The Bill Gates Problem Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire. Tim Schwab. 2023.

A powerful and overdue re-examination of Bill Gates, showing how he uses robust business tactics, political influence and philanthropy to exercise enormous power without accountability.

Through his vaunted giving, Bill Gates transformed himself from a tech villain into one of the most admired people on the planet. But, as Tim Schwab shows in this riveting investigation, Gates is still exactly who he was at Microsoft: a monopolist, convinced of his own righteousness and intent on imposing his ideas, his solutions and his leadership on everyone else. At the core, he is a power broker who turned extreme wealth into immense political influence - and who has made us believe we should applaud his acquisition of power, not challenge it.

The Bill Gates Problem shows how Gates’s billions have purchased a stunning level of control over public policy, private markets, scientific research and the news media, piercing the saintly image of Gates that has shielded him from public scrutiny for way too long. Whether he is pushing new educational standards in America, health reforms in India, industrialised agriculture in Africa, or a global vaccine policy during the pandemic, Gates’s heady social experimentation has shown itself to be not only undemocratic, but also ineffective.

As Schwab shows, Bill Gates’s philanthropic empire needs to be seen as a dangerous model of unconstrainex power that threatens democracy and demands our attention.