Why I refused to participate in the Netflix docu-series on Bill Gates
Who funded the streamer's newest whitewash of our so-called 'good billionaire?'
You may recognize the name Morgan Neville. He’s the Academy-Award winning director of the documentary “20 Feet from Stardom.” He also directed celebrated films about Anthony Bourdain (“Roadrunner”) and Fred Rogers (“Won’t You be My Neighbor”).
Neville’s name was familiar to me when his production company, Tremolo, asked me to participate in a new Netflix documentary about “significant global challenges our world faces.” I was excited by the opportunity, but also skeptical.
Tremolo had made a point to tell me that the billionaire Bill Gates would also appear in the film. Clearly the filmmakers recognized that I, as the author of the book “The Bill Gates Problem,” would want to know about Gates’s involvement.
“We are including the voices of Bill Gates along with community organizers and the very people who are most directly impacted by such challenges. Their collective—and at times contrasting—voices and vision for the future will act in part as our guide throughout the series,” Tremolo’s Moira Hamilton noted in an email to me. “As independent filmmakers (we are receiving no funding from Bill or the foundation), we see this episode as an opportunity to question philanthropy as a solution to global inequities and directly challenge Bill: ‘are you too rich?’”
I agreed to a phone call, but Tremolo’s pitch didn’t convince me. Gates doesn’t participate in media that makes him look bad, certainly not long-form media, like a documentary. I also knew that Gates puts hundreds of millions of dollars into shaping the media, including in non-transparent ways.
And Netflix doesn’t exactly have a great track record in this regard. In 2019, the streamer began pushing out its first docu-series on Gates, the cartoonishly one-sided “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates.” Unbeknownst to most viewers, the docu-series was directed by a filmmaker with a history of funding from the Gates Foundation.1
Lending my name—as an independent journalist who has authored a book on Gates—to the new Netflix series, I knew, could give it legitimacy and credibility it probably did not deserve. In the worst case, the filmmakers would twist my words to make me seem inarticulate or conspiratorial. Or they would tokenize me, bury my critique in counterpoints, and give Gates the last word—-pushing out a one-sided narrative that misinforms the public and distorts the public debate on wealth.
Fast forward one year, and my fears appear confirmed; Netflix is now promoting the series—released yesterday—in nearly opposite terms to how the filmmakers pitched it to me. Gates is not simply one of many diverse voices in the docu-series, as the filmmakers told me. He is the docu-series.
The five episodes, nearly four hours in length, are titled: “What’s Next: The Future with Bill Gates.”
As a Netflix press release notes,"the tech visionary and global health and climate philanthropist invites viewers to join him on a learning journey to explore pressing issues facing our world today."
Director and producer, Morgan Neville, piled on the praise: “Bill is one of the most curious people I’ve met, and the amount of learning he still does on a daily basis is truly inspiring,”
Bill Gates, meanwhile, is promoting the project as “my new Netflix series.”
To say the least, I feel that the filmmakers grossly misrepresented themselves when they approached me. They minimized Gates’s role. And they told me their project was a vehicle to “directly challenge Bill Gates” when its real function, inarguably, is to exalt him.
While the film includes a few—very few—token counterpoints to Gates, like a friendly three-minute interaction with Senator Bernie Sanders about wealth inequality, the filmmakers do not ever meaningfully challenge Gates, put him on the defensive, or give voice to Gates’s critics, who are legion. Why not speak to one of the many organizations across the African continent who are calling on the Gates Foundation to pay reparations for the enormous damage it has inflicted on African farmers? Why not talk to countless schoolteachers or students who have been hurt by Gates’s destructive crusades in U.S. education? Or why not investigate the numerous MeToo allegations of misconduct that Bill Gates faces, alongside his hard-to-explain association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein? (Gates denies any wrongdoing.)
All of these stories have been widely covered by top news organizations around the world. But not by Netflix, which appears devoted to laundering Gates’s reputation every five years—-first with the three-part series “Inside Bill’s Brain” and now with the five-part series “What’s Next.”
The question is: why. At a moment in history when there is a vibrant public debate around challenging billionaires—and a growing concern about Bill Gates’s enormous wealth and unaccountable power—why is Netflix putting out more propaganda for Gates? Why is Netflix so afraid to challenge our ‘good billionaire?’
