Gates Grovels to Trump

Queuing up behind Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and other oligarchs, Bill Gates is letting the world know he’s on Team Trump

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Bill Gates repeatedly praises, and never criticizes, President Donald Trump, using buzzwords like energized, impressed, intriguing, fascinated, incredible and innovation. (YouTube, WSJ)

Under Bill Gates’s leadership, Microsoft developed a reputation for its toxic masculinity. When his now ex-wife, Melinda Gates, started her career at Microsoft—Bill Gates pursued her while she was his subordinate— she recounts being floored by the chest thumping and alpha dogging she witnessed.

“This wasn’t just a spirited exchange; it was a brash, escalating face-off, almost a brawl,” Gates writes in her autobiography. “And I was thinking, ‘Wow, is this how you have to be to do well here?!’”

All manner of grotesque behavior emerged in this boys-will-be-boys work environment, including the crude phrase "Bend Over, Grease Up"—used so frequently that it internally was shortened to BOGU. The term appears to have originated around Microsoft’s corporate policy of deference to IBM, the company’s one-time VIP client. The idea was: whatever IBM wanted, no matter how demanding or degrading, Microsoft would deliver—with a toadying smile.

This corporate culture of submission and humiliation was good practice for Bill Gates, as he now begins to slavishly prostrate himself to Donald Trump. In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Gates effusively praised Trump, trumpeting to the world how “frankly impressed” he is with the new president.

Gates could find no words of criticism for Trump—a man who calls the poor nations the Gates Foundation partners with “shithole countries;” a man who appears dead set on dismantling reproductive rights, an issue over which the Gates Foundation has long claimed to be a champion; a man whose America-first jingoism appears at loggerheads with the Gates Foundation’s motto, “All lives have equal value.”

For everyone (including the news media) still clinging to the mythology of Gates as our ‘good billionaire’—a principled leader committed to science, reason, facts and humanitarianism—his buddy routine with Trump should make them think twice. To date, I’ve seen only one outlet—a very short post in The New Republic—dare to call out Gates for ‘bowing down’ to Trump.

Really, no one should be surprised by Gates’s behavior. As I wrote in a post last November, “In the weeks and months ahead, we should expect Bill Gates, following the lead of other tech billionaires, like Jeff Bezos, to look for ways to cravenly kiss the ring and curry favor with Trump, just as Gates has long done with other authoritarian leaders."

Shortly after I wrote that, Trump made public that Gates had been, essentially, begging him for a meeting. And last week Gates began boasting about his “intriguing” three-hour dinner with Trump.

According to Gates’s account, he used his time with Trump to discuss humanitarianism, like eradicating polio from Afghanistan and Pakistan. As Gates said of Trump: “He was fascinated to hear what he could do to maximize the chance that, during the next four years, that incredible milestone will be achieved.”

Are we really expected to believe that Trump—a man who routinely falls asleep at his own events, a man who goes out of his way to denigrate people of color living in foreign nations—spoke to Gates, for more than three hours, about eradicating polio in Afghanistan?

Of course not. Invariably, the real conversation was focused on horse trading. The reason Trump, the self-described ‘art-of-the-deal' master negotiator, met with Gates was to see what the Seattle billionaire could offer, what he was willing to put on the table. And Trump can command an extremely high price.

As I reported in November, among Trump’s right-wing political base, Gates is one of the most reviled public figures on Earth. And Trump is filling out his administration with overt critics of the Gates Foundation, like RFK Jr. All of this puts Gates in the hot seat for the next four years. I would not be surprised to see the Gates Foundation facing some kind of federal investigation in the near future. At the very least, the foundation will lose some measure of political and financial support from the US government.

But we also shouldn’t underestimate Bill Gates. If his life story tells us anything, it is how committed he is to an ends-justifies-the-means, self-serving pragmatism—bending over and greasing up in order to advance his personal interests, his personal reputation and his empire of influence. The fact that he was able to secure three-hours of face time with the most powerful person in the world demonstrates the political influence Gates wields—and also Trump’s craven fidelity to the billionaire class.

