Why Won't Bill Gates Stand Up for Himself?
People hate him because they're stupid and conspiratorial
Rich men are often treated unfairly. But I don’t think that there has been a successful businessman in American life who has been treated more unfairly or maligned with less justification than Bill Gates. His story has something to teach us about conspiracy theories, why certain figures become targets and not others, and the nature of public relations. It also suggests that whatever he is doing is not working, and if Gates is going to save his own legacy, he’s going to need to do more to defend himself against false and misleading attacks.
Today, the founder of Microsoft is in the news for once having had an association with Jeffrey Epstein. But he’s been a target for conspiracy theories for over a decade and a half. In 2017, Snopes factchecked a claim that Gates had admitted to using vaccines to depopulate the earth. While it’s true that Gates has expressed concerns with overpopulation, his actual argument about vaccines was the exact opposite of the one attributed to him by conspiracy theorists. As explained in a 2011 Forbes profile,
So in 1997, when he and Melinda first ventured into public health—their eponymous foundation would come into being in two years—they focused on birth control, funding a Johns Hopkins effort to use computers to help women in the developing world learn about contraception. The logic was crisp and Bill Gates-friendly. Health = resources ÷ people. And since resources, as Gates noted, are relatively fixed, the answer lay in population control. Thus, vaccines made no sense to him: Why save kids only to consign them to life in overcrowded countries where they risked starving to death or being killed in civil war?…
Gates began consuming data that startled him. In society after society, he saw, when the mortality rate falls—specifically, below 10 deaths per 1,000 people—the birth rate follows, and population growth stabilizes. “It goes against common sense,” Gates says. Most parents don’t choose to have eight children because they want to have big families, it turns out, but because they know many of their children will die.
“If a mother and father know their child is going to live to adulthood, they start to naturally reduce their population size,” says Melinda.
In terms of giving, Gates did a 180-degree turn. Rather than prevent births, he would aim his billions at saving the kids already born. “We moved pretty heavily into vaccines once we understood that,” says Gates.
The article goes on to describe how Gates went on to operationalize his efforts to vaccinate poor people across the world.
So back in 1999 Gates traveled to Bellagio, Italy to hammer out a solution, along with Unicef, the World Bank, the UN, various pharmas and aid groups. The result was the Global Alliance for Vaccines & Immunisation, now called the GAVI Alliance, which Gates ultimately backed with a $2.5 billion pledge and personal will, exhibiting the tough-guy tactics, when necessary, that earned Microsoft the fear of its rivals and enmity of U.S. antitrust regulators. “Bill was a little like a poker player who put a lot of chips on the table and scared everyone else off,” says Seth Berkley, who ran a Gates-funded AIDs vaccine effort and is now GAVI’s chief executive.
GAVI set out to do things differently in two ways. First, buy-in: It forced developing countries to cofinance vaccination programs, even at the nominal amount of 20 cents a dose. And second, accountability: It required clear record-keeping to ensure the vaccines were getting to children and to establish a sustainable delivery system. This clarity—a well-financed effort with partners on the ground—created a lasting market for big pharma that wouldn’t cost them their shirts. To further goose competition, increase supply and bring down prices, GAVI encouraged drugmakers from developing nations like China and India to bid on contracts….
With newer, more-expensive offerings, like Pfizer’s Prevnar for pneumonia, the biggest-grossing vaccine in the world, GAVI has gone a step further. By promising to buy a certain number of doses, it guarantees the pharma company massively efficient volume. In exchange GAVI sets a ceiling for what it will pay long term—Prevnar, for example, goes for $114 in the U.S. but will cost no more than $3.50. Gates and his peers subsidize losses during the ramp-up. The math can be staggering: To deliver pneumococcal and rotavirus vaccines to 250 million children, GAVI raised more than $3 billion from various governments, including the U.K., Norway and the U.S., and Gates kicked in the final $1 billion to make it all work. The results have been equally massive: 3.4 million lives saved from hepatitis B, which causes liver cancer, 1.2 million lives from measles, 560,000 from the Hib bacteria, 474,000 from whooping cough, 140,000 from yellow fever and 30,000 from polio. In the past year the new initiatives have prevented another 8,000 deaths from pneumonia and 1,000 from diarrhea.
