Bill Gates pledged on Thursday to give away $200 billion US via his charitable foundation by 2045 and lashed out at Elon Musk, accusing the world’s richest man of “killing the world’s poorest children” through huge cuts to the U.S. foreign aid budget.
The 69-year-old billionaire co-founder of Microsoft said he was speeding up his plans to divest almost all of his fortune and would close the foundation on Dec. 31, 2045, years earlier than previously planned. Gates said he believed the money would help achieve several of his goals, such as eradicating diseases like polio and malaria, ending preventable deaths among women and children, and reducing global poverty.
His announcement follows moves by governments, including the Trump administration, to slash international aid budgets used to prevent deadly disease and famine.
The U.S. cuts have been overseen by Musk, who has publicly bragged about feeding the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper,” and about his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Around 80 per cent of USAID programs are set to be cut; the agency spent $44 billion US worldwide in fiscal 2023.
“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Gates told the Financial Times.
In an interview with Reuters, Gates warned of a stark reversal to decades of progress in reducing mortality over the next four to six years due to the funding cuts by governments worldwide.
“The number of deaths will start going up for the first time … it’s going to be millions more deaths because of the resources,” Gates told Reuters.
Foundation cannot fill critical gaps, Gates warns
The Gates Foundation’s annual budget will reach $9 billion US by 2026 and around $10 billion US annually after that due to the accelerated spending. Gates has warned the White House that his foundation and other philanthropies cannot fill the gaps left by governments.
“I think governments will come back to caring about children surviving” over the next 20-year period, though, Gates said on Thursday.
Gates and Musk, the latter of whom is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, once agreed over the role of the wealthy in giving away money to help others, but have since clashed several times.
As the U.S. abandons much of its global ‘soft power’ influence by trying to shutter agencies like USAID, countries like Canada are adapting how they provide foreign aid. The National asks foreign aid expert Kate Higgins and global strategy analyst Noam Unger to explain how aid cuts can destabilize the world and make humanitarian disasters even worse.
Asked if he had appealed to Musk recently to change course, Gates said it was now up to Congress to decide on the future for U.S. aid spending.
“Gates is a huge liar,” Musk said in reply to a tweet on his X social media platform that featured an interview with Gates warning about U.S. aid cuts. Musk’s spokespeople were not immediately available for comment.
Gates said that despite his foundation’s deep pockets, progress would not be possible without government support.
“There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people,” Gates wrote in a post on his website. “It’s unclear whether the world’s richest countries will continue to stand up for its poorest people.”
Foundation has given away $100B US since inception
He praised the response to aid cuts in Africa, where some governments have reallocated budgets, but said that, as an example, polio would not be eradicated without U.S. funding.
Gates made the announcement on the foundation’s 25th anniversary. He set up the organization with his then-wife Melinda French Gates in 2000, and they were later joined by billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
Since inception, the foundation has given away $100 billion US, helping save millions of lives and backing initiatives like the vaccine group Gavi and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.
It will close after it spends around 99 per cent of Gates’s personal fortune, he said. The founders originally expected the foundation to wrap up in the decades after their deaths.
Gates, whose fortune is currently valued at around $108 billion US, expects the foundation to spend around $200 billion US by 2045, with the final figure dependent on markets and inflation.
The foundation has faced criticism for its outsized power and influence in the field without the requisite accountability, including at the World Health Organization.
Gates himself was also subject to conspiracy theories, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He has spoken to Trump several times in recent months, and twice since the president took office on Jan. 20, he told Reuters on Thursday, on the importance of continued investment in global health.
“The world does have values. That’s what my parents taught me,” Gates told Reuters.
