Speaking of malaria, after googling for 3 minutes it seems he spent around 2B$ on it. Does it really matter? Yes and no. Maybe it had impact on people's lives, but given Gates' net value is 100B$+, giving away a billion or two does not matter. It will not affect his quality of life in any significant way. He could give away a few dozen billions more and still will spend rest of his life living in luxury that I could only dream off. Sure, better to fight malaria than buy another yacht, but still, it's easy decision to make when you have that much money.
My 2 mins of googling came up with more like 3.6B$ on malaria, but even 2B$ is a shit-ton of money. I certainly haven't donated 2% of my net value to malaria (and it's only on the order of 1/10000 of his!).
Malaria rates are down around 30% since 2010, thanks in part to Gates. He's likely saved thousands to hundreds of thousands of lives.
Malaria is just one part of his philanthropy. I'd love to see the numbers for Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. It would be great to all billionaires follow suit with this kind of "easy decision".
I'm not saying he shouldn't outsource his videos. What I'm saying is that this looks more like a professionally made commercial (advertising his personal brand). I'm pretty sure it cost O(hours) of his time (consider even getting to the set - you can see this is a professional set, so probably in some studio; I also doubt this was done in one take given how there are other actors around including the skating Santa Clauses). All in all, it really feels artificial and dishonest. What kind of person would even come up with idea of creating such a video in the first place?
There are somewhat diminishing returns spending money on philanthropic causes: if he were to spend 30 rather than 3 billion the result wouldn't be ten times better. I'm happy he's trying to make the world a better place while still keeping an eye on the money being used efficiently.
Why does the 100k matter if the 3 billion don't?
Is it not enough for you that he went out of his way to improve other people's lives? Would it only satisfy you if his lifestyle suffered?
> it's easy decision to make when you have that much money
How do you know? Have you ever been in that position?
How did he went out of his way?
> How do you know? Have you ever been in that position?
I don't think snark is necessary here; probably there are no 100B$+ users on HN.
But it's not hard to extrapolate from where am I. I have comfortable tech job, I could easily give away few thousands bucks to some charitable cause just to show off (and my quality of life wouldn't change). Would that automatically make me a good and trustworthy person? I think the answer here is no. I also guess if for some reason my net worth went up a few orders of magnitude, I could also give few orders of magnitude more. Would then I be a good and trustworthy person?
He spent a considerable amount of his free time.
> I have comfortable tech job, I could easily give away few thousands bucks to some charitable cause just to show off (and my quality of life wouldn't change).
Yes, you could. Do you?
> Would that automatically make me a good and trustworthy person? I think the answer here is no.
It wouldn't. But also because there are no good and bad people. There are good and bad actions. I use Linux and absolutely hate what Bill Gates was doing wrt the whole free software ecosystem. I still commend him for his charity work.
> I also guess if for some reason my net worth went up a few orders of magnitude, I could also give few orders of magnitude more.
Yes, you could. Would you though?
We have a pretty open internet today, or at least MS is no longer the biggest threat to it so maybe this was just another MS-bungled project lol.
Jokes aside, utmost respect to the people who have fought for an open internet over the years.
Despite this and more importantly despite his reputation in business and the often laughable products MS produced, his tremendous philanthropy really changed my perspective on him.
In a world where there are mega-billionaires, he's my least unfavourite. He's doing good things with his money like eradicating malaria and funding bleeding edge climate tech. He's pretty outstanding wrt how he spends his money.