“I’ve met mothers who walked eight hours to get their child a vaccine and hoped that it’s there on that day,” Melinda says. On a trip in January to a rural clinic in Kenya she saw four children with pneumonia sharing a single oxygen tube. “They were just sucking breath,” she recalls. But across the clinic the Gates Foundation work showcased a different future: Children lined up to get the new vaccine that would dramatically reduce the risk they would ever get pneumonia.
This is the guy that anti-vaxxers chose to hate.
So Gates’ theory was that vaccines are great because they save lives, and health and development in general lead to women naturally limiting their fertility. Conspiracy theorists turned this on its head: Bill Gates thinks vaccines sterilize or kill people, which is why he’s so into them! You can chalk up this misunderstanding to the general idiocy of anti-vaxxers.
Despite being promoted by figures like Alex Jones, such ideas remained relatively niche before Covid. At that point, we got a new conspiracy theory, which said that Gates wanted to use vaccines to microchip people. The source of this idea was an AMA from the beginning of the pandemic in which he talked about creating “digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.” A Yahoo News/YouGov poll from May 2020 showed 44% of Republicans and 19% of Democrats endorsing the theory that Gates wanted to use microchips in vaccines to track people.
And then came Epstein. Here is the extent of the relationship: Gates had a private foundation with a focus on global health. Epstein presented himself as someone who could persuade extremely wealthy clients to direct billions toward charity, in addition to being wealthy himself, so between 2011 and 2014, they met numerous times, with Gates hoping to get funding for his work. There is no evidence Epstein ever donated, and their relationship eventually ended, only for Epstein to reach out to Gates in 2017 in order to pressure him over the financier’s knowledge of an extramarital affair. This means that there’s more evidence of Gates being an actual victim of Epstein than there is for the stories of most if not all of Epstein’s female accusers who have gotten large payouts from his estate and been celebrated by the media. For all this, Gates has been dragged before Congress to testify about Epstein, the foundation has launched an external review, and Warren Buffett has ended his longstanding practice of providing donations.
Gates has been remarkably passive throughout all of this. In response to claims regarding topics like vaccines and microchipping, the Gates Foundation puts out statements calmly explaining that conspiracy theorists are misrepresenting things he has said. In 2022, Gates told the BBC, "In some ways, you almost have to laugh because it's so crazy," adding "I mean, do I really want to track people? You know, I spend billions on vaccines, I don't make money on vaccines, vaccines save lives." On conspiracy theories in particular, Gates is fatalistic: “Misinformation is the one where I, a little bit, had to punt and say, ‘OK, we’ve handed this problem to the younger generation.’”
Gates has declared that associating with Epstein was a major mistake. In response to the revelation of a draft email of Epstein claiming that Gates suffered from an STD – which appears to show Epstein workshopping a likely fabricated allegation that he could later use against his former associate – Gates’ PR flaks have pushed back, though the man himself continues to ignore the story.
One might say that Gates has a target on his back because he’s a rich guy, and this is just the way the world works. Yet Gates is singled out in a way that other wealthy and famous individuals are not. If you’re worried about rich guys putting microchips into your body, you might want to start with Elon Musk, who literally has a company devoted to that purpose, and in that case it goes straight into the brain. And unlike Gates, there’s a paper trail of Musk trying to get invited to Epstein’s island. Trump was better friends with Epstein than Gates ever was, and that relationship was actually based on their shared affection for young women, rather than resulting from an attempt to get money to save the lives of poor people.
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So this is not simply about Gates’ fame or net worth. What we see here is another demonstration of the fact that conspiracy theorists are much dumber than most intelligent people realize. Gates looks and talks like a nerd. He wears glasses and sweater vests. He reads scientific studies and determines that vaccines are the best way to improve global health. Musk and Trump are also much richer and more successful than normal people, but they talk and act in ways dumb people would if they were rich. Their information about politics and social issues comes from social media or what people personally tell them rather than peer-reviewed journal articles. Gates’ handful of tactful affairs appear much worse than the much more unrestrained sexual behavior of other powerful men. Musk and Trump also respect the unwashed masses enough to try to gain their approval, while Gates is playing a status game where he simply tries to win over other elites.
To understand how much populism is based on aesthetics, I often ask people to engage in a thought experiment where Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell switched positions on substantive political issues, but kept their same looks and personalities. Would the typical MAGA who loves Trump and thinks McConnell is a weak cuck change his views on either of these men? No one can possibly believe so.
