Tim Schwab’s book lashes out at the magnate and philanthropist, depicting him as an unpleasant person whose charity work actually conceals an operation of power
Does anybody still believe his philanthropic efforts are out of the goodness of his heart?
It’s tax evasion, power brokering, influence peddling, and straight up corruption with a side of reputation-washing.
For example. He donates to his foundation. He doesn’t pay taxes for that income. He then uses his foundation to pay travel and expenses vaguely related to that.
The foundation owns facilities and stuff that would also otherwise be taxed. Including property taxes.
He donates to a different org, let’s say a college. He gets a seat on the board and gets paid money back…
… and uses funds frim that org to pay expenses…
Or he buys a shit load of books from campaigns of politicians he wants to bribe. Or rather, his 501c Corp trust does that, because fuck paying taxes on bribes…
I’ve had this discussion before, some people still believe it. Another example of philanthropy abuse is how he stopped the Oxford vaccine from being given away as an open source vaccine, and insisted on it being licensed to one pharmaceutical firm instead. He succeeded in demanding that because his foundation has enough pull with universities because they received donations (with money that otherwise could’ve gone to taxes, which could’ve been used to fund universities directly).
And on his ‘private’ side, he’s heavily invested in pharma stocks, so you can do the math there. Millions of people in the global South died from COVID because Indian and South African firms were delayed by about a year before they could produce the vaccine.
Plenty of gullible people out there who don’t question such qualifiers when they’re almost all you can see without digging a bit, billionaires like him also have a lot of influence on the media, the French ones outright own all the news outlets. I don’t know about the specifics for Bill Gates, he’s probably clever enough not to do it in his name if he’s going to control the narrative.
Does anybody still believe his philanthropic efforts are out of the goodness of his heart?
It’s tax evasion, power brokering, influence peddling, and straight up corruption with a side of reputation-washing.
For example. He donates to his foundation. He doesn’t pay taxes for that income. He then uses his foundation to pay travel and expenses vaguely related to that.
The foundation owns facilities and stuff that would also otherwise be taxed. Including property taxes.
He donates to a different org, let’s say a college. He gets a seat on the board and gets paid money back…
… and uses funds frim that org to pay expenses…
Or he buys a shit load of books from campaigns of politicians he wants to bribe. Or rather, his 501c Corp trust does that, because fuck paying taxes on bribes…
I’ve had this discussion before, some people still believe it. Another example of philanthropy abuse is how he stopped the Oxford vaccine from being given away as an open source vaccine, and insisted on it being licensed to one pharmaceutical firm instead. He succeeded in demanding that because his foundation has enough pull with universities because they received donations (with money that otherwise could’ve gone to taxes, which could’ve been used to fund universities directly).
And on his ‘private’ side, he’s heavily invested in pharma stocks, so you can do the math there. Millions of people in the global South died from COVID because Indian and South African firms were delayed by about a year before they could produce the vaccine.
I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. Carnegie pulled it off too
Plenty of gullible people out there who don’t question such qualifiers when they’re almost all you can see without digging a bit, billionaires like him also have a lot of influence on the media, the French ones outright own all the news outlets. I don’t know about the specifics for Bill Gates, he’s probably clever enough not to do it in his name if he’s going to control the narrative.
I never believe any billionaire’s philanthropy is anything but self-serving. I just hope it helps anyway.