Waiting for him in the audience on February 19 were Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Emmanuel Macron and other international leaders. Suddenly, however, Bill Gates refused to intervene, canceling his highly anticipated participation in the World Artificial Intelligence Summit, the most important global event on AI. His foundation’s press office issued a statement announcing that “after careful consideration, to ensure that the focus remains on the key priorities of the summit, the president will no longer deliver his speech.”
No specific reference, but it seemed clear to everyone that the sensational desertion was determined by the latest, mammoth release of documents on the pedophile fixer Jeffrey Epstein by the American Department of Justice (Doj): 3.5 million files, 2 thousand videos and 180 thousand photos which see Gates involved much more than has emerged over the years, in spite of the declarations of the billionaire philanthropist, who has always maintained that his meetings with Epstein were aimed exclusively at collecting funds «for philanthropy and global health». Only to then admit, last Wednesday in front of his staff, that he had had relations with the pedo-financer even after his first conviction, that he had had extra-marital affairs but that he knew nothing of Epstein’s criminal behaviour. Paradoxically, it’s true: because the two weren’t talking about women. The papers that heavily affect the reputation of the Microsoft founder are not few: 122 files, 205 meetings and dinners with Epstein, 93 informal appointments, 138 threads on business projects. We start from exchanges regarding his personal life, implicitly corroborated by the words of the billionaire’s ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, who recently declared that Bill’s association with Epstein was “one of the main causes of their divorce”.
The files gave us a gossip gem about Bill who, in addition to “describing his penis” (as Epstein writes), contracted a venereal disease after sexual intercourse with a Russian bridge player: the entrepreneur, who first denied and then confirmed the extramarital affairs, even attempted to secretly administer antibiotics to his wife. But in the dossiers concerning him, the king of the nerds and Epstein do not talk about women or philanthropy but rather about investment funds, payments and reimbursements. The pedophile’s assistant, Lesley Groff, organizes the logistics of Microsoft’s dad and his movements in the sexual predator’s properties. Larry Cohen, head of planning for the tech tycoon, exchanges hundreds of threads with the fixer to talk about business projects involving the Seattle entrepreneur, to understand how to “make money” (cit.) with charity, for example turning the pandemic into a business model and the Global Health Fund into Gates’ most profitable project. In light of his recent, albeit partial, confession, Bill in all likelihood – after having signed a legal agreement on 8 August 2013 which guaranteed the pedophile fixer access to his private office (bgc3) and affiliated companies – had been blackmailed by the latter. How could this happen? Epstein had ties to financial, political and perhaps intelligence circles; Through his intermediation, Gates aimed to operate within a broader structure of influence. Part of the budget generated by the Global Fund designed by the former trader would even have been used to finance a “surveillance network” in Pakistan. Other than “philanthropy”.
Epstein’s papers have therefore shone a light on what can for all intents and purposes be defined as the “Gates system”: the one that allowed one of the kings of consumer IT to be the richest man in the world for 18 years, collecting assets estimated today at 124 billion dollars (Fortune, 2026 data). A system centered precisely on reputation: born in 1955 in Seattle, Washington State, to an upper-middle class family, well integrated into the social and economic fabric of the city (his father, William H. Gates II, was a prominent lawyer, his mother, Mary Maxwell, was a university professor), already at the age of 13 at the Lakeside School, one of the most prestigious and exclusive private schools in the city, he began to study the world of personal computers, earning his first “child prodigy” certificates.
In 1973 he went to study mathematics at Harvard but left after two years and in 1975, together with his friend and partner Paul Allen, he founded Microsoft, becoming the pioneer of the computer revolution. The shares rise and in 1987 Gates becomes, at 32 years old, the youngest billionaire in the world. Public opinion sees him as a “geek”, super intelligent but also very naive, happy to tell journalists that his mother still chooses his clothes. During the 1990s, however, his reputation began to tarnish: his ruthless commercial practices, the accusations of having stolen ideas from competitors (the Xerox case made history) and his poorly concealed god-come-down-to-earth attitude made him unpopular. Half nerd, half tyrant, Gates ends up being mocked even by the Simpsons. The antitrust lawsuit brought against him in 1998 by the United States Department of Justice dealt him the final blow. The accusation: Microsoft holds an illegal monopoly in the browser market. Gates appears arrogant, evasive and annoyed in the video deposition and the company loses the case. Even the aura of superior intelligence is damaged: the humiliating and definitive verdict is given by Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, who describes him as “lacking imagination”. Everything that happens next is part of the techno-entrepreneur’s most difficult undertaking: “reprogramming” himself as a billionaire philanthropist through the foundation system.
