as Das recounts, his PR team would regularly discount poll numbers from the subcontinent when gauging his global reputation in the late 1990s. Those are the kinds of results that can’t be generated by spin doctors alone.Don’t expect this book to bother with Gates’s biggest achievements, however, or even, per its title, with the success of his various quests to shape our world. The entrepreneur who envisaged a “a computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software” and then made that vision a reality; the nerd who turned all office workers into keyboard warriors; the philanthropist who played a central role in the spectacularly successful fight against diseases like HIV/AIDS; the environmentalist whose net-zero vision has led him to create a multibillion-dollar nuclear-power company — that man barely makes an appearance in this book. As a result, Das doesn’t grapple with one of the most intriguing questions surrounding Gates, as first posed by economist Robert Barro in 2007: Has he done more good for the world as a philanthropist or as an entrepreneur?Perhaps that’s because Das, even though one of her chapters is titled “Why We Hate Billionaires,” thinks that all pro-Gates arguments have already been internalized across most of the planet. “We have willingly conferred near divinity on our billionaires,” she writes, adding that we shower them with “unqualified adulation and worship” — just two of many instances where her prose becomes hyperbolic to the point of hollowness.Rather than weigh Gates’s accomplishments against his failures, Das focuses on his personal weaknesses — his unpleasant management style, his extramarital affairs and, especially, his association with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who is featured extensively throughout, including in the beginning of the book’s introduction and in a 12-page section that leads off the chapter titled “Cancel Bill.”Frustratingly, Das sheds little new light on the Gates-Epstein relationship, beyond suggesting that Epstein first attracted the billionaire by indicating that he might be able to get Gates his coveted Nobel Peace Prize. While I and others have reported that a $2 million donation from Gates to the MIT Media Lab was thought of within MIT as being Epstein money, for instance, Das will go only so far as to say that “the donation may or may not have been at Epstein’s recommendation.” It’s also far from clear whether Epstein was, indirectly, the posthumous source for her reporting that “many” billionaires approached the Gates Foundation wanting to give their money to its endowment. If those assertions did come from him, she’s giving him altogether too much credibility.Similarly, when Das reports that Microsoft hired escorts in the ’80s and ’90s “to weave their way through the guests at company parties,” that seems like an explosive enough allegation that it would at least merit an endnote — but that assertion, like many others in the book, goes unsupported.Das goes to great lengths to find real or imagined ways in which Gates is problematic — a failed $23 million Gates Foundation project in the Indian state of Bihar, say, or an anti-vaxxer who painted a portrait of Gates with a syringe and failed to sell it on eBay at an asking price of $800. At one point she accuses Gates of “using his star power and influence to push toward things he thinks are for the general and societal good.” Elsewhere she spends many pages detailing the amount of money he and his fellow billionaires spend on their homes, staff and other personal outlays. (“Some of the world’s most expensive art sits in the homes of billionaires,” she helpfully notes.)Das is particularly uncharitable about Gates’s pivot from CEO to philanthropist, a move she describes as being “manufactured” by an army of PR professionals. Whether you’re inclined to believe that claim is a good test of whether you’ll like this book, which is perhaps a better portrait of Gates’s PR team than it is of Gates himself. Gates didn’t cooperate with Das — refusing to be interviewed or otherwise provide her with information — but a significant contingent of his current and former PR people clearly did, their presence visible in dubious self-aggrandizing claims about how, for example, in 2008, he became “the first nongovernment leader to speak at Davos.” (The main stage of the World Economic Forum, held annually in Davos, Switzerland, featured countless nongovernment leaders in the decades leading up to 2008.)This book’s sympathies clearly lie with critics of Gates, such as philanthropy scholar Linsey McGoey and environmental activist Vandana Shiva, both of whom are quoted. Das’s first-person plural (“we equate wealth with nobility and virtue, and often view the intentions of billionaires with an uncritical eye”) clearly doesn’t encompass the first-person singular. Das, who refers to herself in the text only as “this reporter,” avoids saying explicitly that she agrees with such voices. Instead, she’ll describe the Gates Foundation as being “not unlike an undulating octopus” and seemingly blame it, at least in part, for any and all failures of the global development project, whether it’s “missed targets and abandoned strategies” or the fact that malaria and polio still haven’t been eradicated. “What good is a vaccine if it remains out of reach for the poorest communities?” she asks, as though saving just some lives is a picayune achievement.There are a lot of facts in this book. We’re informed what the weather was like when Warren Buffett announced his multibillion-dollar donation to the Gates Foundation (“unremarkable”), whether Gates owned land in Georgia where an onion grower was accused of passing off regular yellow onions as special Vidalias (he did) and that “the war ignited by the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, has resurfaced painful historical conversations involving religion, colonization, and the pointlessness and inescapability of war.” What’s missing is a sense that these facts are being marshaled in service of an overarching thesis — that they appear here for a reason.Reporters are urged to show rather than tell, but in this case the reader is left craving an unambiguous polemic — something to agree or disagree with — rather than this slightly flabby mixture of reported events and other people’s opinions.Felix Salmon is the chief financial correspondent at Axios.Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, KingBill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World
Journalist Anupreeta Das examines the life and legacy of the Microsoft co-founder in her book “Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King.”
“He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.”
That immortal line from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” kept running through my head as I was reading “Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World,” by Anupreeta Das, a reporter at the New York Times. It’s a book that you should definitely not judge by its cover, which features a benign, smiling portrait of the Microsoft co-founder as a 39-year-old from the shoulders up, his awkwardly buttoned shirt considerately cropped out by the designer.
