A Conversation with Investigative Journalist Tim Schwab (Part 2 of 2)

The author of a book on Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation talks to Michael E. Hartmann about Melinda French Gates’ grantmaking, as well as potential aggressive policy reforms of philanthropy and whether they could ever be cooperatively pursued by those of different worldviews.

---

Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist whose work has appeared in, among other outlets, The Nation, The Baffler, and the Columbia Journalism Review, and he also writes on Substack. His 2023 book The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire, as our review of it in The Giving Review puts it, “convincingly and comprehensively makes a case that Gates is neither who you think he is, nor is he who he wants you to think he is, nor is he who he says to others and thinks he is to himself.”

In fact, there is “a growing number of efforts that wealthy philanthropists deploy to advance their goal of protecting, conserving, and enhancing the privileges of the billionaire class by reminding us just how good they really are,” Schwab writes in a 2023 Baffler article, “Big Philanthropy.”

Gates Foundation grantmaking in particular “has empowered an army of advocates to amplify this message, giving more than $500 million in charitable donations to groups that help advance the philanthropic sector’s interests, publicize its good deeds and big donations, and set the acceptable boundaries of debate,” Schwab continues.

“Gates and his fellow billionaires,” according to the Baffler piece,

have carte blanche to use charity as a money-in-politics tool, like lobbying and campaign contributions, but with virtually no oversight. In this perversely unregulated system, the richest people on earth pay the least in taxes and are celebrated as saints, even as their donations are directed to projects that advance their own political interests, including enlarging the special-interest political power of the new philanthropist class. It’s an extraordinary entitlement and Big Philanthropy knows it needs to vouchsafe both hearts and minds to lacquer its claim on these privileges, lest Congress get any big ideas, or, even before that, the public puts ideas in the head of its elected representatives.

Schwab was kind enough to join me for a recorded conversation last week. During the first part of our discussion, which is here, we talk about the reaction to his book, the degree to which the foundation is representative of establishment philanthropy in America, the recent announcement that the foundation will increase its spend-out rate, and what happened to the (once-)cooperative grantmaking relationship between Gates and Warren Buffett.

The just more than 12-minute video below is the second part, during which we discuss Melinda French Gates’ grantmaking, as well as potential aggressive policy reforms of philanthropy and whether they could ever be cooperatively pursued by those of different worldviews.

“Another stunning development since the publication of my book is that Melinda Gates, like Warren Buffett, has jumped ship. She has stepped down from the Gates Foundation,” Schwab tell me. “After her divorce from Bill, they said they’re going to try and work it out. They tried to co-direct it for a few years, and eventually she just said this isn’t working and she stepped away.”

Schwab doesn’t “see Melinda French Gates as really distinct from Bill Gates in how she’s doing philanthropy or how she sees the world,” though, he continues.

I think the politics and the ideology … are the same as Bill Gates’, in terms of market-based solutions, the primacy of the private sector, technology is a solution to every problem. I think that’s still a major current in the work that she’s doing and now that she’s an independent philanthropist. … She’s also very Bill Gates in the lack of accountability and transparency with which he operates now as an independent philanthropist.

Asked about some of his recent writing that has expressed support for the House budget bill’s tiered increase of the federal excise tax on net investment income of private foundations, Schwab answers, “Well, big picture, I just want to be clear that I’m not endorsing Trump’s tax bill—the net effect of which, I think, will actually expand and enhance Gates’ personal wealth and thereby the money that’s going to go into the Gates Foundation. So I think it’s a net positive for Bill Gates and probably the Gates Foundation.

“But this one tiny little slice of the bill” makes sense to Schwab. He asks back: why shouldn’t the foundation be paying meaningful “taxes on the investment income it makes from, you know, from Microsoft, from Berkshire Hathaway? To me, it does not seem like a radical thing.

“And I guess, really big picture,” he continues, “Trump represents really the first big opportunity we’ve had in U.S. politics to hold the Gates Foundation accountable, and I’ve had Gates Foundation insiders telling me from the earliest days that they’re really scared that the Trump administration will do that.”

Schwab later underscores, “I do think that Trump is a threat to democracy,” and “I don’t think that Trump really is going to significantly and substantially change the way extreme wealth exists in the United States or anywhere else.”

But looking forward, Schwab notes that in the face of Big Philanthropy, there is “a growing body of detractors, on both the political left and the political right—and when I say political left, I mean left of the liberal-centrist sort of New York Times ethos of the world.” On philanthropy reform in particular and in attitudes toward the mega-wealthy more generally, he says, “I do think that there is a sort of strange-bedfellows thing happening.”

---

This article first appeared in the Giving Review on June 26, 2025.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/a-conversation-with-investigative-journalist-tim-schwab-part-2-of-2/