Last year you published the book "The Bill Gates Problem".1 What motivated you to learn about Bill Gates?

You have this phenomenally rich man, Bill Gates. Today, he's worth 130 billion US-Dollars and runs a very powerful private foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whose endowment today is 67 billion US-Dollars. He has a great deal of money, but also a great deal of influence on the world stage. He's traveling around the world, meeting with government leaders, shaping priorities, shaping the agenda of governments, and also shaping how tax dollars are spent.

One of the most fascinating parts of the book for me was how foundations work in the U.S. Could you elaborate a bit on how the Gates Foundation operates, where the money comes from and how it uses its money?

In the United States, it is incorporated as a non-profit private foundation and there are very few rules and regulations governing how it works: Bill Gates donates money from his private wealth to his private foundation and in doing so, he gets massive personal tax breaks because of the way the US tax code is written. Now that money sits in the Gates Foundation's bank account, where most years it's generating billions of dollars in investment income. Again, this is tax free income and one reason why the Gates Foundation is growing over time. You would expect the reserves and endowment of an institution in the business of giving money to be diminishing over the time. But you find the exact opposite with the Gates Foundation, where it's getting richer over time.

In terms of the endowment the investments are into anything and everything from private prisons to fast food companies. The foundation is positioned to make money from products, practices, industries that many would say are harming the very same poor people that the Gates Foundation intends or aims to help. So, there's a kind of conflicting mission or conflicting ethics there. In terms of where the Gates Foundation gives money, some of the largest recipients of the Gates Foundation's funding are organizations where the Gates Foundation sits on the board of directors. 

I think the top destination of foundation’s funding is a vaccine distribution procurement organization called GAVI in Switzerland.2 And the Gates Foundation sits on the board of directors. So, Bill Gates is donating money from his private wealth to his private foundation, where he continues to exercise control over it and then goes to an outside organization where the Gates Foundation sits on the board of directors. At a point you have to say, is this charity?

Bill Gates made his career as the founder of Microsoft; did he adopt strategies from this business into his foundation?

I think we've either forgotten or forgiven Bill Gates’ first chapter as software technologist, the head of Microsoft. We've imagined that he was a cold-hearted capitalist, and now he's this kind-hearted philanthropist who has really changed his character, his personality and his ambitions. But that's not at all what happened. Bill Gates today remains the exact same person who ran Microsoft. And you see that in the values and sensibilities and the approaches he brings to the Gates Foundation. For example, in his work with pharmaceuticals, where he is working with and through the largest multinational pharmaceutical companies to try to bring new drugs and vaccines to the marketplace. It’s very much a classically neoliberal sensibility. It's about market-based solutions, it's about corporate power, it's about technology as a solution to everything and the importance to preserve intellectual property at all costs.

The other way that the Gates Foundation is like Microsoft, is that today it is hounded by allegations of exercising monopoly power and bullying because it has so much money that it can go into a given field and to a great degree, take it over. It raises a lot of questions about science, about research, and about how effective it actually is in all this work. In many of the areas that the Gates Foundation works, it stands accused of doing more harm than good. And after writing the book, that's certainly the conclusion that I came up with.

I don't doubt that Bill Gates is well-meaning in the sense that he really believes that he's helping the world. The problem is he's helping the world the only way he knows how, which is by taking control. So he is forcing his ideas and solutions in a fundamentally anti-democratic way, in ways that are counterproductive, that create all kinds of collateral damage and opportunity costs. 

Where do you see the problem with regard to the research funds that come from the foundation?

A kind of quirk of the Gates Foundation is that it's donating money to private companies like Pfizer, which again, strains the common definition of charity. Why would we give tax benefits to Bill Gates or the Gates Foundation for donating money to a massive, major multinational pharmaceutical company? If you look at people who can't afford access to lifesaving medicine – is Big Pharma really a humanitarian partner in solving this problem, or are they the obstacle? 

The Gates Foundation legitimizes and normalizes pharmaceutical companies as humanitarian partners in humanitarian bodies. By doing so, they're standing in the way of more egalitarian strategies that would challenge Big Pharma's power in the marketplace, which in practice means that the lifesaving medicines they sell are too expensive for poor people to access.

The Gates Foundation has a number of markets shaping projects, as they call them, that try and get around this market failure. They try and negotiate prices with big pharma and do bulk purchasing. But, you know, that is one way to tackle this problem but it's not the only way. If you look back on the foundation’s history, it's arguably the least efficient way, certainly the least just way in terms of access to medicine. 

There are major transparency problems at the Gates Foundation that limit what we can see. But from everything that has been published, you can see that something around 90 percent of its charitable dollars go to rich nations. That should be counter-intuitive, because if you go to the Gates Foundation's website, all you see are these images of these nameless, poor people, you know, mostly black and brown women and children smiling. But if you follow the money, the actual model of social change from Gates is not helping the poor, but it's helping the rich to help the poor.