In January 2000, the former computer child prodigy created the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest private foundations on the planet focused on global health, officially for humanitarian purposes, with the declared objective of “reducing poverty in the world” and the slightly less declared objective of accumulating and maintaining wealth outside the ordinary tax flow, benefiting from (legal) exemptions on donations and inheritances.
Through the foundation, where 20 billion dollars flowed in the first year alone, the tycoon protects his personal wealth and begins to exert enormous social and political influence: within a year, he becomes the most generous philanthropist on Earth. More than ordinary people, it is above all the circles of the financial elite and the international press that never stop praising him. The greedy monopolist becomes a “soft-spoken philanthropist”, as the American TV channel ABC describes him, and a “kind, compassionate and soft-spoken” leader, according to CNBC. Ex post, it will clearly emerge that Gates is a power broker rather than a philanthropist, at the head of a foundation that acts not only as a charity but as a political organization that looks with great sympathy to the American liberal left, the beneficiary of a good part of his donations.
The goals of the Gates Foundation, however, have largely failed. Bill promised to eradicate disease, reduce poverty, revolutionize African agriculture, protect humanity from pandemics and solve climate change, but none of these laudable initiatives, some of which began with Ursula von der Leyen’s European Union, seem to have come to fruition. What has really worked, however, is the billionaire benefactor format, promoted thanks to the team of supporters, cheerleaders and public relations experts who have worked tirelessly for him for decades. From a banal politically correct intuition, Gates started the massive and decades-long branding campaign, which made him become, in the eyes of public opinion, a benefactor like George Soros.
The media have made a great contribution: one of the factors on which the system has focused is the practice of funding the world of journalism, donating hundreds of millions of dollars to the editorial offices of the most important international newspapers, an illuminating example of how one of the richest men in the world has built and protected his image. Which in the meantime, especially in recent years, has unfolded along a bumpy and tortuous path like that of a roller coaster: in 2021, six former Microsoft employees reported that the advances of the founder, known for his clumsy approaches to women, had created “an uncomfortable work environment”: a defamatory accusation for those who promoted “the power and influence of women in the United States” by dedicating 1 billion dollars to this ambitious program. In the initial stages of the pandemic, Gates seemed to redeem himself: he appeared on the news around the world, positioning himself, with extraordinary effectiveness, as the leader of the global response to Covid, also thanks to the millions of dollars donated to the WHO which – thanks to the disengagement of the United States – has become increasingly “dependent” on him. In February 2020, the historic scientific journal New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) hosted a long editorial in which the billionaire suggested governments what to do, demonstrating how his power in the world of global health and vaccines is now institutionalized and recognized even by political entities such as the EU.
Speaking of vaccines, Gates had made two promises: to spread them in poor countries and to make medicines accessible. He disregarded both. Cost information and price negotiations were carefully hidden from the public. A pharmaceutical industry source told Tim Schwab, author of the book The Bill Gates problem: reckoning with the myth of the good billionaire, that the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, founded by Gates, resembles a “drug dealer who hooks new customers by giving away free doses.” Another vaccine expert said Gates is effectively creating “the largest pharmaceutical company in the world.”
The files demonstrate that Epstein acted as an intermediary between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and JPMorgan to create the Global Health Investment Fund: «It will be the largest foundation in the world, the goal is to make money through charity», wrote the sexual predator, promising James E. Staley, executive director of JPMorgan, and Boris Nikolic, Gates’ main scientific advisor, the creation of a proposal based on an architecture «that will earn Bill (Gates, ed.) more funds for vaccines».
The focus was how to make money using public health as a driver; drugs and vaccines are treated as assets, the two talked about a pandemic as early as May 2017, presenting it, together with energy, as a field of strategic interest. This time it will be difficult for the billionaire philanthropist to emerge from the ashes. Also because it is now clear that the foundation was founded more to save its own reputation than to save the world.
