Benevolent Billionaire or Despot

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Reckoning with the legacy of Bill Gates in 2024 requires engaging in a gut-churning calculation: Do his multiple dinner meetings and single late-night hangout with Jeffrey Epstein, combined with a flight on the convicted sex offender’s plane, discount the tens of millions of lives he has impacted through his philanthropic work?

Yes, this math is reductive. And yes, it is almost certainly unfair. However, that does not mean it isn’t a worthy question. Billionaires are more numerous and powerful in our society than ever before. The world was home to 140 billionaires in 1987. There are 2,755 of them today.

Source: Forbes.

Beyond their sheer fiscal might, the power of the B-class lies in the services they control and the influence those services have on us plebeians. Their attitudes and philosophies shape the internet gardens in which all of us roam. Exhibit A: How Elon Musk has adjusted the moderation policies on X to be more in line with his views on free speech, or at least the kind of speech he prefers.

This is why the new book Billionaire Nerd Savior King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World, by New York Times finance editor Anupreeta Das, caught my eye. The book does a quick run through Gates's personal history, then spends the bulk of its 281 pages on the contrast between his philanthropy, which saw him and his former wife Melinda distribute millions of vaccines and donate over $35 billion to causes all over the world, and the controversies that have threatened to overshadow that legacy. The latter includes the dissolution of his marriage and the accompanying scandal over his Epstein connections, which became public after a 2021 report in the New York Times. (Bill Gates has denied having “a friendship or business relationship with him” and called the meetings a “huge mistake.”)

Gates is a notoriously ferocious entrepreneur. His philosophy about software and technology shapes how billions of people work. The book’s wager is that it is worth examining his life beyond his business acumen, and it’s one that I agree with.

Frankly, the question of whether you can be both a good person and rich is one I’ve been a little obsessed with this year. In April, I shot off a tweet pontificating on whether a moral billionaire was even possible that drew 1.5 million impressions. From there, I embarked on a quest to find "Jesus Christ with a Gulfstream" and uncovered a few examples of billionaires with exceptional character.

Das’s book was my latest read in this study of power. All in all, it is a typical book written by a journalist: She combines dozens of newspaper articles into a crisp narrative, then sprinkles it with little details provided by anonymous sources. It’s a format that typically sells on the juiciness of the scoops that the journalist is able to uncover.

Billionaire Nerd Savior King has new information about the extent of Gates’s personal investing empire and his divorce from Melinda, but there are relatively few earth-shaking revelations. Mostly, Das meditates on the complicated nature of billionaires themselves (and ends up deciding they probably shouldn’t exist in the chapter “Why We Hate Billionaires.”) Below, I explain why the question she asks is worth reflecting on: Given the enormous scale of their impact on the world, in both positive and negative ways, how are we supposed to comprehend these people’s net impact on society?