Practically every serious analysis finds that the Gates Foundation has done data-driven work that has improved global health, having distributed over $100 billion. But that’s not what people inclined toward populism would do with their money if they were rich. In contrast, they could imagine buying themselves gold toilet seats or thinking about how to spite the libs.
Another factor behind Gates hate is his specific focus on vaccines. Even before crazy people took over the right, anti-vaxxers were an extremely energetic community. During Covid, they moved comfortably into the conservative coalition, and brought their anti-Gates attitudes along with them. The poor guy had the misfortune of meeting with Epstein, and although rightists were the ones to keep the fake human-trafficking story alive for years, eventually the deceased financier’s relationship with Trump and general MeToo hysteria made it something that Democrats were interested in too. So Gates now finds himself hated across the political spectrum.
Even when his reputation was clean, Gates was never particularly loved. It was always Melinda who pushed most strongly for causes dear to the hearts of Western feminists like making corporate environments less masculine. Bill was always not woke enough for the left, and too smart for the right. Nobody likes a quantitative nerd. Now, his scandals have come to play a major part in his public image.
Bill Gates is both a great entrepreneur and a great philanthropist. In a healthy, sane society, he would be considered one of the greatest men of our era. We are too stupid to appreciate him, but that doesn’t mean he can’t find more effective ways to respond to criticism. Gates expresses bemusement and frustration over conspiracy theories, but never goes on the attack. The man is clearly uncomfortable with conflict or public controversy, and in his innocence probably never thought that promoting vaccines would be something that could make him hated outside of a small circle of lunatics. Again, it is difficult for smart people to even predict how dumb people will react to statements and events. Having already become a punching bag for the right, he found himself with practically no defenders when the bipartisan Epstein mob came for him.
At this point, Bill Gates needs to fight for his reputation. He might think that this would make things worse, but current attempts to stay above the fray are clearly not working. Gates can start by telling the truth: he’s a talented and altruistic man who has saved millions of lives, and people only hate him because they’re stupid and conspiratorial. Of course, he would probably prefer to be more diplomatic. Say they are misinformed, or have been taken in by grifters. One can find a diplomatic way to get the point across.
Everyone hates the wealthy now, but conservatives make an exception for rich guys who share their own brainworms – obsessed with things like vote fraud and hating immigrants, trans, and libs. Among enlightened centrist types – who might not be a major part of the public, but are disproportionately influential in elite circles – there’s a pent-up demand for an unapologetic defense of wealth, if it is made honestly, and especially when those who are successful put their earnings toward good causes. Right now, we see wealthy figures like Musk and Andreessen respond to their critics by making overly broad attacks and showing a reckless disregard for truth. Gates is at the other end of the spectrum, simply refusing to stand up for himself, regardless of how much the facts are on his side.
Are these the only choices we have among wealthy entrepreneurs? Guys who let journalists and conspiracy theorists walk all over them, and psychos who have had their brains destroyed by right-wing Twitter? Couldn’t we use a major entrepreneur who uses his profile to forcefully push back on his critics, but does so in a thoughtful and fact-based way, without engaging in ad hominem attacks or turning into a MAGA zombie? I don’t expect Gates to start behaving like Musk, and he shouldn’t try to force himself into that role. But why not a few sophisticated essays explaining why his critics are wrong, modeled after the ones summarizing the work of the Gates Foundation?
I think he’d have a pretty popular Substack. Or how about Gates cultivating relationships with public intellectuals who might make the same case on his behalf, and promoting their work? There is a hunger for something like this, as I discovered when I recently defended Gates on Twitter and got 157K views, due to a combination of angry chuds and neoliberals and abundance types agreeing with me.
But it’s hard to be a strong Bill Gates defender if he won’t take up his own cause. This is not a role he ever wanted to play. But if he cares about his legacy, and his ability to continue doing good in the world, an honest defense of his life’s work, freed from the confines of adhering to advice given by risk-averse PR flaks, is necessary. And when it comes to modeling behavior for other successful men, few things can be as useful as demonstrating that they can unapologetically defend their contributions to the world without embracing the moral black hole that is MAGA.
I'm inclined to think that Bill Gates has given up caring about what other people think of him. He can hold his head up knowing that he's doing what he can to make the world a better place. Trying to educate the unteachable is a lost cause, let it go
How I wish that the other tech billionaires had decides to compete with Bill Gates on being the biggest philanthropist, rather than the opulent conspicuous-consumption/alpha-male dickishness they've actually decided are the status games that matter.