Do you see colonial tendencies in the way the Gates Foundation operates? 

So, I do think there's something fundamentally colonial about the Gates Foundation that speaks to certain bias within the Gates Foundation: That it really doesn’t think that the global poor have or will ever have the sophistication, the capacity or wherewithal to take care of themselves. It imagines a political future in which there are poor who will always be poor, but their lives will be marginally better because of the philanthropic endeavors of the richest people on earth, like Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation.

It’s interesting that in areas like global health or public health for poor people, there’s now a political or social movement trending under the hashtag of Decolonize Global Health, where you have scholars and activists and practitioners who are challenging the fundamental colonialism you see throughout global health. This political movement hasn’t yet come fully to the doorstep of the Gates Foundation. But in many ways, it presents an existential threat to the Gates Foundation's modus operandi and to how it does business. 

Do you think that the failure of the Alliance for a Green revolution in Africa (AGRA) has had an impact on the image of the institution? Perhaps you could end with elaborating about this example for the readers?

It's been nearly two decades that Bill Gates said he was going to revolutionize African agriculture. And it started under this project called the Alliance for a Green Revolution (AGRA) in Africa. And the model essentially was like the original Green Revolution decades ago, which bypassed Africa. Gates wanted to take the same things that made the Green Revolution successful elsewhere – as he saw it – and bring them to sub-Saharan Africa.3 It's about a kind of industrialization, an expanded use of agrochemicals fertilizers, especially chemical fertilizers. It's about the use of inputs bought from foreign manufacturers and new high-tech varieties of seeds. Gates promised that this revolution would double farmer incomes, it would cut hunger in half and it would dramatically increase yields and farmer incomes. 

So, he had certain things that he promised that his agriculture development plan would deliver and it has failed to deliver those. But more importantly, I think, is that you now have many farmer organizations across the African continent openly petitioning the Gates Foundation, asking it to stop its charitable crusade because it's causing so much harm, because it's standing in the way of better alternative pathways of agricultural development. African farmers who say we shouldn't be dependent on these foreign producers of agrochemicals for our farming to thrive. We should be able to use local knowledge and local solutions and locally produced inputs, working through agroecology to expand and develop agriculture in the nations in which we work.

When you step back and think about Bill Gates, he's this multi-­billionaire in Seattle, yet he's managed to become one of the most powerful voices in African agriculture. What does Bill Gates know about farming? How does he become such a powerful voice and shaper of vaccine policy, of policy around contraceptive access and all manner of public education in the United States and elsewhere? Bill Gates is claiming expertise, claiming authority, using his wealth and power to try to remake all of these public policies according to his own narrow and often wrong-headed view of how the world should work. 

It is a striking example of money and politics and anti-democratic power. And if we ignore the Bill Gates problem we're going to have a Jeff Bezos problem and a Mark Zuckerberg problem next, because Gates is now traveling around the world getting other billionaires to sign what he called the giving pledge, asking them to promise to give away most of their wealth to charity, to follow in his footsteps. So, unless we deal with our Bill Gates problem, this is our political future where climate change, artificial intelligence, public health, public education and immigration, all of these areas are increasingly going to be influenced by these obscenely rich men through philanthropy. I do think that it is a very serious problem for democracy that we should think about and we should address now, not later. 

That's not a positive prospect, but it's a good way to end the interview...

I myself am inspired by the political change I see all around us. And this is not new either. You have to look at Occupy Wall Street, look at Decolonize Global Health, look at Black Lives Matter. You see all these political social movements right now. The political will and the political culture is changing and it's changing in a way that goes against the sort of oligarchical, plutocratic ethos that Bill Gates brings to the table.

I think that his days as this kind of undemocratic unofficial diplomat, roaming the world and trying to shape government budgets and government agenda, are coming to an end. He's reached his zenith. But it's not just going to happen. We have to be able to get past the political fatalism and to believe in another world as possible and to really fight for it. So, you know, I do hope that the book that I wrote does send that message that another world is possible. It's there and it's worth fighting for, and we should do it.

Thank you very much for the interview, it was a great pleasure!

• 1Schwab, T. (2023): Das Bill-Gates-Problem: Der Mythos vom wohltätigen Milliardär. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, ISBN: 978-3-10397-165-1.
• 2Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is a global public-private partnership based in Geneva with the aim of improving access to vaccinations. Organizations such as Doctors Without Borders have criticized the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on the organization. Online: www.gavi.org.
• 3The Green Revolution refers to the development of modern agricultural high-performance or high-yield varieties that began in the 1960s and their spread to countries in the Global South. It is based on the involvement of both the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation in the initial development in the 1940s in Mexico. It enabled an increase in yields and an associated reduction in malnutrition and child mortality rates. However, it is criticized for, among other things, environmental damage caused by the intensification of cultivation, the use of mineral fertilizers and pesticides, and irrigation.