That’s pretty much the last act of generosity toward Gates that you’ll find in this volume, which often feels like an extended list of all the major and minor complaints that Das could find not only about Gates but also about billionaires, nerds and the broader practice of philanthropy.
In truth, there’s a lot to commend about Gates. He was voted the world’s most admired man in each of the first six years of YouGov’s “world’s most admired” survey, from 2014 to 2019, beating out Barack Obama. Even before he turned to philanthropy, his stellar reputation in India was so entrenched that, as Das recounts, his PR team would regularly discount poll numbers from the subcontinent when gauging his global reputation in the late 1990s. Those are the kinds of results that can’t be generated by spin doctors alone.
Don’t expect this book to bother with Gates’s biggest achievements, however, or even, per its title, with the success of his various quests to shape our world. The entrepreneur who envisaged a “a computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software” and then made that vision a reality; the nerd who turned all office workers into keyboard warriors; the philanthropist who played a central role in the spectacularly successful fight against diseases like HIV/AIDS; the environmentalist whose net-zero vision has led him to create a multibillion-dollar nuclear-power company — that man barely makes an appearance in this book. As a result, Das doesn’t grapple with one of the most intriguing questions surrounding Gates, as first posed by economist Robert Barro in 2007: Has he done more good for the world as a philanthropist or as an entrepreneur?
Perhaps that’s because Das, even though one of her chapters is titled “Why We Hate Billionaires,” thinks that all pro-Gates arguments have already been internalized across most of the planet. “We have willingly conferred near divinity on our billionaires,” she writes, adding that we shower them with “unqualified adulation and worship” — just two of many instances where her prose becomes hyperbolic to the point of hollowness.
Rather than weigh Gates’s accomplishments against his failures, Das focuses on his personal weaknesses — his unpleasant management style, his extramarital affairs and, especially, his association with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who is featured extensively throughout, including in the beginning of the book’s introduction and in a 12-page section that leads off the chapter titled “Cancel Bill.”
Frustratingly, Das sheds little new light on the Gates-Epstein relationship, beyond suggesting that Epstein first attracted the billionaire by indicating that he might be able to get Gates his coveted Nobel Peace Prize. While I and others have reported that a $2 million donation from Gates to the MIT Media Lab was thought of within MIT as being Epstein money, for instance, Das will go only so far as to say that “the donation may or may not have been at Epstein’s recommendation.” It’s also far from clear whether Epstein was, indirectly, the posthumous source for her reporting that “many” billionaires approached the Gates Foundation wanting to give their money to its endowment. If those assertions did come from him, she’s giving him altogether too much credibility.
Similarly, when Das reports that Microsoft hired escorts in the ’80s and ’90s “to weave their way through the guests at company parties,” that seems like an explosive enough allegation that it would at least merit an endnote — but that assertion, like many others in the book, goes unsupported.
Das goes to great lengths to find real or imagined ways in which Gates is problematic — a failed $23 million Gates Foundation project in the Indian state of Bihar, say, or an anti-vaxxer who painted a portrait of Gates with a syringe and failed to sell it on eBay at an asking price of $800. At one point she accuses Gates of “using his star power and influence to push toward things he thinks are for the general and societal good.” Elsewhere she spends many pages detailing the amount of money he and his fellow billionaires spend on their homes, staff and other personal outlays. (“Some of the world’s most expensive art sits in the homes of billionaires,” she helpfully notes.)
Das is particularly uncharitable about Gates’s pivot from CEO to philanthropist, a move she describes as being “manufactured” by an army of PR professionals. Whether you’re inclined to believe that claim is a good test of whether you’ll like this book, which is perhaps a better portrait of Gates’s PR team than it is of Gates himself. Gates didn’t cooperate with Das — refusing to be interviewed or otherwise provide her with information — but a significant contingent of his current and former PR people clearly did, their presence visible in dubious self-aggrandizing claims about how, for example, in 2008, he became “the first nongovernment leader to speak at Davos.” (The main stage of the World Economic Forum, held annually in Davos, Switzerland, featured countless nongovernment leaders in the decades leading up to 2008.)
This book’s sympathies clearly lie with critics of Gates, such as philanthropy scholar Linsey McGoey and environmental activist Vandana Shiva, both of whom are quoted. Das’s first-person plural (“we equate wealth with nobility and virtue, and often view the intentions of billionaires with an uncritical eye”) clearly doesn’t encompass the first-person singular. Das, who refers to herself in the text only as “this reporter,” avoids saying explicitly that she agrees with such voices. Instead, she’ll describe the Gates Foundation as being “not unlike an undulating octopus” and seemingly blame it, at least in part, for any and all failures of the global development project, whether it’s “missed targets and abandoned strategies” or the fact that malaria and polio still haven’t been eradicated. “What good is a vaccine if it remains out of reach for the poorest communities?” she asks, as though saving just some lives is a picayune achievement.
There are a lot of facts in this book. We’re informed what the weather was like when Warren Buffett announced his multibillion-dollar donation to the Gates Foundation (“unremarkable”), whether Gates owned land in Georgia where an onion grower was accused of passing off regular yellow onions as special Vidalias (he did) and that “the war ignited by the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, has resurfaced painful historical conversations involving religion, colonization, and the pointlessness and inescapability of war.” What’s missing is a sense that these facts are being marshaled in service of an overarching thesis — that they appear here for a reason.
Reporters are urged to show rather than tell, but in this case the reader is left craving an unambiguous polemic — something to agree or disagree with — rather than this slightly flabby mixture of reported events and other people’s opinions.
Felix Salmon is the chief financial correspondent at Axios.
Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King
Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World