20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
291 comments
·May 8, 2025wing-_-nuts
zozbot234
> There's a reason they're marked as secondary beneficiaries on all my accounts.
Strictly speaking, the foundation discourages individuals from donating directly to them, mostly because the tax treatment of giving that way isn't necessarily favorable. They've set up Gates Philanthropy Partners as a 501(c)(3) charity which is aligned to the same philanthropic goals.
(Of course there's also many other worthwhile players in the broader EA space.)
Ozzie_osman
For you (or other folks) working in tech and giving to charity, apart from corporate match, another couple pieces of advice are to consider a Donor Advised Fund. They are really easy to set up, and then you get some benefits, like the ability to "bunch" your donations (can help with tax deductions) or donate appreciated investments (like RSUs) without paying capital gains tax.
Zaheer
https://charityvest.org/ is a great modern DAF tool. I use it to get 1 single charity receipt at the end of the year and track my giving.
MattSayar
Money managing tools like Betterment also have native UI features to donate investments to charities as well
wing-_-nuts
Yep, I've considered a DAF and donating stock, but it wouldn't be eligible for my employer match.
dmoy
Depends on the employer I guess. Some companies will do match even for DAF distributions (not the initial transfer obviously)
9rx
> without paying capital gains tax.
It's a funny day when you're feeling charitable, but go out of your way to avoid helping the entity that should be the ideal charitable recipient.
toast0
The state goes out of their way to encourage it.
Let's say you just won the startup lottery and you've got a significant amount of now tradable stock. Some of which was early exercised and the cost basis is effectively zero. Some of which was RSUs or non-qualified options and you owe ordinary income. And that you're way over into the top tax brackets.
If your zero cost basis stock is Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS), there's a very nice discount on federal capital gains, so you might not need to do the rest of the stuff.
Otherwise, if you donate your apprechiated zero basis stock, you get to save federal capital gains of 20% + 3.8% net investment income. Plus it offsets against your ordinary income that's 37%. So that's a 60.8% discount on being charitable for the feds. If you live in California, capital gains are regular income, so you're saving 13.3% because the capital gains go away and offsetting 13.3% on your ordinary income, so your total discount is 87.4%. In other words, your difference in cash after taxes for selling $1M of zero basis stock or donating $1M of zero basis stock is $126k.
When the government is telling you it only costs $126k to give a charity $1M, it's pretty compelling. The math used to be different, when you'd get credit for state taxes on the federal return, but that was many years ago now.
monooso
That assumes a lot about the current administration.
wing-_-nuts
If that entity used my tax dollars wisely (looking at nordic countries), yes I agree paying taxes is superior. I have no interest in contributing more towards our 1T/yr defense budget or subsidizing oil and gas.
vasco
The state is never going to be as agile as private people engaging on topics they are passionate about on their private time.
knowitnone
It's OK to do both and who is this ideal charitable recipient you are talking about? You mean the one that takes your money and does whatever it wants with it?
njdas
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giantg2
It seems his foundation already has significant funding. I would give to other charities, focusing on high impact work in specific regions or domains that knight not be as popular.
hiuyty
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altruios
What a completely unhelpful comment: for all you know they are infertile. Having children shouldn't be done for such selfish reasons as mere personal fulfillment. I care about the kind of life a hypothetical human offspring would have (which is why I choose not to have any currently). Creating a family is a really weird solution to bring up.
But your rage is valid, I think it is just misplaced. The above commenter to you could perhaps be more effective in their decision making regarding filling their existential void. But family planning is a rash and presumptuous 'solution' to filling that need.
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_bin_
I have to disagree. I am an ordo amoris enjoyer and cannot agree with Gates giving a red cent to overseas causes until we fix things like drug treatment, cancer treatment, and cures for neurodegenerative diseases.
He’s of course within his rights to ignore this but I am within mine to remind everyone to please help your friend, your neighbor, your town, state, and country before you look further afield.
mlyle
> I am within mine to remind everyone to please help your friend, your neighbor, your town, state, and country before you look further afield.
