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The $200 Billion Gamble: Bill Gates’s Plan to Wind Down His Foundation

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The $200 Billion Gamble: Bill Gates’s Plan to Wind Down His Foundation

In a wide-ranging interview, he explains his decision — amid the Trump administration’s assault on foreign aid — to accelerate the end of his giving.

Credit…Katy Grannan for The New York Times

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By David Wallace-Wells

May 8, 2025Updated 3:23 p.m. ET

Today the Gates Foundation celebrates its 25th anniversary by announcing its plans to close up shop.

Established in 2000 — when Melinda French Gates was just 35 and Bill Gates was 44 and the world’s richest man — the foundation quickly became one of the most consequential philanthropies the world has ever seen, utterly reshaping the landscape of global public health, pouring more than $100 billion into causes starved for resources and helping save tens of millions of lives.

For all its pragmatic public-health spade work, the foundation has also served as a kind of valorous abstraction — the seeming embodiment of “the Golden Rule,” in a phrase that Bill Gates likes to use, and the face of an increasingly anachronistic era of elite optimism.

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See more on: U.S. Politics, Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Bill GatesRead 786 Comments