Bill Gates undertook on Thursday to give us $ 200 billion through his charity foundation until 2045 and attacked Elon Musk, accusing the world's richest man of “killing the poorest children in the world” through huge cuts of the budget of foreign American help.
The 69-year-old billionaire co-founder Microsoft said that he accelerates his plans for selling almost all his fortune and closed the foundation on December 31, 2045, years earlier than previously planned. Gates said that he believes that money would help to achieve several goals, such as eliminating diseases such as polio and malaria, ending death among women and children, and reducing global poverty.
Its announcement takes place after the movement of the rule, including the Trump administration, in order to reduce international aid budgets used to prevent fatal diseases and hunges.
The US cut was supervised by Musk, which publicly boasted of feeding the American Agency for International Development “to a wood chipper” and about its Department of Government Efficiency (Doge). About 80 percent of USAID programs are to be cut off; The agency spent $ 44 billion around the world in a tax year 2023.
“The image of the richest man in the world killing the poorest children in the world is not nice,” said Gates Financial Times.
In an interview with Reuters, Gates warned against a clear reversal of decades of progress in reducing mortality over the next four to six years due to cuts of financing governments around the world.
“The number of deaths will start to develop for the first time … It will be millions of more deaths due to resources,” said Gates Reuters.
The foundation cannot fill critical gaps, Gates warns
The annual budget of Gates Foundation will reach $ 9 billion by 2026, and about $ 10 billion in US dollars per year due to accelerated expenses. Gates warned the White House that its foundation and other philanthropists could not fill the gaps left by the rule.
“I think that governments will return to childcare that survived in the next 20 years, said Gates on Thursday.
Gates and Musk, of which the latter is the general director of Tesla and Spacex, once agreed to the role of money rich to help others, but since then they had enough times.
Because the US abandon a significant part of their global influence of “soft power”, trying to close agencies such as USAID, countries such as Canada adapt the way they provide foreign help. The National expert will ask Kate Higgins foreign help and the NOAM Unger global analyst to explain how cuts can destabilize the world and worsen humanitarian disasters.
Asked if he recently appealed to Musk to change the course, Gates said that it was to congress that the future of expenses for help in the US should be decided.
“Gates is a huge liar,” he said in response to the tweet on his social media platform X, which contained an interview with Gates warning about the cuts of help in the USA. Muska spokesmen were not immediately available for commenting.
Gates said that despite the deep pockets of his Foundation, Progress would not be possible without government support.
“There are too many urgent problems to solve resources that could be used to help people,” Gates wrote in the post on his website. “It is not clear that the richest countries in the world will continue to defend their poorest people.”
The Foundation has distributed us $ 100 billion from the very beginning
He praised the reaction to the cuts of help in Africa, where some governments have real budgets, but said that, for example, Polio would not be eliminated without US financing.
Gates announced this on the 25th anniversary of the Foundation. In 2000, he founded an organization with his then wife Melina French Gates, and later joined them by the investor of the billionaire Warren Buffett.
Since its inception, the Foundation has spent $ 100 billion, helping to save millions of lives and supporting initiatives, such as the Gavi and Global Fund to Fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
He said he would close after spending about 99 percent of Gates's personal fortune. The founders originally expected the foundation to end with decades after their death.
Gates, whose fortune is currently valued at around $ 108 billion, expects the Foundation to spend about $ 200 billion by 2045, with a final number depending on markets and inflation.
The foundation met with criticism for huge power and influence in this field without the required responsibility, including the World Health Organization.
The gates itself were also subject to conspiracy theories, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In recent months he talked to Trump and twice since the president took office on January 20, he told Reuters on Thursday, about the importance of continuous investments in global health.
“The world has values. This is what my parents taught me,” said Gates Reuters.