The Problem With Bill Gates

Out of all the billionaires I know, I only like Bill Gates. Steve Jobs was an awful person who deleted his employees’ work for fun. Jeff Bezos is a systemic bully. Zuckerberg refuses to admit that no one should have the kind of power he has, so he tries to pretend he doesn’t have it. Richard Branson reminds me of a rich boss I had: seemed like a nice guy, but dragged me on a getting-to-know-you lunch at a vegan salad place I didn’t want to go to and peppered me with questions while not listening to my answers. Elon Musk, tragically, is Elon Musk.

Bill Gates did some dodgy business in the 90s that, among other things, created an Internet Explorer monopoly that was a personal bane in my life for ten years. But I can look past that. He gives a lot of money to places that need it, for the betterment of all, and I don’t think it’s just to be remembered for something other than Windows ME. I think he genuinely wants to make a difference and knows he can, so he does.

In 2018 Bill Gates bought a book for every graduating student, approximately three and a half million. The book is called Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. It makes a factfulish case for the notion that the world is getting better.

The primary yardstick for this notion is a measure of poverty. About a billion people are living on a dollar a day or less. The number of people living at this level is going down. That’s good.

Bill Gates has an estimated worth over one hundred billion dollars. He could eliminate a category of poverty without changing the number of digits in any box on his tax forms.

But there’s no remotely effective way to distribute one dollar to a billion separate people who don’t have electricity. It would take an enormous amount of thankless labor to create a world where kind-hearted billionaires can distribute their money equitably. It’s easier to buy eBooks for people who can already afford to finish school. Books that tell them to feel better because of selected facts about a few countries.

This seems like an act of kindness in a world that includes billionaires. The act exists in a worldview that respects the existence of billionaires, and considers them a million times more worthy of opinions than a person who has one thousand dollars in their checking account. Bill Gates chose to use that power of opinion to make people feel better about the system that allows him to exist.

The only way billionaires can help us is to invest in unmaking the system that created them. There is no way to be a moral billionaire. The existence of that fortune is built on a form of systemic exploitation that precludes redistribution. There cannot be both billionaires and the means of billionaires fixing the world out of the goodness of their hearts, because the only way to maintain billionaires is to maintain a system of dragging money toward billionaires. The insurmountable problems of distributing wealth exist because all the things we built and called distribution systems are central vacuum installations.

Anyone worth over a billion dollars after 2020 will have failed the only moral test that mattered in their lives. They must dismantle themselves, each other, and the violent power structures that protect them. The plutocracy can have all the good intentions in the world, but it is unable to exist without draining the resources and smothering the efforts that could sustain justice in that world.

I actually still have one of these somewhere.