Nah. We have memberships in families, neighborhoods, friend groups, local areas, cultural groups, nations, and the whole world. And problems at any of these levels can grow to the point where they affect us, too. And places where the needs are most acute and broad stand the greatest chances of developing to not be as acute of problems anymore and indeed to offer value to the overall world community through trade.
Indeed, the extreme version of what you're saying is why so many only give to their church communities which are insular and isolated. Or to just retain everything.
70% of my giving is domestic, but I think it's nuts to ignore the rest of the world. Yes, things improved in distant lands maybe are harder for me to see and have less of a direct impact on those around me; so discount their benefit some, but that marginal benefit is so much larger...
_bin_
You have to weigh that against the fact that you are much more able to figure out how to actually do what's needed at levels where you see things firsthand. At least, that's been my experience; it's much more realistic to start a nonprofit that can make a real difference locally, then perhaps scale with time, than it is to found something with a global mission, lacking global context on how things manifest around the world.
More importantly, I'm not a utilitarian, and do not subscribe to "effective altruism" or other utilitarian philosophies. At the end of the day it's Gates' money to do with as he wishes and it's my internet account to argue against that as I wish.
olivermuty
A dollar will help someone abroad much more than the same dollar will in the US though.
closewith
I don't think any individual should have the power to unilaterally choose where to deploy billions of dollars, but your vision is equally myopic. Nothing about being a US citizen gives you any moral priority over any other person.
otikik
> help your friend, your neighbor, your town, state, and country before you look further afield
Many of my friends and family don't live on my neighborhood, town, state or country. They live in the world. Consider broadening up your social circle a little bit. Our lives don't have to be limited to where a horse can travel to any more.
knowitnone
It's his money. He can give it to North Korea or China if he wants. Entitled and selfish.
actionfromafar
Giving it to North Korea used to be associated with risks, but things are changing fast these days.
willvarfar
If you were to live very close to the border of, say, Canada or Mexico, would you support giving financial support to alleviate suffering in those countries?
criddell
I think he wants Gates to focus his philanthropy on the Seattle region before expanding the scope of his giving to all of Washington. That could probably consume Gates' entire fortune, so the question of what to do next is irrelevant.
packetlost
You clearly have never actually looked at effective altruism and what it tries to be. You would otherwise know that your values are diametrically opposed to the values of that movement and said values are neither right nor wrong, they're personal.
_bin_
Of course I have. I am well aware that my values are diametrically opposed to it at a first-principles level; I find utilitarianism to be an incredibly hollow worldview that fails on many grounds, not least of which are the teleological (disordered love is no virtue.)
I don't have to argue from the first principles of the EA crowd.
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prvc
Have to disagree about the 'effective' part. Gates seems to have had a knack for massive inefficiencies and negative externalities in every way that he has impacted the world. Think of how many man-hours (measured in human lifetimes) have been wasted due to the shortcomings of various MicroSoft programs. Weigh that against his health initiatives in the third world. Or the impact of dimming the sun by depositing massive quantities of particles in the atmosphere: the resources consumed and carbon emissions that placing them would entail, and of course the intended effect, which is to impede human progress as measured by the Kardashev scale. Everything starts to look much more efficient if this is taken as the goal, though.
mgraczyk
Helping to cure polio doesn't outweigh imagined future harms by George engineering that didn't happen yet?
ok123456
He's not curing polio, though. His polio program is spreading it because they use a live virus, and a low percentage of the population is getting it. People are now getting paralytic polio from others who got the vaccine.
This is just one example of the Kreuger-Dunning that permeates all aspects of the Gates Foundation. His interventions have been mainly disasters, distorted public policy, and gobbled up biotech IP in the process. He controls the money spicket and is very petty and cocksure about what is "right." Researchers and public policy experts who disagree with his ideas get cut off.
Governments should set public health policy and manage the needs of their people, not billionaires, biotech companies, or NGOs.
skandium
One of the great tragedies of the world is that while he is arguably the philanthropist with the highest positive impact in human history, a significant part of the population seems to still think he is the literal Antichrist.
bko
I could understand some of the criticism for charitable work.
