Gates Foundation Quotes

“frustration has flared up over the Common Core initiative, involving the implementation of national reading and maths standards for primary and secondary school children. The Gates Foundation played a central role in bringing the standards to fruition. Spending over $233 million to back the standards, the foundation dispersed money liberally to both conservative and progressive interest groups. The two major teachers' unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, each received large donations, as did the US Chamber of Commerce. Gates himself suggested that a benefit of the standards is that they open avenues towards increasing digital learning. In 2014, Microsoft announced it was partnering with Pearson to load Pearson's Common Core classroom material onto Microsoft's Surface tablet. Previously, the iPad was the classroom frontrunner; the Pearson partnership helps to make Microsoft more competitive.”
― Linsey McGoey

“Bill Gates is not plowing hundreds of millions of dollars into journalism because he believes in the democratic ideals of the free press or because he is a personal fan of watchdog reporting. His private foundation funds the media for the exact opposite reason—to defang his watchdogs and bring them to heel, to promote his agenda and embellish his brand, to create propaganda that builds his political power, and to control the narrative that guides public understanding of his work.”
― Tim Schwab, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire

“The foundation enjoys unparalleled privileges in the marketplace. It is not taxed or regulated as a private company because all its deal making happens through charitable agreements. It is not scrutinized by the public or by journalists as part of Big Pharma because it wears the superhero cape of philanthropy. And, armed with its unimpeachable brand as a humanitarian body, the foundation can financially partner with competing developers in ways that Big Pharma probably couldn’t.”
― Tim Schwab, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire

“Gates donates money from his private wealth to his private foundation. He then assembles a small group of consultants and experts at the foundation’s half-billion-dollar corporate headquarters to decide what problems are worth his time, attention, and money—and what solutions should be pursued. Then the Gates Foundation floods money into universities, think tanks, newsrooms, and advocacy groups, giving them both a check and checklist of things to do. Suddenly, Gates has created an echo chamber of advocates pushing the political discourse toward his ideas. And the results have been stunning.”
― Tim Schwab, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire

“Across most of the diseases the Gates Foundation works on, its track record of innovation is quite weak. Gates planted its flag as the leading voice on malaria, working with a number of different companies to develop a vaccine, eventually putting all its weight behind a GSK product. The GSK vaccine’s efficacy was so weak that even the foundation distanced itself from the product. We see a similar story with TB, where the foundation put half a billion dollars into a nonprofit vaccine developer named Aeras, which shuttered in 2018. Gates also poured money into, and grandiosely promoted, its work on an AIDS vaccine and new TB drugs. Again and again and again, the game-changing innovations Gates promised never materialized. Yes, these failures speak to the complexity of these diseases, but many sources say they also speak to the foundation’s bullying and micromanaging, which stifle innovation.”
― Tim Schwab, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire