Let's see what Bill has in mind

 

“People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that ‘he died rich’ will not be one of them,” Gates, who turns 70 later this year, wrote. “There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people.”

[...]

Gates announced on Thursday that he now plans to distribute “virtually all” of his wealth — around $200 billion, he estimates — within the next 20 years, before shuttering the [Gates] foundation on December 31, 2045.

[...]

Over the next 20 years, the Gates Foundation will focus on three main goals: ending preventable deaths of moms and babies, eradicating deadly infectious diseases and lifting hundreds of millions of people around the world out of poverty.

[...]

Gates accused fellow billionaire Elon Musk of “killing the world’s poorest children” because of his work at the Department of Government Efficiency cutting US international aid programs. In an event in New York on Thursday announcing the commitment, Gates said he met with Trump in February to express his concerns, in particular, about cuts to USAID.

  CNN

I guess that fell on deaf ears. I wonder if that spurred his decision to handle his wealth in this way.

Gates wants to accelerate the foundation’s work on global health and equity initiatives and hopes the move will set a model for other billionaires, he said in a blog post published Thursday morning. The pledge builds on Gates’ track record of promoting philanthropy. He, along with ex-wife French Gates and Warren Buffett, launched the Giving Pledge in 2010 to encourage wealthy individuals to donate most of their fortunes to charitable causes either during their lifetimes or in their wills. It now has more than 240 signatories.

[...]

The $200 billion he expects to give away through the foundation over the next 20 years will come from its existing $77 billion endowment and his personal wealth, including any earnings from ongoing business investments such as TerraPower, the nuclear power company he founded.

[...]

The announcement comes weeks after Microsoft, now worth more than $3 trillion, marked 50 years since it was founded by Gates. “It feels right that I celebrate the milestone by committing to give away the resources I earned through the company,” he wrote.

Fight!

 

Surely Musk won't be able to let that pass.

Bill Gates wants a seat at the oligarchs' table

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Trump's "China ban"

N.B.  Bill Gates' comments in the video.  He makes a major point that doesn't get much air.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

What your Trump supporting neighbors are reading

But the REST is true, I'm sure.

We MUST get rid of this administration

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) halted a coronavirus testing program promoted by billionaire Bill Gates and Seattle health officials pending reviews.

The program sought to send test kits to the homes of people both healthy and sick to try to bring the country to the level of testing officials say is necessary before states can begin safely reopening. The program, which had already gone through thousands of tests, found dozens of cases that had been previously undiagnosed.

[...]

The FDA "recently clarified its guidance for home-based, self-collected samples to test for COVID-19. We have been notified that a separate federal emergency use authorization (EUA) is required to return results for self-collected tests," SCAN said. "The FDA has not raised any concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of SCAN’s test, but we have been asked to pause testing until we receive that additional authorization."

  The Hill

When hell freezes over.

The pause is emblematic of the fractured national response to the coronavirus, with federal officials proposing guidelines but leaving much of the implementation and administration of tests to states and localities.

[...]

Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft who has dedicated much of his personal fortune to global health issues, said the program could be an effective tool in guiding public health responses.

“Not only will it help improve our understanding of the outbreak in Seattle, it will also provide valuable information about the virus for other communities around the world,” Gates wrote in a blog post this week.

An FDA spokesperson told The New York Times, which was the first to report on the pause, that the home testing kits raised concerns about the safety and accuracy of the results.

Like the CDC tests, you mean?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Republicans goin' all in

And the pope!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Bill Gates is about to be tweet-skewered

Former Microsoft CEO and co-founder Bill Gates recalls in newly revealed footage how President Trump once left an equestrian event in Florida and returned in a helicopter to make what Gates described as a "grand entrance."

In a video obtained by MSNBC and aired Thursday night on "All In with Chris Hayes," Gates can be heard telling an audience about his personal experiences with Trump, whom he said he met only after the real estate mogul won the 2016 election.

