Do we like Bill Gates?
Our score: 6 out of 10. A huge record of life-saving giving and no harmful words of his own, set against a serious lapse in judgment over Epstein.
Bill Gates grew up in Seattle, dropped out of Harvard in 1975 and co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen. He ran it as CEO until 2000 and stayed on as chairman, then shifted his energy to the foundation that now carries his name. Most people under 40 know him as the vaccine-and-malaria bloke, not the Windows bloke.
The big stain is Jeffrey Epstein. Gates told 9 News Australia that he met Epstein in 2011, years after Epstein's conviction, and had several dinners with him. In February he said “every minute I spent with him I regret,” and his spokesperson called claims in the released files “absolutely absurd and completely false.” In June he told House lawmakers in an interview that he never witnessed Epstein's crimes, called meeting him a “grave error in judgment”, and said Epstein tried to use knowledge of Gates's affairs to pressure him. The committee chair said nobody is accusing Gates of wrongdoing.
There's an older mess too. In 2021 the Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft's board had reviewed a past relationship between Gates and an engineer and considered it inappropriate, and that he stepped down while the review was ongoing. His spokesperson said there was an affair almost 20 years ago which ended amicably and that leaving the board was in no way related. Microsoft confirmed a committee reviewed a concern with an outside law firm.
On the harm check, the record is thin on anything nasty. Nothing from his own mouth against LGBTQ+ or trans people turned up, and honestly my searches found little on that topic either way. His October 2025 climate memo argued the fight should shift toward reducing human suffering; critics like economist Jeffrey Sachs panned it, while others called it an overdue reality check. And when the US pulled back on foreign aid, his foundation promised to hold its budget at $9 billion a year.
Lately he's been warning about AI. In an interview aired in August he said the coming period “will be one of the most turbulent times in human history”. He wants governments to act, floating ideas like taxing AI tokens and robots and keeping some jobs off-limits to AI. Reasonable people can argue about the details, but he's calling for guardrails rather than profit-grabbing.
The good stuff is the real stuff. In 2010 the foundation pledged $10 billion over a decade for vaccines in poor countries. It now plans to spend the bulk of his fortune by 2045, concentrating at least 70% of funding on preventable maternal and child deaths and infectious diseases. Few billionaires have put their money where their mouth is quite like that.