Bill Gates Has Elon Musk's Number, Slim
Clash of the billionaires!
Bill Gates, the former richest man in the world, had some harsh words this week for the current holder of that title, Semipresident of the United States Elon Musk. In an interview with the Financial Times, Gates pointed out the sick irony of Musk’s central role in eliminating the US Agency for International Development (USAID), telling the magazine, “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”
Referring to, among other things, cuts for AIDS prevention in Mozambique that Musk demanded because he’s an idiot (the aid was helping a hospital in Mozambique’s Gaza province, and not, as Musk and Trump insanely claimed, providing condoms to Hamas to make bombs), Gates added, of Musk, “I’d love for him to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut that money.”
Now, Gates is certainly not the first person to point out that cruel contrast, but he’s almost certainly the richest person to call out the deadly consequences of Musk’s efforts to dismantle the US government, and for that, he gets a big thumbs-up from us. Congratulations, Mr. Gates, you’ve been moved well down the list of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes!
Gates also used a variation of the same line in a recent interview with the New York Times Magazine, in which Gates noted that Musk had, back in 2012, signed on to a rich-people charitable effort called “the giving pledge,” in which obscenely rich people like Gates and Musk promise to give away at least half their wealth before they ring down the curtain and join the choir invisible.
“He could go on to be a great philanthropist,” Mr. Gates told the magazine. “In the meantime, the world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children.”
As for that Giving Pledge Musk signed in 2012, the Financial Times notes that Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson said Musk later told Gates that “philanthropy was mostly ‘bullshit’ and that commercial solutions to problems like climate change, including Tesla’s electric vehicles, were more effective.” Of course, since then, Musk has also lost interest in EVs and climate, since trolling is more fun. The Financial Times adds that
Gates once told Isaacson that Musk should spend more time worrying about life on Earth than seeking solutions on other planets. “He’s overboard on Mars,” he said.
Dang, that Bill Gates has such prosaic concerns, what a loser.
Gates himself announced this week that his own charitable organization, the Gates Foundation, is on track to go out of business by 2045 because by that time it will have completed its mission of giving away virtually all of Gates’s personal fortune. In an editorial published at the foundation’s website, Gates wrote, “People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that ‘he died rich’ will not be one of them. There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people.”
To that end, Gates pledged that he’s sped up his goal of giving away all his money, so that the foundation will close in 20 more years instead of going on longer than that. Gates noted that this is the foundation’s 25th anniversary, Microsoft’s 50th, and that he’ll be turning 70 himself in October, so he decided it would be good to donate another $200 billion to the foundation, effectively making himself no longer a billionaire, just a very rich guy who runs a foundation.
The editorial doesn’t specifically mention Trump or Musk, but emphasizes that the world’s richest governments are also obliged to “continue to stand up for its poorest people” by providing medical and development aid, simply because that’s simply the right thing for civilized humans to do, for fucksakes (there we go summarizing again).
In conclusion, while Yr Wonkette remains committed to our goal of eating, or at least composting, the rich, we have to say that if we have to have billionaires — and that’s a very big if — we’d prefer they be like Bill Gates than Elon Musk. Gates may be a plutocrat, but he’s also a hoopy frood who knows where his towel is.
[NBC News / Financial Times / NYT / Gates Foundation]
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" . . .Wonkette remains committed to our goal of eating, or at least composting, the rich . . ."
Alasdair Beckett-King
@MisterABK
If you took a billionaire's money away, they would just earn it back again. Cream rises to the top.
I'm so confident about this, I think we should prove it by taking all the billionaires' money away.
And once again Dok proves that he is also a hoopy frood.