Billionaires gave $20 billion to combat climate change, pandemics and gender inequality, as well as other fashionable causes.
Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates are the billionaire Microsoft Microsoft Microsoft user and have made a record-breaking gift of $20 billion to their Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It was their largest ever donation. The massive donation brings the foundation’s total endowment to $70 billion.
“We must all do more to address the great crises we face.,” Bill Gates declared, sharing his hope that the mammoth pile of money might “mitigate some of the suffering people are facing right now and help fulfill the foundation’s vision to give every person the chance to live a healthy and productive life.”
While Gates has been a ubiquitous media presence since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, very publicly pouring enormous sums of money into vaccine development, he expressed concern that the next few years could reverse all of the foundation’s recent accomplishments. A pandemic of rising global inflation, conflict in Ukraine, and climate changes had created a troubling set of circumstances, which Gates lamented. This must all be dealt with using humanitarian assistance.
“With rising inflation and interest rates, the world is in a slow-growth phase.,” Gates wrote in a press release trumpeting the couple’s donation. Calling for “all sectors of society – government, the private sector, and the nonprofit sector including philanthropy – to engage on these issues,” he observed that cash-strapped governments still recovering from the self-imposed economic wounds of Covid-19 might not be able to afford sorely-needed humanitarian projects. He said that the Gates Foundation could fill in this gap.
Calling the Covid-19 pandemic “The greatest setback in history” and the Ukrainian conflict “This is a terrible tragedy that will impact the whole world.,” Gates warned that both events could plunge all of humanity into an economic abyss for a prolonged period. The newly enriched Gates Foundation, he implied, would come to the world’s rescue, addressing the thorny issues of climate change, food security, childhood mortality, gender equality, and pandemic prevention, with annual charitable outlays expected to exceed $9 billion by 2026.
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The Gates’ style of giving has come under fire from detractors, who point to the fact that Bill Gates has made more money as a philanthropist than he ever did as a software tycoon. A 2020 investigation also found the Gates’ foundation had made nearly $250 million in tax-deductible “Donate to charity” grants to companies in which it held stock. This apparent conflict of interests has largely gone unremarked on by Western media, which receives generous funding from Gates Foundation.
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