For instance, his foundation pushes birth control in developing nations. On the surface, it look like a just and noble cause.
But imagine how a developed nation would view an act like this on its own people from a foreign body. Imagine some wealthy Chinese national started taking out ads on American television telling Americans to have fewer children and going to poor neighborhoods in the US and handing out free contraceptives.
It's a kind of soft imperialism and social engineering that I imagine a lot of people object to. The guy can't even keep his marriage together and he's insistent on telling people half way around the world how to run their life?
larodi
This statement is so 90s and so BOFH-centered that it is irrelevant to a level of stupidity. Gates has done a lot to prove he's not a cold-hearted mf and compared to all the bros in their prime at the moment, dude, just think of Elon or Larry Ellison, well our man Billy is really very much a bright persona.
posix_compliant
Rationally, you're correct. But emotionally, there's a lot of people who don't understand why someone would provide a free service without an ulterior motive. Gates talks about this a bit on the Trevor Noah podcast.
wongarsu
Microsoft's company practices under Gates don't help, but they are far from the main issue people have with him nowadays. Most people aren't even aware of the things Microsoft did.
People think he is the antichrist because he promotes vaccines and because there are multiple quotes of him where he explains that he wants to reduce the world's population. By raising the standard of living and giving healthcare to the poor, which empirically seem to cause lower birth rates, but lots of nutjobs assume he tests weaponized vaccines or something like that. And people are distrusting of people who appear too altruistic in general, thinking it's some kind of con (and often they are right).
el_benhameen
I think the comment was referring more to the antivax/conspiracy crowd who often mix Gates in with Soros, etc. in their stories. Still plenty of those folks.
crossroadsguy
> irrelevant to a level of stupidity
Is that ever?
I am not saying Gates is a monster. So I am not commenting on him. I am commenting on your logic of doing supposed good and hence they becoming good.
When you look at the history of most colonial monsters you will notice is an often repeated trend. Those despicable monster amassing wealth literally on the bodies of natives and then going back home (including some to USA) and buying a "good name" (sometimes literally in the form of those fancy titles and peerages etc).
Oh by the way, Musk and Ellison from your example are benign non-beings compared to pretty much all those "monsters".
I don't know where you are from or where you are now but a lot of world sees "good deeds of good people" with great suspicion.
mhh__
The impression I get is that he's just cold hearted but directing it towards charity. Not in an evil sense although perhaps it's lucky.
People like the bill gates of the 90s don't just disappear
turnsout
Agreed—I spent the 90s idolizing Jobs and despising Gates. But today I have deep respect for Gates and the way he's using his wealth as a positive force in the world. Jobs had better taste and was a more effective product leader, but I'm sorry to say that he sucked as a philanthropist. It's disappointing that he spent ANY of his mental energy at the end of his life building that dumb $100M yacht, rather than focusing on his legacy.
kmoser
Better taste? How so, and why does that matter when we're talking about moral character?
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BSOhealth
My guess would be, actually a very small number of people think he’s the antichrist. Why would anyone other than someone with decades of operating system passion even care who this guy is? They know he’s a rich guy. Big deal. I’d guess most people just live their lives and don’t care about Microsoft monopoly or FOSS or anything. The same can probably be said for his altruism—most people probably have no idea.
swiftcoder
The antivax movement has been demonising the medical side of his foundation for decades at this point - I'd wager the folks who weren't born in the 90s are more likely to have heard about that than about the genesis of Windows
SoftTalker
The antivax movement is a tiny number of fringe wackos. Normal people are not against normal vaccines, even if some of them had concerns about one recent one in particular.
Azkron
For many people "wealthy = evil". And "poor = good". It is easier to demonize someone that is doing better than you than to admit that maybe he is just making better choices.
