It's not just about money, it's about the "brightest minds" part. Injecting arbitrary amounts of money to some cancer projects won't suddenly make smart people to come back from making ads, especially if such donations are unsustainable. And you can't plan for billionaires; a Bill Gates is one-in-a-billion fluke combination of skill, upbringing, luck and conscience. For all the good Gates family is doing, you can't base humanity's most important projects on whether or not a billionaire wants to help their fellow men, instead of hoarding it all for their estate, or damaging some market in an attempt to turn their fortune into a greater fortune, or just blowing it all on heroin and hookers.

Bill Gates isn't really that much of an outlier within the class of people with that level of wealth. There is a long tradition of it stretching to the likes of Andrew Carnegie, and Gates isn't even the only modern example. Warren Buffet has committed to giving 99% of his wealth to charity. Elon Musk is Elon Musk. Any random billionaire is more likely to have a charitable foundation than not. It's pretty much impossible to spend that amount of money on heroin and hookers in practice.

The problem with relying on billionaires isn't that they won't do it, it's that they don't actually have that much money. Gates with ~$90B is #2 in the world, but spending every cent of it all in the same year would amount to less than one half of one percent of US GDP. His entire fortune is not quite half of what the US spends on just advertising each year.

> Any random billionaire is more likely to have a charitable foundation than not.

something something tax avoidance

Donations to certain charities can be tax deductions, but once you give the money to the charity, it has to be used for charitable purposes or it's not tax avoidance, it's tax fraud. Having it be used for charitable purposes seems like the thing we should want to happen to it.

Moreover, most of the things traditionally thought of as tax avoidance don't involve charities at all and are more along the lines of warehousing wealth in offshore companies where it can collect interest at low/zero tax rates.

Bill Gates has no real ability to cure polio or malaria, other than by throwing money at the problem. Other people have to do the actual work. But if the industry for those kinds of jobs isn't very good, enough people won't go into those careers at the time they need to, which is early: they need to have an interest at a young age, major in the right fields in college, specialize in postdoc, etc.

You can't just throw money at something and expect hordes of highly talented and qualified people to suddenly be available to do it.

This isn't Bill's fault (as much as I'd like to blame him for something after suffering with Windows 9x), it's a product of our society. We don't value that kind of work, we don't demand our government to fund it properly (since the "free market" isn't going to), so we get kids going into college tracks where they can be good at online advertising rather than curing cancer.

> Bill Gates has no real ability to cure polio or malaria, other than by throwing money at the problem.

This is far too simplistic. Throw a bunch of money at advertising and everyone goes to work for FAANG. Shift some of that money to disease research and suddenly people - who might have otherwise become doctors or followed a career path that paid - start realizing its a valid career path that they don’t need to sacrifice quality of life to pursue.

Yes, it’s not something that will happen overnight (it’s not like everyone immediately switched to coding once FAANG started paying a lot), but if the money is there, it will start to happen.

It's very easy to shift from some other programming work (where you have a degree in CS or similar) to working for FAANG.

You can't take a CS degree and start working in disease research, any more than you can get an MBA and start in disease research. The time to get people on that track is when they're coming out of high school.

You can't take doctors and have them work in disease research either. They'll have the necessary undergrad work most likely, but all the med school stuff just isn't useful for it, and they'll have to start over with the postdoc studies to specialize in that research. After they've already invested a fortune in med school, they're not going to do that. Who's going to pay all these people to move away from more lucrative fields into research?