Why Bill Gates is giving away his money faster

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. Here's another email. This is from Linda in print. This is from a 2010 interview with the late Neil Conan, who hosted the call-in show Talk of the Nation. Well, I'm... I don't...

care about being remembered. Of course, Gates made his fortune as a founder of the tech giant Microsoft, and with his then-wife Melinda Gates, he launched the Gates Foundation in the year 2000 to give that money away. I'll note here the foundation is a supporter of NPR, but we cover it like any other organization. By 2010, it was contributing nearly as much to global health each year as the UN's World Health Organization.

Over the years, the foundation says it has helped save more than 80 million lives by supporting work on vaccines, AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. But the man who put his name on that multi-billion dollar philanthropic effort was saying he didn't care how history remembered him. In fact, he said he didn't even expect the foundation to outlive him by that much. So you don't intend this as a, the foundation itself as a legacy? No, the foundation should spend all its money.

And go out of business. And then other foundations will come along. I can't craft in my will. some words that anticipate the problems of the future. Well, 15 years after that interview, Bill Gates is speeding up the timeline. Last week, he announced that over the next 20 years, the foundation will spend down more than $200 billion, virtually all his accumulated wealth. And then, it'll close.

consider this. Bill Gates has thoughts on how to save lives, the state of global health, rich oh the world we'll talk to him after the break From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. closely co-host a fresh air at a time of sound bites and short attention Our show is all about the deep dive. We do long form interviews with people behind them. film book. music and journalism. Here our guests open up. you've never heard before Listen to the Fresh Air podcast from...

This is Fresh Air contributor Anne-Marie Baldonado. I talked with actor Cole Escola about their hit Broadway play, Oh Mary. Cole plays an unhinged alcoholic Mary Todd Lincoln, who's an aspiring cabaret performer. If that makes no sense, that's part of the point. You can find my interview on the Fresh Air podcast.

It's Consider This from NPR. Bill Gates has a lot of ambitions for his foundation before it closes its doors in 20 years. In his letter announcing its last chapter, he says the goal is to save and improve as many lives as possible in that time, to end preventable deaths of moms and babies, and lift millions of people out of poverty.

On the day he made the announcement, I asked him why he decided to accelerate his giving. I've learned a lot in the last 25 years, including the incredible impact that these resources can have. You know, I know there'll be lots of rich people in the future and the needs are very urgent today. I want to spend at an even higher level than we are right now because I see the pipeline of innovations.

you know pretty straightforward like vitamins for pregnant women or things that are complicated like ai health delivery or gene editing to cure hiv so with that in mind I'd like to make sure. uh we do as much as we can in these uh 20 years and i've built a strong organization hopefully i'll

be able to help guide it during all of those 20 years. But if not, it's got a strong culture and I'm sure it'll do well. The amount of money we're talking about can be hard to imagine. So can you give us An example of what specifically you'll be able to do in the next couple decades with 200 billion plus dollars that you would not have been able to do with the mere tens of billions of dollars that you had been planning to spend over that next 20 years.

Well, one of the areas we work in is agriculture. Health is by far biggest of about 70%, and then education is about 15%. But agriculture, some people are surprised. that we can do incredible things to improve seeds and educate farmers so that even in Africa, where today the productivity is the lowest. and they face climate change and population growth.

We want to get kids even more nutrition despite all of that. So we do better seeds, better chickens, better cows. And that's an area we're going on spending a lot. This idea of curing HIV, curing sickle cell, a few kids have been cured of sickle cell, but it costs millions of dollars.

for each case and we want to do that for less than a hundred dollars so it's very advanced science and it'll take us even spending full speed maybe eight to ten years to get that that done but I'm able to say to those scientists, who are incredible, please go full speed ahead. You've mentioned some ambitious goals like curing HIV.

But less ambitious goals, like treating HIV, have seen dramatic cuts. since the Trump administration has ended many of its foreign aid programs like USAID. So does your announcement have anything to do with the government pulling back on foreign aid spending? Are you trying to fill that gap? No, my decision came after thinking about this for several years, and it's really timed with the year I turned 70 and our 25th anniversary.

And so it's kind of strange that here we are in the middle of a global health emergency where the U.S. made gigantic abrupt cuts. And some of the European countries are also making cuts because of the demands to raise their defense spending. And so I can't overstate how awful it is. to be in a period where the number of children who die is going to go back up you know it went down from 10 million to 5 million we cut it in half since the year 2000 right

Since year 2000, exactly. And it was supposed to keep going down, but with these cuts, millions will die. So I'm going to try and make the case. that a lot of this money should be restored. There's a lot of benefits that have come from this. less than 1% of the US budget.

On vaccines specifically, a lot of your work has been about getting these life-saving vaccines into developing countries. And the last time you were on this program, back in February, you told my co-host, Scott Detrow, that you were hoping to meet with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has questioned the science around vaccine safety and effectiveness. You said you were optimistic and hopeful about finding common ground. Have you been able to meet? Were you able to find common ground?

No, I'm still hoping to get that meeting. Since then, there have been some headcount cuts, so I'm worried in the U.S. medical research. has been hugely beneficial to the world. So I think the US commitment to medical research is great. We got to make sure it continues and we'll try and influence it in the right direction.

You recently told the New York Times, the world's richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world's poorest children. That's a reference to Elon Musk leading the effort to defund USAID. Have you spoken with him about that? No. Although he's a genius and an expert in a lot of things, I've been out and met these people. I've been to Nigeria and seen their great work. I've been to the Democratic Republic of Congo. So this is one where I think he made a mistake.

What responsibility do you believe comes with enormous wealth? well trying to avoid killing children maybe uh so uh been involved in uh what's called the giving pledge that uh warren buffett and melinda and i created to get philanthropists to share their thoughts to encourage better giving, more giving, and philanthropy is on the increase, not just in the United States. You know, I'm trying to set an example by getting 98% of the money I have. Warren Buffett's been an inspiration to me.

Even before I met him, he'd written an article about how, you know, giving too much money to your children isn't necessarily good for them or society as well. You're a notorious optimist. And sometimes when people who listen to the news every day ask me, about the state of the world, I say, well, there's the Bill Gates view, which is that more people have access to clean water and education and fewer children are dying and more people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You've in this very conversation said millions more children are going to die in the coming years than otherwise would have. And so how do the cuts of the last few months shape your outlook on the state of the world? Yeah, I think they Tragedy that this is so far away means that People don't feel it. And, you know, I think the basic religious principle of treating other people well still applies. So you're going to see me speaking a lot about these budget things, but no, I'm not pessimistic.

because I think the case is so strong that we can get the money back and then take advantage of pipeline of innovation, including a lot driven by advances in AI. Microsoft founder and global health philanthropist Bill Gates, thank you so much for speaking with us today. Thank you. This episode was produced by Alejandra Marquez-Hanse and Connor Donovan with audio engineering by Simon Laszlo Jansen. It was edited by Patrick Jaron Watanana. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan.

It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro. Conductor Robert Franz says a good melody captures our attention and then it moves you through time. Music is architecture in time. If you engage in the moment with what you're listening to, you do lose a sense of the time around you. How we experience time. That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Sarah Gonzalez, the economy has been in the news a lot lately. Always in the news. Planet Money is always here to explain it.

Each episode we tell a sometimes quirky, sometimes surprising, always interesting story that helps you better understand the economy. So when you hear something about cryptocurrency or where exactly your taxes go, yes. Listen to the Planet Money podcast from NPR. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor break?

Amazon Prime members can listen to Consider This sponsor-free through Amazon Music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Consider This Plus at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org.