How to Spend $200 B Faster Than a Falcon Rocket: Gates Strikes, Musk Whines

Billionaire Beef: The Gates Foundation v Musk

Bill Gates steps onstage, shirt pressed sharp enough to cut billionaire bullshit. After twenty‑five years of slow burn, he vows to vaporize $200 billion by 2045.

Of course, no good deed shall go unpunished. Elon Musk called the whole thing “philanthropic cosplay,” bragging on X that his Mars colony will “save more lives than Gates’s toilets ever will.” 

Gates fires back in the Financial Times, accusing Musk of “killing kids” by cheering the shutdown of USAID, because nothing says late‑stage capitalism like billionaires dueling over who loves humanity more, armed with spreadsheets and memes.

The Engine Room: $77 Billion in the Hold

Under the hood, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation roars with $77.2 billion in assets and a war chest that grew by nearly $8 billion last year alone. Its audited 2023 financials read like a Fortune 50 annual report, except the shareholders never see a dividend. Good. Because those who are in dire need of assistance reap the rewards of the Gates’ wealth.

For context: The trust will “spend more than $200 billion between now and 2045,” a number big enough to buy every team in the NBA and still have petty cash for the occasional player bailout.

“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,” Gates wrote, adding, “There are too many urgent problems to solve for me to hold onto resources that could be used to help people.”

Per Forbes: The Gates Foundation, established in 2000, will “sunset its operations” on Dec. 31, 2045, as the group announced a commitment to spend $200 billion over the next two decades.

In a statement, Gates said he would “give away virtually all my wealth” through the Gates Foundation until its closing date, saying his net worth—estimated by Forbes to be nearly $113 billion—would “drop 99%.”

Gates, 69, and then-wife Melinda Gates, 60, planned to close the Gates Foundation at least 20 years after their deaths, the organization said, though Bill Gates said he “began to rethink that approach” a few years ago and he now believes the foundation’s goals can be achieved “on a shorter timeline” if investments “double down.”

Over the foundation’s remaining 20 years, Gates said he hoped to stop newborn babies, children and mothers from dying of preventable causes, reduce poverty and end diseases like polio, malaria and measles.

The Gates Foundation announced what it called its largest annual budget earlier this year, with $9 billion in spending funds expected by 2026.

Three Theaters of Operation

1. Global Health: eradicating polio, beating malaria, and dropping HIV transmission where USAID once stood, before Musk was taken off the leash.

2. Global Development: microloans, drought‑proof seeds, and the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, which seeks a water‑free throne for the billions who still squat over open pits.

3. U.S. Division: K‑12 reform, library grants, and the endless attempt to bring public education into the 21st century without leaving teachers in the dirt.

Collectively, those buckets poured out $7.7 billion in 2023 grants, converting to roughly $21 million per day.

And while the Gates Foundation is at least attempting to effect global change, Musk is irrationally grandstanding about wanting to die on Mars. Translation: one entity is working on improving the planet, while the other, which contributes nothing to planet Earth, is intent on leaving it.

A Who’s Who: The Rolodex of the Filthy Rich

Flip the pages of the balance sheet, and you find Berkshire Hathaway, Canadian National Railway, Waste Management (WM), and Caterpillar stock humming along inside the endowment. Microsoft, naturally, still sits at the head of the table, and dividends keep feeding the foundation. Philanthropy is always cleaner when dividends underwrite the good deeds: it’s the whitewashing of conscience by “doing good”. However, the trust also parked money in Exxon, Chevron, and, until the protests got too loud, the GEO Group, a private‑prison behemoth that turns human rights violations into quarterly earnings. Thus, not all that’s social justice and for the greater good is actually derived from “good”.

The Education Gambit: Fixing Kids or Fixing Scores?

In American classrooms, the foundation’s involvement is both a savior and menace. Charter conversions, merit‑pay schemes, and standardized tests arrived with Gates’ money stapled to them, sometimes lifting graduation rates, other times kneecapping neighborhood schools. Teachers’ unions call it a Trojan horse for privatization; Gates calls it data‑driven improvement. Parents caught in the crossfire just want their kids to read without a corporate or NGO agenda.

Global Health Imperialism or Shot in the Arm?

