Tim Schwab

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The Bill Gates Problem

Investigative journalism with a fierce polemical edge … Nobody who comes away from reading The Bill Gates Problem will look at him in the same way.

A tale of frustration and even rage at the culture of secrecy and often incompetence inside Gates’s philanthropic world, it is also strangely heartening.

Tim Schwab has written the definitive critique of Bill Gates as bully-philanthropist. Schwab uses the case of Gates to tell a compelling and carefully researched story that raises disturbing questions about the lack of accountability of power-philanthropy.

Robert Kuttner, co-founder and co-editor, The American Prospect

This is not the story of one bad man, so much as a demonstration of the inability for anyone-no matter how smart or rich-to solve the world's problems from the top down with money and technology.

Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Richest

In this incisive and penetrating book, Schwab dares to confront a question society has long ignored: should a secretive, unaccountable billionaire dictate policy in public health, education, and science? Fearlessly rendered and much-needed.

Sonia Shah, author of The Next Great Migration

Tim Schwab follows the money to expose what happens when one man-however intelligent or well-intentioned-amasses so much wealth and so much power, he can literally dictate to governments around the world. With great skill-and given the range of Bill Gates's influence, considerable courage-Schwab pulls back the curtain to deliver a classic of muckraking journalism.

An extraordinary and detailed work of investigative journalism into an underexplored nexus of influence in global affairs.

[An] excellent exposé of hyper-billionaire ‘myths’

Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire

‘Nobody who comes away from reading The Bill Gates Problem will look at him in the same way’ - The Times 
You know him as the founder of Microsoft; the philanthropic, kind-hearted billionaire who has donated endless funds to good causes around the world. But there's another side to Bill Gates. 
 
We might like to think of the Gates Foundation as an innocent charity giving away money, collaborating with stakeholders, and listening to the desires of the populations it hopes to help, but is that how it works in practice? 
 
Combining rich storytelling and ground-breaking reporting, The Bill Gates Problem offers readers a provocative and timely counter-narrative about one of the world's most widely recognized individuals - a true global celebrity with international reach. But more than that, this book speaks to a vital political question around economic inequality and the erosion of democratic institutions - why should the super-rich be able to transform their wealth into political power, and just how far can they go?

Tim Schwab is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. His 2019 investigation into the Gates Foundation won multiple awards, including an Izzy from the Park Center for Independent Media and a Deadline Club Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and was nominated for a Pulitzer prize by The Nation newspaper. His reporting on Gates has appeared in The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review and the British Medical Journal, and represents some of the only investigative journalism ever published on Gates. Earlier in his career, Tim worked as a journalist for two daily newspapers and as a researcher for the watchdog group Food & Water Watch.

How much money should one man be allowed to amass? Would your answer change if you knew he was a saint? 
 
From greedy to generous, from cold- to kind-hearted, from rogue to hero, Bill Gates is an extraordinarily complex public figure. Yet over the last decade, we've reduced him to a flat caricature - a sweater-wearing, avuncular, well-meaning billionaire, who is adamantly giving away all of his money through the Gates Foundation in order to improve the lives of others. 
 
This simplistic portrait perilously ignores the political influence that Gates has acquired through his charitable work, and the controversial ways through which he utilises it. We might like to think of the Foundation as an innocent charity giving away money, collaborating with stakeholders, and listening to the desires of the populations it hopes to help, but is that how it works in practice? The charity internally sets a policy agenda for how to fix the world - based apparently on one man's worldview - then arguably seeks to impose this vision onto the developing world by funding groups that align with it. 
 
Combining rich storytelling and ground-breaking reporting, The Bill Gates Problem offers readers a provocative and timely counter-narrative about one of the world's most widely recognized individuals - a true global celebrity with a truly global audience. But more than that, this book speaks to a vital political question around economic inequality and the erosion of democratic institutions - why should the super-rich be able to transform their wealth into political power, and just how far can they go?

The Bill Gates Problem

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Tim Schwab

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