Climate activists disrupt Bill Gates's book tour, chanting "Tax the motherfucking rich!"
Try as he might, Gates can no longer hide from the growing chorus of critics calling him an oligarch. That's a very good thing.
Bill Gates is now on book tour promoting his new memoir. And he’s charging the public as much as $70 per ticket—for the opportunity to listen to him talk about himself.
It’s astonishing that a man worth well over $100 billion is asking people to pay good money to sit as his feet. But this isn’t about greed or narcissism. It’s about cowardice.
Gates is terrified of the outside world—-the vast public who he cannot buy and control, the growing body of critics who see him as an oligarch and an emperor who has no clothes. This fear has driven Gates to take increasingly extreme steps to insulate himself from the world. If Gates can’t silence his critics, he can at least pretend they don’t exist— by creating a world they cannot enter.
The steep ticket prices definitely were a decisive factor in my decision not to attend Gates’s book event in DC. Had I known what was planned, I would have gone.
At the event, a small group of protesters positioned themselves on the edge of the stage between Gates and the audience, offering the crowd a decidedly different version of Gates’s life story. Read the words of the protestors:
The top 1% emit more than the bottom 50% worldwide. Billionaires are the problem.
Bill Gates is not a climate hero. His actions mean more than his empty words.
His fossil-fuel powered AI is destroying our planet. We cannot afford it.
Billionaires are torching the planet. Billionaires are not the solution to our problems. Billionaires are the problem.
People like Bill Gates are destroying our planet!
We need clear air, not another billionaire!
Tax the rich. Tax the motherfucking rich!
It is absolutely worth watching the footage of Gates’s book event (here or here) because the protesters are inspiring—-and because it’s not often we see Gates in this position, where he is forced to hear his critics. Gates appears frozen in the video, wearing an expression that could be derision or discomfort. Or is he smirking?
Criticizing Gates through the lens of climate change is an excellent way to show how destructive his extreme wealth is. As I reported in 2021 in The Nation, Bill Gates is one of the largest individual carbon emitters on Earth, largely because of his extensive travel on his private jet. Additionally, the Gates Foundation’s $76 billion endowment has long held investments in fossil fuels, positioning the philanthropy to generate income from climate destruction. (Gates claims to have divested, but his foundation’s most recent public-facing financial filings continue to show large stakes in fossil fuels).
Gates also is one of the world’s fiercest promoters of artificial intelligence, the use and development of which carries a massive carbon footprint. As a major investor in Microsoft, Gates is positioned to profit from the unregulated expansion of AI. In these and other ways, Gates’s great wealth cannot be separated from the harm it is causing—to our planet and to the rest of us.
It is good to see Gates being called out, and the protest of Gates’s book event should be a model for every public appearance he—and every other billionaire—-does. We need to be raising our voices to confront extreme wealth in all of its forms, and to call it out as a threat to democracy. And we need to make the news media pay attention. We can’t have a strong democracy without strong journalism.
Only a couple mainstream outlets covered the protest of Gates’s book event, none of them in the United States. This confirms a long-standing trend of media bias and one-sided reporting on Gates, often presented as our ‘good billionaire.’
Isn’t it newsworthy that Gates can no longer appear in public without being sharply criticized for his greed? Or what about all the other one-percenters now beefing up their personal security, terrified of being confronted or attacked? The widespread sympathy, if not jubilation, that emerged around the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson shows what a deep well of frustration people feel at how rigged the world is—-in favor of the rich and powerful. Clearly there is a desire from the public for accountability and change. Much of the legacy news media today, however, appears unable to understand or interrogate the grotesque inequality that defines modernity. In its worst moments, journalists actively support our crawl toward oligarchy, giving the richest people the loudest voice.
Case in point are all the celebrity journalists joining Gates on his book tour. That’s the topic of my next piece. Please stay tuned —-and please subscribe!—- because I think you’ll want to hear how CNN rationalizes Anderson Cooper helping Gates promote his ‘good-billionaire’ memoir.
