“We are not ready for the next epidemic,” Bill Gates argued in 2015. Now he bids farewell to Microsoft to focus on the challenges facing his foundation: health, development, education, climate.
"When I was a boy, the disaster we worried about most was nuclear war. But if something kills over ten million people in the next few decades, it's far more likely to be a highly contagious virus than a war. Not missiles, but microbes." As health systems and governments around the world struggle to contain the advance of the coronavirus, officially declared a pandemic, these words sound undeniably prophetic. They were spoken, during a TED Talk held in March 2015, by Bill Gates. Who, since 2000, together with his wife Melinda, has built the world's largest private philanthropic foundation (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and will now devote all his energies to it, permanently stepping down from Microsoft's board of directors.
The news was released by the company on Friday via a statement. It was 1975 when Bill Gates, then twenty years old, co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen. The company was destined to revolutionise the software industry and the daily habits of millions of people, turning the personal computer into a mass-market product.
Over the years, Gates has devoted himself to philanthropy with ever-greater dedication. In June 2008 he stepped back from his day-to-day role at the company, while continuing to chair the board of directors until 4 February 2014. He has gradually divested the majority of his shareholding, investing the proceeds in other activities or donating them to the Gates Foundation itself (such allocations, according to Forbes, have reached $35.8 billion). Today he has a personal fortune of $103.6 billion, placing him second on the list of the world's wealthiest people, behind Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
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From now on he will remain at Microsoft solely in an advisory capacity to chief executive Satya Nadella and other executives. On the same occasion he announced that he had also left the board of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's holding company, where his place will be taken by Kenneth Chenault, former chief executive of American Express.
The LinkedIn post in which Gates sets out his reasons is entitled "Focusing my time". Behind these surprising moves is, in fact, the desire to spend more time on the challenges facing his foundation, which include "global health and development, education and a growing commitment to addressing climate change".
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has already taken action on the coronavirus emergency. Together with Mastercard and Wellcome, the independent foundation that supports scientific and health research, it has launched the Covid-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, which will work side by side with the WHO (World Health Organization), institutions and healthcare facilities to identify and trial possible treatments as quickly and effectively as possible. The three organisations have committed a total of $125 million; fifty million of which comes from the Gates Foundation, which has already pledged to invest a further fifty million to tackle this health emergency.