SwamyM
Yea, his involvement with the Covid vaccine research seems to have made him a target for a large portion of the GOP/MAGA contingent. They are convinced that he wants to use the vaccine to implant a microchip in everyone and control them.
wincy
Huh? You must not hang around middle America, out here people act like Bill Gates wants to vaccinate all of Africa in order to sterilize them and also put microchips in your brain. I guarantee if I asked five random people on the street in Kansas about what they think of Bill Gates, half of them would say “oh right he’s like doing bad stuff with the Illuminati?” or something similar.
nicce
But that is not Bill Gates' fault because he hasn't been doing it in reality. I think the difference still matters. Only the restricted set of conspiracy theorists and their audience thinks otherwise.
coryfklein
> a significant part of the population seems to still think he is the literal Antichrist.
Beware that you don't fall into the trap of thinking the 1% of the population that makes 90% of the noise on the internet is "significant" or a representative sampling of the population. Most everyone else's views are quite boring and detached from extremism, they just don't shout their moderation on the rooftops.
knowitnone
a significant part of Americans are dumb as bricks
sam_lowry_
He is literally buying indulgence for his earlier sins.
Voloskaya
Ah yes, saving millions of kids’ lives through vaccination and virtually eradicating polio is a way to make up for … checks notes… bundling a browser into an OS and not being nice with open source.
Some grass is in need of touching.
dekrg
Yes and Bill Gates is such a good guy that he even remained friends with Jeffrey Epstein after Epstein's conviction. To help children of course. Truly a Bill Gates is a true hero looking out for all the children.
amelius
> still think he is the literal Antichrist.
And then I suppose that Steve Jobs is the Christ in this story.
You only have to look at the research output of Microsoft Research to know that it is the other way around. Kind of weird how even smart people get things mixed up.
mithametacs
What research?
queuebert
I didn't realize Xerox had so many employees.
jarbus
Say what you want, but I respect this a lot. Sure as hell beats giving it all to your kids.
RataNova
You don't have to love Gates or everything the foundation does to recognize that putting billions toward global health and poverty is way better than setting up a dynasty or letting it sit in investments
danvoell
And/or when you die. We need more people trying to make the world better while they are here instead of treating the finish line like the, well, finish line.
hiuyty
Man some people must hate their children. I would rather burn everything in a furnace than give a dime to strangers. Family or nothing.
TheAmazingRace
Or, why not do both? If you are worth billions, you can give millions to your kids and give the rest to charities of your choice. Everyone wins.
This attitude of "I'd rather burn everything" feels like such a massive waste of an opportunity to leave a quality legacy behind and legitimately make the world a better place.
ragnot
Raising kids to not be spoiled even with moderate amounts of wealth is hard as is...imagine being one of the richest men in the world
babelfish
What a miserable life you live.
oulipo
Sure, but only capitalism concentrates so much wealth in such few hands
An alternative would be that company like Microsoft couldn't gain so much wealth, simply because their revenue would be capped / taxed high enough that the extra money they make goes back directly to people and governments
In this case, *everyone* gets to vote and choose for what philanthropies the amount gets used, rather than having just "one guy" deciding for himself how to spend all this money, which is prone to errors
throwaway5752
Exactly. Look at the Walton and other families hoarding wealth by abusing tax law and lobbying to make it even worse, and the armies of advisors and attorneys parasitically helping them.
Gates is thousands of times better than most. He and Melinda have done more good for the world than all but a few handfuls of individuals. I've heard estimates his original MSFT stake would be worth over a trillion dollars now.
RataNova
How much power is concentrated in the hands of individuals... It's great that Gates is choosing to use that power philanthropically, but it also raises questions about the long-term role of private wealth in solving public problems.
Cthulhu_
When the government doesn't do it, private parties have to; when there's a significant percentage of the population voting for "small government" parties, more responsibility goes to (wealthy) individuals.
otikik
When the government doesn't do it, it's because wealthy individuals have already bought the government. And have invested huge amounts of money into bamboozling the population into voting against their own interests.
coryfklein
> private parties have to
No they don't. It can also be that neither the government nor private parties give.
Making it an either/or often makes space for the individual to make excuses for why they don't share because out there somewhere there exists some government program that vaguely looks like charity.
newsclues
If the government do it, because they are lobbied not to, so that private parties (with lobbyists) can, there is potential moral hazard.
njdas
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adverbly
+1
This is great, but what about the rich people who don't give? Won't they just continue to get more and more power?
