Gates ups wealth outlay, links Musk to child deaths
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The news: Bill Gates pledged to give away 99% of his fortune and shut down the Gates Foundation by 2045, accelerating earlier plans to close it after his death.
The numbers: The foundation will spend USD200 billion ($312.2 billion) over the next 20 years, doubling its historic outlay.
What they said: “I have decided to give my money back to society much faster than I had originally planned,” Gates said. “There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people.”
The foundation, which has already given away USD100 billion, employs more than 2,000 people and holds a USD77 billion endowment.
It will focus on ending preventable childbirth deaths, eliminating deadly infectious diseases, lifting people out of poverty, improving education in the US and addressing climate change.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Gates said the USAID payment cutoffs driven by Elon Musk’s DOGE have resulted in “a dramatic increase in childhood death.”
“Children that would have been protected from getting HIV from their mothers during birth — that money’s been cut off,” he said.
"The picture of the world's richest man killing the world's poorest children is not a pretty one," Gates said in a separate interview with the Financial Times.
The sources: Gates Foundation statement, Bloomberg, Financial Times