Gates’s recent, glowing comments about Trump are almost certainly just the beginning of the courtship. We should also expect the Gates Foundation to make structural changes in the weeks or months ahead, compromising its publicly declared values and mission to align with Trump’s political agenda. And it might work. Billionaires like Trump and Gates have more in common than they do differences.

It’s also important to understand that Bill Gates has a life outside of the Gates Foundation—as an investor—which plays into his relationship with Trump. While Gates claims to be a philanthropist, arguably his biggest passion is accumulating wealth, something he is extremely good at. And we know this because during his tenure as a philanthropist—while the news media has written endless one-sided, good-billionaire narratives about Gates’s giving away all of his money—he was quietly building his war chest, essentially doubling his personal wealth.

Two other people were present at Gates’s meeting with Trump——former Microsoft executive, Larry Cohen, and Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Cohen today is a close aide to Gates, including leading Gates Ventures, which helps manage Gates’s investing and PR activities outside of the Gates Foundation. If Gates brought Cohen to the Trump meeting, and not a Gates Foundation staffer, this again indicates the meeting was about more than philanthropy.

Gates—with a personal net worth estimated at between $106 and $163 billion—has invested billions of dollars of his personal wealth into a growing portfolio of technologies he thinks will solve climate change. And he has long expected us, taxpayers, to subsidize these investments. The U.S. government has pledged to front half the costs—-two billion dollars in taxpayer funding—to support a questionable, new nuclear energy plant Gates has proposed building in Wyoming, as one example.

Gates has always used his political access to pressure the federal government to direct taxpayer support to ‘climate innovation’—-or whatever euphemism Gates wants to use for his personal financial investments. Undoubtedly he will also push the Trump administration in this direction.

Gates also has a deep self-interest in how Trump treats Microsoft, where Gates is the founder, a major investor and has an institutional role as a high-level advisor. The company generates billions of dollars in federal contracts, and keeping taxpayer money flowing means winning Trump’s favor. Microsoft recently gave a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration, for example; this wasn’t a donation as much as it was buying influence.

The bottom line is that Gates is highly financially incentivized, in a self-interested way, to win over Trump. And flattery appears to part of Trump’s ‘art of the deal.’ Does this explain why Gates is now spinning preposterous narratives about what an “energized” and “fascinated” leader Trump is, committed to “driving innovation” and advancing the public health of poor nations?

Gates’s philanthropic career, like his personal investments, is also highly dependent on federal funding. Many of the Gates Foundation’s biggest charitable projects—the ones Bill Gates has built his personal philanthropic legacy on—are largely funded by us, taxpayers. Again, this financial relationships didn’t just happen. It’s the result of the Gates’s strenuous, long-term efforts to pressure government leaders, around the globe, to keep the dollars flowing into his charitable empire. (Trump is already turning off the tap to the aid complex—more on this in a future post.)

While Gates wants to win Trump’s favor, what does he have to offer? A lot, as it turns out. For more than two decades, Gates has used philanthropic donations to build an army of allies—-advocacy groups, think tanks, universities and news rooms—-all of which, on some fundamental level, serve at the pleasure of Bill Gates. These Gates-Foundation-funded groups, essentially, are a massive political network that can be summoned to influence public opinion and public policy, whether on public education or public health. This is why I argue that we should view the Gates Foundation as an unregulated political actor, not a philanthropy.

If Gates orders this network to change directions, they are obliged to do so—or lose funding. This leverage and influence can be used in complex ways by Gates to advance his own political agenda, or serve others. For example, he could de-fund groups that might be critical of Trump, effectively silencing them. Gates could, likewise, re-prioritize the foundation’s agenda to avoid overtly conflicting with Trump’s political goals.

This is what other billionaires are already doing. Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, directed the newspaper to kill its presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris. Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Facebook will stop its fact-checking efforts, which often made Trump look bad. The purpose and effect of these decisions seems obvious—a cowardly effort by oligarch-billionaires to win favor with the United States’s petty, vindictive and highly transactional president.

In the weeks and months ahead, I’m predicting we will see some outrageous examples of Gates’s capitulation, concession, cowardice and complicity in Trump’s wrecking-ball efforts to destroy democracy. I’ll use my newsletter on Substack to keep track of this story—-stay tuned and please subscribe!