The scales are tipped and this is not sustainable. Gary Stevenson is a bit extreme, but he's not wrong about centralization and it's dangers!
CamperBob2
Well, it's not as if the public sector is solving many problems these days. We seem to have decided, collectively, that we'd rather have more problems.
At least that's what we've been voting for.
bogwog
Well, consider how our voting priorities would change if billionaires had less of an impact on elections? Would we be where we are today if, for example, Musk couldn't spend over a quarter billion dollars influencing the 2024 election?
knowitnone
the rich have always impacted elections through advertisements, campaigns donations, etc.
lesuorac
I honestly don't think Musk affected 2024 to any real extent. Look at how much narrower Harris's loss was than other incumbent losses in 2024. If anything you could make the argument Musk tanked Trump's lead like Trump tanked Poilievre.
Democrats running a candidate that lost their only attempts during a competitive primary. As well as that candidate being unable to read the room and saying they'd do the same economic decisions as the unpopular _incumbent_ Biden. And they still were within 1% of votes!
lapcat
That's because the ultra-wealthy control the elections via unlimited campaign contributions, "independent" group spending, lobbying, providing lucrative jobs to ex-politicians, or even running for office themselves. Both of the major political parties are corrupted by money, just in different ways, different funding sources. The news media has also been centralized, monopolized, and increasingly, owned directly by billionaires.
The public sector doesn't work because it's been sabotaged by the private sector.
biophysboy
The public sector has many problems, but they do pick up the tab when disaster strikes.
whattheheckheck
How can it when it's a thankless job that other psychopathic politicians will rally the people you're trying to help against you?
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alabastervlog
> We seem to have decided, collectively, that we'd rather have more problems.
... because a faction of the rich decided they wanted the poors to believe government can't do anything useful, and launched an ongoing decades-long propaganda campaign to that effect.
nradov
You're correct to an extent, but "the rich" also have a point there. As a taxpayer, the level of waste and incompetence in government spending on those problems is horrifying. It doesn't have to be that way. We don't need to spend billions of dollars and decades of time just to get minor infrastructure projects completed.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/...
eej71
I think that's an incredibly simplistic and naive view of why large public projects gobble up colossal sums of money and don't have much to show for it.
tootie
He talks about this in today's NY Times interview and he is pretty unsparing against Elon Musk in particular for his role in killing USAID. Says he is directly complicit in killing children while at the same time, he is technically still a signatory of the Giving Pledge.
njdas
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toenail
If there's a problem to solve, there is a business opportunity. What do you propose instead?
malcolmgreaves
No. Capitalism is ineffective at solving lots of problems. Particularly problems of the kind where there is universal inelastic demand, where competition makes the end arrive or product less affordable or efficient, where externalities are not priced in, and where there are single/few or a unique instance of a thing that can be used by the public.
Examples: healthcare, food and water for sustenance; insurance; pollution; parks and roadways, residential property; respectively.
legitster
It's interesting he decided to go this way rather than put it into a sustainable trust and just trickle money out indefinitely.
I suspect he believes that these causes need shock therapy. To eradicate a disease, you are better off doing it all in one go.
I also wonder if he looks at something like the Ford Foundation and realize in the long run that any charitable trust will just turn into an overstuffed political advocacy group that does little to advance his charities or even his legacy.
ghaff
Was just talking with some folks last weekend about this in a different context. Open-ended foundations can easily have their missions drift and also become essentially sinecures for an executive director.
Ford Foundation is a great example of what can happen. Olin is a good example of a foundation that was set up to dissolve after some length of time.
gwern
He can have other motivations. Between 2020, 2024, Mackenzie Bezos & Laurene Powell Jobs, the deeply unimpressive philanthropy of the Buffett children, and his own divorce, a very rich philanthropist has excellent reasons to aim for the foundation being liquidated in his lifetime, and not handed off to administrators like, yes, the Ford Foundation or Harvard...
