I consider Gates to be "better" than most billionaires, but, I recognize that he's still a billionaire, and as such, his philanthropic endeavors are as much about him having wealth and maintaining his wealth as they are about him being a "good person".
Let me explain: it's a tax write off. Basically, billionaires often donate to charity, not because they're particularly giving, but because it reduces their taxes. They basically take the money they would otherwise pay in tax, and instead pay it to a charity that then does whatever they do with it.
By establishing a charity for himself, he can personally pay his charity the money that would otherwise go to tax, then as the charity, dictate where those funds are spent. Instead of giving the money to someone else to do with as they will, he basically pays himself, so he can dictate what happens with his money.
In turn, he pays little to no taxes, and only has to ensure the money circles around his charity somehow. That may be in the form of paying himself (or others) as a function of running the charity, or sending the money to places and people who he believes can benefit from it (or indirectly, benefit him).
It becomes a large circle jerk of money that otherwise would have gone to the government for taxes.
EDIT: before this gets any worse: he's not making money with tax write-offs. That's literally impossible. The point is to control where your money goes. Here's an example. In situation A, bill, the individual, wants a thing to happen.... Say, it's research into a new form of energy. So Bill takes $1000 from his gross income and pays someone to research that thing to make it a reality. At the end of the year, bill gets a knock on the door, it's the tax man, looking for his cut off the $1000 bill earned. His cut is 30% or $300. Now let's move to situation B. Bill wants the thing to happen, but Bill owns a charity. So Bill donates the money to his charity and gets a tax write off for it in the form of a receipt that he can submit later. As a representative of the charity, bill then pays that $1000 to people to make the thing. At the end of the year, the tax man comes calling for his $300 of bills income. Instead, bill hands the tax collector the receipt for the charitable donation he made with the $1000 of income. The tax man accepts it and leaves with nothing.
The charity is a tax shelter so that bill has more money available to spend on the things he wants to have happen. So more of his money can go towards those things without being taxed.
I hope that clears it up a bit. Jesus, there's a lot of people here that don't understand tax write-offs. There's more that simply don't understand me, or have literacy issues, and assume far too much about what I'm saying here. Yikes.
Bill Gates pays less taxes as he donates to a charity
Bill Gates runs that charity
Bill Gates then gets to decide how that charity spends his donated money
This then means that he can use what should have been tax to:
Pay himself with the charities money, as he is an employee of the charity
Lobby politicians using the charity's money
Otherwise direct the charity to work in his best interests
Which part are you disagreeing with? I guess he doesn't "make money" in the strictest sense, but it sure seems like he's exploiting the system to keep more of it
I've come to the same conclusion. Every time there's a corporation or billionaire either scrapping something or giving something away, then it's "for the tax breaks".
None of that makes sense with how taxes actually work. For every $1 donated to charity, the maximum you're getting back is 0.37 from the tax deduction. That's assuming you're in the max tax bracket. The higher your tax bracket, the cheaper it is to give to charity, but it's never better than keeping the money yourself.
There are games that can be played with charitable donations, but cash to a foundation is not really the way. The real games are played around with hard to value assets like art/jewelry where massively inflated values and weird lease terms can lead to some really questionable outcomes. For example "loaning" art to a museum and writing off the "rent" after having it appraised for some insane value.
The 0.37 you get back is the tax you paid on the income. The exercise is more about controlling where your money goes and what it goes to.
Instead of giving the money to the government, who you may not agree with, you're giving it to a cause that either directly or indirectly can benefit you, whether that cause is a direct benefit in the form of helping with a problem that is causing you trouble, or simply as a good PR move.
You spend money to get there, but now often than not you're getting a benefit from the transaction.
Billionaires and their mentality and interests are fairly well known, for the most part. Bill is a co-chair of the foundation and likely recieves many benefits from holding that position, including a salary. He can also, as chair, influence who is hired, providing stable employment for people who are in his favor, while also getting a massive boost to his public image, all while paying himself a salary. He can also direct the funds that would normally go to the government as tax, who may spend it on things he doesn't want to happen, and redirect those funds to something he would like to see happen, such as R&D into technologies (which is a nontrivial part of what the foundation funds).
For Bill, the charitable foundation is a win all the way around, except to his billion dollar bank account, which I'm certain is providing plenty of income on its own.
