Bill Gates, who will become a grandfather early next year, weighs in on technologies being evaluated by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that may help address some global problems.
GETTY IMAGESDespite all the problems facing the world now–Russia’s war in Ukraine, the Covid pandemic, and extreme weather–Bill Gates is optimistic about the future. The main reason? The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is adopting and supporting new technology such as artificial intelligence and gene therapy to tackle global challenges like childhood mortality and diseases like HIV.
Gates spoke to Forbes just ahead of the publication of his annual letter on his blog Gates Notes, a tradition he started in 2009. He and his former wife Melinda French Gates–who together co-chair the Gates Foundation–recently finished running a series of strategy sessions and planned the foundation’s budget for 2023. Gates said the foundation’s budget will be its biggest ever, pumped up by the biggest one-year increase in the foundation’s 22-year history. He’s thinking even more concretely about future generations given the fact that he will become a grandfather for the first time next year; his older daughter, Jennifer, who got married last year, is expecting a baby in February.
The renowned co-founder of Microsoft is currently the world’s sixth richest person, by Forbes Counts. He’d be worth at least $162 billion–and rank as No. 3 in the world–if he hadn’t given $59 billion over time to the Gates Foundation, mostly gifts of Microsoft stock. But his plan is that going forward, his rank among the world’s wealthiest will drop. Down the line, says Gates, he expects to fall off the list of billionaires altogether. The reason has everything to do with his commitment to giving nearly all his fortune to the Gates Foundation, the largest charitable foundation in the U.S.
“Although I don’t care where I rank on the list of the world’s richest people, I do know that as I succeed in giving, I will drop down and eventually off the list altogether,” Gates, who turned 67 in October, writes in his newly released annual letter.
Gates took a big step in July to knock himself further down the list, transferring $20 billion of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. He made that transfer, he explained, to enable the foundation to increase its annual spending and grantmaking by 50%, to $9 billion a year by 2026.
“The $9 billion [in annual distributions] is not one of these things where you can just stay steady and be a ‘forever’ foundation,” says Gates. To keep giving at that rate, even with the annual multi-billion dollar gifts of stock to the foundation from his friend and fellow billionaire Warren Buffett, Gates says he will continue to shift some of his fortune–currently estimated by Forbes at $103 billion–to the foundation as well. “There will be lots more money from me.” Gates figures the foundation will wind down its activities in maybe 25 or possibly 30 years.
In the meantime, here are some of the efforts by the foundation that Gates is enthusiastic about:
Making math education in the U.S. more engaging
Although the Gates Foundation may be better known for its work in healthcare in the world’s poorest countries, it’s also directed resources over the years to improve public education in the U.S.—with mixed results. The newest effort is to jump-start math education for students from Kindergarten through 12th grade. As Gates’ letter points out, those who pass Algebra I by 9th grade are twice as likely to graduate from high school and more likely to go to college and get a bachelor’s degree, and on to a good career. But the pandemic struck a blow. According to a new report card on U.S. education–the National Assessment of Economic Progress–just 26% of 8th graders were proficient in math, down 9 percentage points from 2019 and the lowest numbers in nearly two decades, Gates’ letter said. In October, the foundation announced it will spend $1.1 billion over four years to help revamp the way math is taught. “Teachers tell us repeatedly that their students find the math curriculum dull and irrelevant,” Gates wrote in his letter. “The idea is to make the most of the teacher’s time and skills.” The foundation is supporting nonprofit partners like Khan Academy, Zearn, and Mastery, online tools that are interactive and work to make math more engaging. Gates told me he’s optimistic about the use of AI in such tools: “The AI can figure out what engages you–whether it’s sports examples or health examples, what things do you understand, not understand. An AI could tune that even more than standard software.”
Reducing childhood mortality by using AI-powered ultrasounds
Gates points out that while childhood deaths have fallen by half since 2000, the number of babies who die in the first 30 days of their life–the neonatal period–is not dropping as much. In fact, 1.9 million newborns died in 2019. To try and reduce those deaths, the Gates Foundation, working with partners, has come up with a scaled-down ultrasound tool that could be used in the developing world: a probe that gets plugged into a mobile phone or a tablet. Wave the probe over a pregnant mom’s belly a few times. “The software alone can detect all the normal problems–whether it’s in breech position or [umbilical] cord in the wrong place,” says Gates. And the software can indicate whether the pregnancy is high-risk and whether the mother might need a C-section for delivery. Most births in the developing world are not attended by a doctor, Gates pointed out.
The Gates Foundation worked to develop the AI software with Google as a partner and also Philips, which makes traditional ultrasound machines, Gates told me. The technology is being tested in Kenya and South Africa now; if it proves to make a positively different, it would be another two to three years before it would be ready for wider use.
Using gene therapy to cure HIV
Finding a cure for HIV has long been a goal–and it’s still in the distant future. But Gates is hopeful that advances in gene therapy– making small edits to a portion of a person’s genetic makeup–may prove fruitful. The foundation has funded work at multiple academic centers and start-ups and partnered with Novartis and the National Institutes of Health on gene therapy. The hope is that one injection would give a person’s body a way to fight off the virus. “There are still years of work ahead before any of these approaches are proven safe and effective,” Gates wrote in his letter.
Nuclear Power And Low-Carbon Innovations
Outside of the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates is spending a considerable amount of time focused on his nuclear energy startup, TerraPower, which has an advanced reactor designed to use something called high-assay low-enriched uranium—known as HALEU— as its fuel. Gates says that over the past decade he’s put a bit over $1 billion into the company, which is in the process of developing a demonstration plant in Wyoming that is partly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Gates says it will take until 2030 to know whether the new reactor design is truly a success.
He is also passionate about his Breakthrough Energy low- and zero-carbon investments–now a portfolio of more than 100 companies, with backing from a cohort of other billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Vinod Khosla, and John Doerr. Gates mentions two of companies of interest: lithium-ion battery maker Redwood Materials, led by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, and low-cost energy storage maker Form Energy, which raised $450 million from investors in October. Any profits from these companies, says Gates, will go back into climate investing or to the Gates Foundation.
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