Gates to give away £65 billion fortune
Tom Rhodes and Maurice Chittenden
THE founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, who is the richest man in the world, plans to become the biggest single benefactor in history by giving away his £65 billion fortune to help rid the planet of diseases such as Aids and malaria.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, Gates's father, who manages the William H Gates Foundation, has revealed that in the next three months it will announce a number of newly funded programmes which will go a long way towards its ultimate aim of becoming the largest private charity on earth.
Gates Sr said: "My son is going to have critics all his life because of his wealth. But I'm optimistic now that we have put to rest any criticism on the basis of his not being sufficiently generous. We've pretty much drowned that out."
Gates Jr and his wife Melinda plan to hand over the money made from Microsoft to the six-year-old foundation within their lifetimes, leaving their two children with £6.5m apiece. They are expected to give a large portion of that to the funding of vaccines to combat killer diseases such as malaria and Aids.
"A widely distributed vaccine can help make the goal of a world without Aids a reality," Gates said. "Melinda and I want our children - and all children - to grow up in a world without Aids."
Some of the money will help Aids research in Britain. "It's fantastic," said Professor Andrew McMichael, head of Oxford University's human immunology unit which plans to start testing an Aids vaccine on humans next spring. "Much of our work is centred in underdeveloped countries where pharmaceutical companies are not interested, so there is a huge need for this sort of funding."
Gates, who lives with his family in a £40m mansion on the shores of Lake Washington near Seattle, has previously given £12m towards a computer laboratory at Cambridge University.
His foundation, which has funds of £6.4 billion, now ranks fifth in the league of the world's philanthropic foundations.
The London-based Glaxo-Wellcome Foundation, built on money from drugs companies, is still the biggest with funds worth more than £10 billion. Last year it gave away £227m, the largest amount in Britain; the Sainsbury family gave a total of £58m.
By divesting his £65 billion holdings in Microsoft - a fifth of its market value - Gates's foundation would dwarf them. One of his favourite books is Andrew Carnegie's The Gospel of Wealth in which the philanthropist wrote: "The man who dies rich dies in disgrace." Gates has read it several times.
In May the Gates foundation donated £16m to the International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), a group based in New York which invests money in a number of research teams, including the one working at Oxford.
Gates, renowned for his tough business practices, became interested in global health after he and his wife visited South Africa and India in 1995.
Gates Sr, 73, said the couple found themselves increasingly shocked by the level of disease and poverty that they found in developing countries. "Bill and Melinda believe that one's success is not some sort of God-given thing. Without that society there would be no Microsoft," he said.
There are those, however, who question whether the philanthropy is totally altruistic. Gates has previously been criticised for not giving enough and his latest gifts will receive generous tax breaks in the United States.
His critics say the donations coincide with a dispute with the American government over whether computer makers who license the Windows 95 operating system from Microsoft must also license the firm's internet browser, Internet Explorer. At one stage the Justice Department threatened Gates with a £650,000-a-day fine for operating an alleged illegal monopoly.
Trevor Neilson, spokesman for the Gates foundation, said there was no relation between the new donations and the monopoly case.
"Bill and Melinda have already endowed their foundations with more than $10 billion. When you are giving that sort of money the tax benefits are inconsequential. They are doing this because they think it is the right thing to do," he said.
the-times.co.uk
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