(And then, of course, given his enthusiasm for AI, there is a major question of whether 'keeping your powder dry' is a huge mistake - one way or the other.)
biophysboy
His strategy also may have changed due to recent events affecting foreign aid...
adverbly
Who manages that trust? There is not shortage of short term needs, and short term value added can compound over time. I think this is a fine approach. He's Bill Gates - his legacy is ensured regardless.
Cthulhu_
Isn't the Gates Foundation effectively a trust in itself? I'm no economist, I don't know the exact definitions but the projects they do aren't overnight or one-off donations, they need long term (financial) support and guidance; vaccination development takes years, vaccination programs with the intent to eradicate diseases like polio take generations - e.g. the vaccine was developed in the 50's, it took ~70 years to mostly eradicate the virus in humans (only 30 known new cases in 3 countries in 2022).
modo_mario
Last time he pledged to give away half his wealth over x years didn't it basically tripple during that period?
DavidSJ
MSFT is up 18x during that time and the S&P 500 is up 5x during that time. His investments are some mixture of MSFT and other things, so we might say he would have been up around 10x if he'd given no money away.
Since his net worth is only up 3x, that means he gave away about 70% of his wealth.
willvarfar
He won't have given away 70% of his wealth. If he gave away a dollar at the beginning that is 10 dollars that dollar didn't turn into etc.
monooso
AFAIK he didn't give it all away in one lump sum at the start.
modo_mario
He said he would do it over 5 years. MSFT was up roughly 2x not 18x
gtirloni
The end goal isn't for him to be poor-ish but to do something supposedly useful with the money he has today.
melling
Maybe it’ll triple again and he’ll throw in a cure for cancer(s) or Alzheimer’s.
bravoetch
He does mention existing support for programs related to Alzheimer's research in the article.
legitster
Same thing happened to Buffet.
tootie
It's part of the strategy. He endowed a giant philanthropic org. You can leverage an endowment by investing it aggressively and spending the proceeds to keep the fund running indefinitely. What he is now announcing is a pivot to start spending principal so the endowment starts to shrink until it hits zero.
bee_rider
It seems weird to write this, but:
In the billionaire’s defense, he probably didn’t plan on us as a society deciding to shoveling money at his class as quickly as we possibly could.
jjj123
You really think his team didn’t plan on or even help lobby for that?
jsbg
Did it triple because the assets he owns tripled in value?
modo_mario
In which case he didn't actually charitably give away any of those assets I'd assume?
remus
No criticism of the man, but I think he may fail in this part of his goal
> People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that "he died rich" will not be one of them.
It's easy to forget how absurdly wealthy the very richest in society are. Say he started this initiative on his 70th birthday and he's spreading his giving fairly lineraly over the next 20 years but dies just 1 day short of his 90th birthday, he'd still have about $13,698,630 to his name. I think most would consider someone with that money to their name rich.
yoyohello13
Gates seems like a real embodiment of "Effective Altruism".
1. Get a bunch of money by any means necessary.
2. Donate/invest in altruistic causes.
Unfortunately, most people that use effective altruism to justify themselves hoarding wealth seem to forget the second part.
ascagnel_
I was talking about this with a friend recently -- Romans flaunted their wealth by improving shared social infrastructure (open market spaces, parks, etc), and the robber barons of the 19th century flaunted their wealth by building cultural institutions (eg Carnegie libraries).
It seems like most "effective altruists" want to do things that help "humanity" but don't help "people" -- so developing technology to explore the stars is on the table, but fighting poverty is not.
zozbot234
> It seems like most "effective altruists" want to do things that help "humanity" but don't help "people" -- so developing technology to explore the stars is on the table, but fighting poverty is not.
You seem to have very weird ideas about how EA funding works in practice. Long-termism is flashy and peculiar so it gets a lot of excess visibility, but "fighting poverty" tends to get the bulk of EA money, and the most controversial cause that still gets real sizeable funding seems to be animal welfare.
flexagoon
> developing technology to explore the stars is on the table, but fighting poverty is not.
