Benevolent Billionaire or Despot—Or Both?

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

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.

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? 

The industrial Bill complex 

I mention the incentives at the heart of books like Billionaire Nerd Savior King because they are indicative of my problem with this genre in general: perception. 

According to Das, Bill Gates has over 200 employees that manage his family’s homes, horse farms, meals, security, jets, and travel. Another 150 are focused on managing his personal fortune, along with the assets of his foundation. But that isn’t the only kind of help he has at his disposal: Throughout the book, Das references the dozens of public relations professionals, content creation experts, and style consultants who work on his personal staff, at the foundation, or elsewhere in the kingdom of Gateshood—all of whom are in the business of making us perceive Gates, and the topics surrounding him, in the manner in which he desires. 

Which is to say: Reputation is a purchasable good. If you have a generally warm and fuzzy feeling about Bill Gates and his philanthropy work, it is worth examining where that feeling comes from. Was it from a news article? A publicist probably scheduled the interview with a friendly journalist. Was it a blog post that he wrote? Gates has ghost writers and editors on hand to polish those for him. A YouTube video? Edited. A podcast? Prepped with media coaching and mock interviews. This is not a nefarious practice, but it is an industrial one. And it is something that we need to consider whenever we reckon with who Gates was. He is a media product, after all—not just a person.

There is Gates the founder, the cut-throat businessman who made Microsoft. There is Gates the individual, who allegedly cheated on his ex-wife multiple times and who loves books. And there is Gate the philanthropist, whose work in public health has probably saved more lives than nearly any other private citizen in history. Our understanding of each layer of Gates is one that was at least partially crafted by his team. 

That extends to this book. For most of its writing, Das says, Gates’s representatives did not participate in her research. After being presented with the facts she planned to publish, Das says, they ignored her for months—then eventually responded saying, “They would not comment on ‘hearsay.’” Finally, she writes—and “just days before the book went to print”—a “representative of Gates Ventures offered some comments, which are reflected in the text.” 

This back and forth raises two issues. The first is that Das does not say which parts of her thesis the Gates team offered feedback on, so we don’t know which facts they deemed worthy of refute. Second, Gates himself has written a hagiographic book coming out next year about his childhood, which would’ve been announced around the time his team was arguing with Das. Gates is planning on following this up with two more memoirs—one about his time at Microsoft, and another about his philanthropy. That he and his team are prepping books that will undoubtedly put him in a more positive light than Billionaire Nerd Savior King shows why it is so hard to make sense of these people and their influence on society. Every public mention of their existence is a complicated, messy weave of combating incentives. 

We will never, ever know the truth of what happened with Epstein. We will never get a full accounting of how Bill treated his ex-wife. The real facts of the situation will always be obscured, fuzzed over by time, savvy PR, and confusion. And as we’ve seen with the aforementioned battle of the books, most of the ideas we have about Gates—the ones that start as published accounts, then end up floating around the public consciousness—are also pretty impossible to verify. 

Ultimately, the problem with trying to measure a billionaire’s net impact on the world is their very existence. They wield such god-like levels of power and influence, over such huge populations, that you will always be able to find people who have been deeply hurt by their actions, as well as people who say they have been saved by them. 

This isn’t just a matter of perception or influence—it's a fundamental issue of scale. When we try to evaluate the impact of someone like Bill Gates, we're essentially attempting to perform moral calculus on a cosmic level. It’s a calculus that simultaneously breaks and blends multiple frameworks of moral math and logic:

1. Utilitarian math: If we accept that Gates has probably saved millions of lives through his philanthropy, how do we weigh that against his personal failings or the potential negative impacts of Microsoft's business practices? Is there a number of lives saved that would offset any wrongdoing?
2. Power distortion: The very existence of billionaires warps our ability to judge them fairly. Their influence is so vast that it becomes nearly impossible to trace all the consequences of their actions, both positive and negative.
3. The counterfactual problem: Would those millions of vaccines have been distributed without Gates? Would someone else have stepped in? Or would the absence of such concentrated wealth have led to more distributed, possibly more effective solutions?
4. Systemic effects: Beyond direct actions, how do billionaires shape our economic and political systems? Does the existence of philanthropic billionaires serve to justify wealth inequality?

Perhaps the most unsettling conclusion we can draw from all this is that billionaires represent a kind of moral singularity—a point beyond which our usual ethical frameworks break down. They operate at a scale where intentions, actions, and consequences become so intertwined and far-reaching that clear moral judgments become nearly impossible.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to evaluate, and also regulate, the impacts of billionaires. But it does suggest that we need new frameworks for thinking about them. Maybe the question isn't, "Are billionaires good or bad?" but instead, "How can we structure society so that no individual wields outsized influence over everybody else?"

In the end, the Bill Gates paradox—philanthropist or predator? Savior or sinner?—may be less about Gates himself than about the limitations of our moral intuitions in the face of vast wealth and power. As we grapple with the rise of the billionaire class, we may need to develop new ethical tools, alongside all the new economic and technological ones.

Evan Armstrong is the lead writer for Every, where he writes the Napkin Math column. You can follow him on X at @itsurboyevan and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.