Bill Gates pledged on Thursday to give away US$200 billion via his charitable foundation by 2045 and lashed out at Elon Musk, accusing the world’s richest man of “killing the world’s poorest children” through huge cuts to the US foreign aid budget.
The 69-year-old billionaire co-founder of Microsoft said he was speeding up his plans to divest almost all of his fortune and would close the foundation on December 31, 2045, earlier than previously planned. Gates said he hoped the money would help eradicate diseases like polio and malaria, end preventable deaths among women and children, and reduce global poverty.
His announcement follows moves by governments, including President Donald Trump’s administration, to slash international aid budgets. The US cuts have been overseen by the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.
“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” Gates told the Financial Times. In an interview with Reuters, Gates warned of a stark reversal to decades of progress in reducing mortality in the next four to six years due to the funding cuts.
“The number of deaths will start going up for the first time … it’s going to be millions more deaths because of the resources,” Gates told Reuters.
“I think governments will come back to caring about children surviving” over the next 20-year period though, he said. Gates and Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, once agreed over the role of the wealthy in giving away money to help others, but have since clashed several times. “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 in a post on his website.