Weird that you have that impression, since most EA-related organizations (GiveWell, Effective Altruism Foundation, etc) are heavily focused on donating to charities that address poverty or malaria in Africa
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antisthenes
> 1. Get a bunch of money by any means necessary.
This assumes the money would not have been better spent by giving it to the workers of the company that generated it in the first place.
adamc
It's a noble goal.
But the track record of the rich does not inspire confidence that this is the route our society should take in reclaiming these assets.
999900000999
>The Gates Foundation’s mission remains rooted in the idea that where you are born should not determine your opportunities.
Arguably he's already done so much for billions of people. Had typing on computers not became the main way businesses communicate , anyone with bad, handwriting would be stuck in menial work.
When I was growing up in the 90s my hand writing was so bad it was assumed I would never amount to anything.
Then computers completely take over all aspects of business in the early 2000s. No one is writing TPS reports by hand.
All of a sudden my horrible handwriting doesn't matter. It's still really bad. But I've made 6 figures for well over a decade, along with an amazing year at about 200k.
None of this would of been possible without Gates. I also owe the creator of Android Andy Rubin. It's been a while ( and it might of been one of the other co founders), but I was able to thank Rubin. His response was something like "Well, we still need to get building applications working on Android."
I've also been able to thank( on this forum) Brendan Eich, the inventor of my first programming language, JavaScript. Amazingly humble for someone who helped create trillions in wealth.
Apart of me thinks Gates could still lead some innovation in computing. I hope somehow he's still coding under a pseudonym perhaps, and occasionally answering tech questions.
His gift to us has been this amazing industry.
Johanx64
Pretty much everything you named is simply first-to-the-market horror-show from design pespective.
Javascript? Check.
Android? Check.
Windows? Again, capturing market via transitioning from DOS.
They did focus on many important things like having exceptional backwards compatibility (transitioning from DOS, etc), and kernel team does a decent job usually, but none of this is necessarily attributable to Gates and it's simply what you have to do to capture a market/platform.
I don't know if this is genuine sentiment you're expressing or just naivety, but people that can glaze this hard this easily usually go very far in life. I'll give you that, I wish I could do this.
999900000999
>I don't know if this is genuine sentiment you're expressing or just naivety, but people that can glaze this hard this easily usually go very far in life. I'll give you that, I wish I could do this.
Ohh it's 100% genuine, I went from living on food stamps, multiple evictions to 200k at my peak. Making a bit less now , but I'm still very comfortable.
Ultimately these technologies made computing and programming extremely easy and cheap. You can make a lot of money using your Windows PC to code Android apps in JavaScript.
I'm a not tech purist, if it works it works. Yes better OSes and languages exist, but they weren't really accessible to me. I still suggest most new programmers start with JavaScript or Python so you don't get too bogged down with boilerplate and type systems.
queuebert
I agree with this. We had multiple windowing environments, all arguably superior in various ways, and we had multiple office suites, all with better technology than the Microsoft versions. Then I wonder how much worse off are we because Windows and Office came to predominate instead of one of the others? How much rent seeking has gone into building Gates' fortune? How much has been lost financially by innocent users to Windows security vulnerabilities?
On the handwriting thing, I see a general decline in my children's handwriting because they spend so much time typing. That bothers me personally, since I appreciate good handwriting, and I would think it spills over into other fine-motor skills tasks.
schmookeeg
> When I was growing up in the 90s my hand writing was so bad it was assumed I would never amount to anything.
I'm curious where you grew up? I am high school class of 1992. I skipped third grade, where a lot of penmanship is taught. We had a computer lab in Junior High (so late 1980s), I had a PC Clone at home that we bought in 1985. I'd turn in writing assignments printed on my epson dot matrix printer. To my knowledge, my appalling handwriting was never considered by anyone.
bombcar
In no way would I want to downplay Gates' effect on the industry (though I personally think it was much more in the 80s and early 90s than in the heyday of the 2000s) I think people would have built computers without him, and its possible that we would have been better off overall in a world where the Amiga won, not the IBM PC, or the Mac, etc.
Gates is more notable for NOT Netscaping or Sunning or Lotus-123ing his company than for any particular decision.