Quite literally he's taking money out of the hands of the government and making sure money is being funneled into things that he thinks should happen. It looks very selfless on the surface but gates is a business man, this is just his most recent endeavor.
Bill’s income is near zero, his personal tax burden is probably less than yours. This charitable giving isn’t offsetting his tax liability; it’s a hobby.
I suppose if you mean traditional income, but he gets tens of billions of dollars per year in capital gains. I remember a few years ago he said "sure, I paid three billion dollars in taxes last year, but I should have paid more". I read about ten years ago that he donated $10 billion dollars to charity and his net worth still went up $9 billion. His financial holdings are so enormous that his net worth still increases regardless of giving away ridiculous sums of money. I remember Chris Rock talking about Gates a couple decades ago and he said "you can't get rid of that much money. You can't give it away fast enough to lose it", and that's a pretty accurate statement.
I'm not sure what you mean, since money you donate to charity is exempt from income tax. The taxes you would otherwise pay on income that you donate is refunded to you.
People who look at a billionaire and think "I need to kill him". Anything anyone with that kind of money does, is treated as the greatest evil in the entire world.
He's not doing it for tax write-offs, he's donating billions of dollars per year because he genuinely wants to help. He crushed a lot of people to get to the top, that's indisputable, but he's genuinely trying to offset that destruction now, and he's possibly at a net positive effect on the world now. Actually, I'd say he's probably at a net positive impact on the world.
We joke, but Epstein masqueraded as a wealthy investor/entrepreneur for like two or three decades before he was caught, so him merely having some one's contact written down doesn't mean much. In fact, Bill Gates has never been shown to have visited the island at any point, and Epstein was very invested in the Gates Foundation charity work such as loaning his plane for high profile individuals to fly to charity sites across Africa.
There's evidence that Gates knew what was going on at Epstein's parties, didn't participate, but still choose to stay silent. Gates had enough power and wealth that he didn't need to worry about retaliation either.
He fucking did! Why the downvotes? He personally lobbied governments to make sure nobody released the patents to allow cheap vaccinations in developing countries
He helped championed one of the Covid vaccines, but also forced the private ownership and profit of it. Something the scientists working on it didn't want to do. This in an stark contrast to the polio vaccine, which was free and who's lead scientist referred the idea as "trying to own sunlight".
This is true. It was said by Jonas Salk, who was attributed with the creation of the injectable vaccine in the 1950s that was greenlit for widespread use.
The injectable vaccine is a non-sterilizing vaccine (meaning you still get the disease, but your body can fight it off effectively - which is most vaccines). The injection vaccine was replaced by a sterilizing vaccine (where your bodily systems can kill the virus before you become contagious, and in many cases, before symptoms). The sterilizing vaccine, used to this day, is basically a magic potion that you drink. It kills the polio virus in your gut, which is the ingress method for polio.
From what I've seen, Salk didn't live to see the success of his vaccine; but he's a hero in my mind.
My late father was a polio survivor. He was permanently disabled as a result of the disease. He lost something like 70% of the use of his right (?) leg (could have been his left). He was still ambulatory, and could walk, but often needed to use his stronger leg when climbing stairs because his disabled leg was too weak to lift him up the stairs. He walked with a limp... And he was lucky. Post-polio survivors frequently had much more severe disabilities. I saw him struggle with the effects of it my entire life, and given he only had a relatively mild disability, I consider anyone who developed a poliovirus vaccine to be a hero of humanity, and anyone who refuses that vaccine to be an ignorant fool.
Salk's comments are just icing on that hero status for me.
Gonna take a few downvotes and agree with you. Dude donates so much to the world health organization he beats all other COUNTRIES except for the US. If all billionaires were like him, the world would be a much better place.
He and Buffet have been making a lot of progress towards affordable, renewable energy in poverty stricken and rural areas. So Buffet might be alright too.
Even with issues like polio where he's supposedly doing good, he does lots of harm from my understanding. Probably not though malice, but being a know-it-all who uses their money to shape policy, the end result is still the same. Having a tech billionaire in charge of medical policy has caused many more people to suffer from polio as a result than would have without his meddling. And that's the problem with billionaire: even if they try to be good, they're no dieties and giving that much power to unaccountable individuals means they can accidentally cause lots of harm. And often the have perverse incentives (see Bill Gates and all he's done to hurt education in the US, for example).