The foundation poured roughly $16 billion into global health last decade (foundation financials, 2014‑23), including the seed money for CEPI. That’s the outfit that helped birth COVID‑19 vaccines in record time. Yet, African public‑health leaders noted concerns about “philanthro‑colonialism,” a cure deployed from Seattle rather than grown in Kampala. Moreover, if you ask me, philanthro‑colonialism has the stench of “white savior” complex compounded with catholic crusaders. Worsening the conditions, Gates refused to back a patent waiver for mRNA vaccines, inviting criticism that he cared more about Moderna’s shareholders than the actual cure and widespread dissemination of life-saving vaccines.

Per the NIH: Finally, despite his declared intention to establish COVID vaccines as global public goods, Bill Gates and his foundation supplanted the WHO’s knowledge-sharing initiative, lobbied the US government against intellectual property (IP) waivers and voiced his opposition to sharing vaccine formulas

Skeletons Crawling the Spreadsheet

Before we immortalize the house of Gates, line up the nagging complaints:

• Fossil‑fuel stakes that ballooned just months after Gates published How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.

  

• Private‑prison shares that contradict the motto “All lives have equal value.”

  

• Charter-school crusades derailed by data showing poverty, not pedagogy, drives most test scores.

  

• Microsoft’s antitrust case, the monopoly behind the very fortune now tidying the world.

Add the Epstein connections, the Modi award fiasco, and the lingering question of why Gates’s net worth keeps climbing while he insists he’s giving it all away, and there are a few question marks, deserving of answers.

Then again, if he is, or the others are, willing to give in the billion-dollar range, are we still entitled to ask questions, or should we say “thank you” and turn the other cheek?

Enter Musk: Stage Right, With Chainsaw

Musk’s petty grievance is simple: Gates shorted Tesla stock and dared to preach about climate. Musk continues to frame Gates as the charity industrial complex incarnate, while Gates paints Musk as a libertarian arsonist torching foreign aid to escape the scrutiny of investigations. Two men worth a combined half‑trillion dollars arguing over which of them truly “serves humanity” is peak 2025 irony, the kind of theater Nero would stream on TikTok.

What Happens When the Clock Hits 2045?

Gates says the foundation shuts down twenty years after both co‑chairs die, no dynasty, no perpetual monument. But he’s 69, healthy, and sitting on more technology than Captain Kirk. Betting on mortality feels a bit premature. However, that’s only the juicy question. The bigger consideration is whether a single private outfit, however liquid, can bend global poverty’s trajectory before the money dries up?

Five Questions We Should Be Asking (Bullet‑Point Interlude—Because Data Still Matters)

• Governance: Who guards a $77 billion purse when its owners are gone?

• Alignment: How do fossil‑fuel dividends square with malaria nets?

• Power: What happens when the WHO’s second‑largest donor is a family office?

• Exit Plan: Which governments will backfill polio campaigns when Gates turns off funding?

• Equity: Who decides which African lab, which Indian village, which Mississippi classroom gets the next grant, and who gets ghosted?

Closing the Loop or Tightening the Noose?

The Gates Foundation funds gene‑edited grains that could outlive drought, but the patents sit in Seattle. It bankrolls toilets that vaporize waste into a clean compound, yet millions still defecate in rivers. It fights HIV with one hand while the other hand counts Berkshire dividends.

Meanwhile, there’s Musk: He’ll keep trolling from orbit, promising salvation on Mars while suing regulators on Earth. The rest of us are left here in the splash zone, deciding whether billionaire benevolence is better than billionaire indifference, or if both are just flavors of the same power-trip smoothie.

In 2045, the last wire transfer from the Gates Foundation is supposed to clear. The spreadsheets will close, the press releases will dry up, and the world will either be measurably healthier or just better branded. When that day comes, count the kids who survived malaria, the classrooms that still light up at night, the farmers who kept their land, and maybe we’ll know whether Gates’s calculus redeemed the contradictions.

Until then, the beef sizzles on social media, the grants flow, the critics sharpen their knives, and the world keeps spinning. Sometimes on rubber tires mined from Gates‑backed rubber plantations, sometimes on the hope that money, even imperfect money, can still buy a cure before the final bell rings.

Of course, besides the idyllic eternal money fountain that can fix anything, there’s still the ever-looming question whether we will survive long enough to get to 2045, and what life, in general, will look like at that point. From AI to insane governance (Trump et al.), the velocity of changes will likely outpace the impact of funding that’s tied to research, which moves a lot slower than the level of destruction bestowed upon us by autocracy.

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~Z.