999900000999
I don't see computers being widely adapted without Microsoft deciding to essentially give Windows away to OEMs.
Of course this was anti competitive, but it was a massive net good.
The point is computers became extremely cheap. We're at the point where you can get a used laptop for 100$, install Linux on it and write code to your hearts content. The only thing limiting you is your own skill set.
I don't think computers become affordable without Microsoft
zabzonk
Gates (who I admire) did not invent the computer terminal, the word processor or the spreadsheet.
pfannkuchen
I feel like if, in the counterfactual where people continued writing things by hand, as an adult you thought your handwriting was holding you back, you could probably improve it? It’s not an innate property of a human, it’s a practiced skill. And as a child there is not a good incentive structure to make kids who aren’t for some reason perfectionistic learn to write really well.
sokoloff
> None of this would have been possible without Gates.
Though he and his company did a lot to change the prevalence of typing, if he or Microsoft didn’t come along, someone else would have led the computing revolution with probability 1.
tgv
What an exaggeration. We had typewriters before the 90s. Apple, Commodore, and Atari arguably had an earlier influence than Gates.
padjo
Is this satire? Bill Gates didn’t invent computers, he just started the company that won the PC revolution, very talented and intelligent, but also well placed and lucky.
SoftTalker
He's almost 70. Pretty optimistic of him to think he's still got 20 years.
dexwiz
High 80s is doable with the best care in the world and no chronic health issues.
toomuchtodo
Related:
Bill Gates pledges 99% of his fortune to Gates Foundation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43926212 - May 2025
oceanhaiyang
[flagged]
Windchaser
> So he’s going to selflessly donate it to himself to save himself from taxes? What a hero.
You don't really "save yourself from taxes" by donating money to charity.
Option A: sell stock for $100, pay taxes of $20, spend $80 on yourself Option B: donate stock of $100 to charity, and spend $0 on yourself
Which of these options leaves Gates with more money in his pocket to spend on himself?
Giving money away doesn't save you from taxes on your income; you just forego the income entirely. The money is gone. It's no longer yours. Why would you be paying taxes on it?
ghaff
>You don't really "save yourself from taxes" by donating money to charity.
That's not really true if you have sufficiently appreciated assets and are in a high tax bracket. You can donate those appreciated assets and collect an annuity from some percentage of the face value donation and basically be shielded from any capital gains.
See e.g. https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/guidance/philanthropy/cha...
I'm sure there are other mechanisms as well.
philomath_mn
The exact same logic applies to any deductible expense, and yet people think they can buy a business vehicle "for free" because it is deductible.
IDK why this is so hard to understand.
earlyriser
Gates has been advocating for higher taxes to people like him for a while.
eliaspro
If he'd be serious about it, he'd spend 0.01% of his fortune to buy politicians (he just has to bid more than the fossil industry etc) and have them change the tax code.
lagniappe
Look at outcomes, not words and ambitions.
otteromkram
Is anyone stopping him, et al, from just paying more? There's an option for that on US tax forms (though I'm guessing tax returns for billionaires are a little more complex than what a Form 1040 can handle).
melling
The interest alone on the US debt is $1 trillion a year. He’s giving away $200 billion in the same time the US will spend $20 trillion in interest.
wing-_-nuts
You can only write off ~ 67% of your income in through charitable deductions IIRC. Of course, I suppose if donating shares of appreciated stock that doesn't quite apply the same way.
giantg2
Yeah, it would be going through stocks.
twodave
Not “to” but “through”. What am I missing?
His foundation really does seem to do a good job with 'effective altruism'. There's a reason they're marked as secondary beneficiaries on all my accounts.
Also, as a recommendation, you guys should look into whether your employer matches charitable donations to 501Cs in any amount. I find giving a solid chunk of my discretionary budget to charity every year lends a sense of purpose to a job that wouldn't otherwise have much (at least, in the sense of helping others).
I enjoy being a dev, and I've given serious thought to simply continuing working once I reach my FIRE number and donating half of what I earn to charity. I think most charities would have more use for my money than my time, given my disability