  The Hill

MSNBC’s “All in With Chris Hayes” aired footage Thursday night of the Microsoft founder speaking at a Gates Foundation event, telling the crowd about two meetings he had with Trump, one at Trump Tower during the presidential transition and another at the White House last year.

“Both times he wanted to know if there was a difference between HPV and HIV,” Gates said. “So I was able to explain that those were rarely confused with each other.”

[...]

Gates said last month that Trump was "super interested" in the idea of a universal flu vaccine.

He added that Trump had asked him to be a science adviser, but that he told the president that he didn't believe the role would be a good use of his time.

  The Hill

Why was Trump asking Bill Gates about viruses? Maybe computer viruses, but human viruses? Is Bill Gates Trump's idea of a scientist?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

The biggest loser loses again

Last year, Forbes named Donald Trump The Most Notable Loser in its ranking of the world's richest folks. Looks like he's holding that position.

Donald Trump’s fortune has fallen for the second year running, according to Forbes magazine’s annual ranking of the world’s wealthiest people.

The magazine on Tuesday saidTrump’s net worth had fallen by $400m (£287m) to $3.1bn over the past year. It means the president has slipped more than 200 places in the billionaire rankings from 544th richest last year to 766th this year.

The drop in Trump’s estimated fortune comes on top of Forbes wiping $1bn off his net worth in its 2017 rankings.

  Guardian

His plan to cash in on the presidency seems to be backfiring.

The magazine attributed Trump’s decline in wealth to “a tough New York real estate market, particularly for retail locations; a costly lawsuit and an expensive presidential campaign”. Trump reached a $25m settlement in a legal dispute about claims that his Trump University real estate courses allegedly defrauded students.

Trump fared better in Forbes’s ranking than in Bloomberg’s billionaires list, which put his net worth at $2.86bn.

D'oh!

If this gets on Fox & Friends, we'll be seeing some screaming tweets about "fake news".

[Forbes] named the Amazon founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, as the world’s richest man with a $112bn fortune, replacing the Microsoft co-founder, Bill Gates, who fell back into second place with $90bn.

Forbes calculated that Bezos’s fortune, which is mostly held in Amazon shares, increased by $39.2bn over the past year – the biggest ever one-year gain.

Damn, Bill. You've got a lot of catching up to do.

Collectively, the world’s 2,208 billionaires hold $9.1tn – more than three times the gross domestic product (GDP) of the UK. The billionaires increased their combined wealth by $1.4bn over the past year.

How are the rest of us doing? Don't bother answering. I think I know.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

We Interrupt This Blog for an Important Announcement

That's gonna burn Trump's big ass.

The Real Bill Gates

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has called on Europe to stop demonstrating generosity towards asylum seekers to avoid an overwhelming migrant influx. He also advises European states to make Africans’ way to the continent much more difficult.

During an interview Germany’s Welt am Sonntag, Gates, one of the richest people on the planet, warned of the grave consequences of exceeding generosity towards refugees coming to Europe, whose numbers would only rise unless something is done.

“On the one hand you want to demonstrate generosity and take in refugees, but the more generous you are, the more word gets around about this – which in turn motivates more people to leave Africa,” Gates said.

[...]

Gates’ charity foundation is known for donating money to deal with poverty, disease and lack of food in Africa among its other projects.

  RT

Perhaps he needs to give more.

Go see Trump about that hair, Bill.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Yeah, So Why Partner With China on This?

Maybe because we're broke and don't know how to handle money? I don't know, but...

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates confirmed on Wednesday he is in discussions with China to jointly develop a new kind of nuclear reactor.

"The idea is to be very low-cost, very safe and generate very little waste," said Gates during a talk at China's Ministry of Science and Technology.

Gates has largely funded a Washington state-based company, TerraPower, that is developing a Generation IV nuclear reactor, which can run on depleted uranium.

[...]

"China has a lot to contribute because it's solved many of the problems of poverty, not all of them but a lot of them, itself, and many Asian, south Asian and African countries are well behind, whether it's agriculture or health," said Gates.

No concrete poverty alleviation projects were mentioned.

  UK Guardian

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.