Bill Gates: Where are his billions going?Like many great industrialists before him, Bill Gates cherished a dream: that after he retired, he would give his fortune away. But when his mother died prematurely, the techno-tycoon could wait no longer. Soon, billions were allocated to Aids, malaria and education projects. And now, with a $35bn donation from his friend Warren Buffett, Microsoft's founder truly has the power to change the world. Paul Vallely explains where the money goes - and why
It was already the most powerful charity in the world. And by a big margin. Last year it declared its assets at $35bn - more than the GDP of a medium-sized African country. It gave away $1.36bn in grants. And now it is to double in size - thanks to a massive donation from the world's second richest man.
The rich, F Scott Fitzgerald famously observed, are different from you and me (and not just because, as Ernest Hemingway waggishly riposted, they have more money). If you needed proof of that just put yourself in the shoes of yesterday's donor, 75-year-old Warren Buffett. If you had decided you were going to give all your money away, to whom would you give it? Here's one answer you probably wouldn't come up with. The second richest man in the world decided to give it to the richest man in the world - the Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Buffett, widely regarded as the world's most successful investor - who had previously said his fortune would go to charity after his death - changed his mind and decided to give it away now. The bulk of his $44bn fortune will go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in annual instalments. It will be the biggest charitable gift ever. As part of the deal, Buffett will join the foundation's board, which will become a charity unparalleled in history, far larger than anything created by the great 19th-century philanthropists like Andrew Carnegie or the Rockefellers. The Gates Foundation has come a long was since it began, under a different name, barely 20 years ago. It was the offshoot off the iconic computer software company which Bill Gates had founded - with the dream of placing a personal computer in every home and business and through which he became the man who shaped the first half-century of the information age. In the intervening years it has given $2bn to education and learning projects and $4bn to fight diseases in the poorest countries, along with another $4bn on a range of other charitable activities in more than 100 nations around the world...