It is impossible to avoid the question of money, or to ask: Did the filmmakers misrepresent themselves when they told me they were “independent,” that they had no financial ties to Gates?
Here’s what I uncovered:
In the very final credits of the film, Jen Krajicek is prominently listed as a producer. What’s not disclosed is that Krajicek, according to multiple sources, appears to work for Gates Ventures, which does PR for Bill Gates.2
Why does this matter? A producer credit in a film means power. It usually signals that this person (or the people they represent) helped fund the film, that they were a financial backer or have an ownership stake. Producers can also have editorial input.
Neither the filmmakers nor Gates responded to questions about Krajicek’s producer credit, her professional relationship to Gates, or Gates’s financial involvement with the film or filmmakers.
The producer credit isn’t the only red flag signaling that Gates had some measure of editorial or financial control over the series.
Around the same time that Tremolo and Netflix began work on the project, Bill Gates launched a self-aggrandizing podcast called “Unconfuse Me,” with the help of Gates Ventures. I located a paper trail showing Netflix and Tremolo working on a podcast with the same name, around the same time. And I located several people who worked with Tremolo and Netflix on the podcast—and whose names also appear in the credits of the Netflix docu-series.3
I presented my findings to the filmmakers and asked them to explain. What is the relationship between the Gates podcast and the Gates docu-series? How can Netflix and Tremolo make an independent film about Gates if they are also working on Gates’s self-promotional podcast? Why would independent filmmakers put so much energy into media projects promoting Bill Gates? What financial involvement does Gates have?
Netflix and Tremolo did not respond to any questions.
Neha Shastry, the director of the episode in which I was invited to appear, also did not respond to multiple press inquiries.
Likewise, messages sent to Bill Gates generated no responses.
For a medium like documentary filmmaking that supposedly depends on public trust and transparency, the silence speaks volumes.
I don’t have a money trail to present to readers, but it’s worth underlining just how rich Bill Gates is. Today he controls a $140 billion private fortune and a $75 billion private foundation. A couple million dollars for Gates, almost literally, means nothing to him.
As another point of context, it’s important to understand that financial conflicts of interest in documentary filmmaking are extremely common. In a 2019 investigation in 100Reporters, I showed how wealthy, private actors today are hiring the world’s top documentary filmmakers to tell their stories—to promote their reputations, products and practices. These films are then being presented to unsuspecting audiences—to us, paying viewers—as independent documentaries, if not works of journalism.
Morgan Neville describes his filmmaking as “3-D journalism." If so, shouldn’t we hold Neville accountable to the ethical standards of journalism? The code of conduct from the Society of Professional Journalists, for example, tells reporters to “avoid conflicts of interest” and to “distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two.” The code tells journalists to “respond quickly” to questions about fairness, and to “expose unethical conduct in journalism.”
Really big picture, the job of journalism is to challenge power, not worship it— to afflict the comforted, and comfort the afflicted.
*****
Netflix devotes substantial resources to publicizing its support of the afflicted, like the many press releases it issues about its work with filmmakers from underrepresented groups (here, here, here). The company’s claimed identity as a champion of the under-privileged, however, is difficult to square with the enormous resources Netflix has put into glorifying the most privileged man on Earth. As Gates describes himself, “I’m the luckiest person alive.”
It might be that Netflix’s public-facing commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is designed to distract us from seeing its most important partners—the super-wealthy.
At least three members of Netflix’s board of directors have partnered with Bill Gates on “the Giving Pledge,” in which the richest people on Earth promise to follow Gates’s footsteps into philanthropy. Netflix chairman (and multi-billionaire) Reed Hastings supports some of the same philanthropic projects as the Gates Foundation. (Both are listed as having given at least $10 million to the Charter School Growth Fund.) Another Netflix board member and billionaire philanthropist, Strive Masiyiwa, sits on the Gates Foundation’s board of directors.
Several other Netflix board members also overlap with Gates. Susan Rice previously worked with the Gates Foundation in a position she held in the Obama administration, while Brad Smith currently serves as the president of Microsoft, the company Gates co-founded and in which he remains a major investor and advisor.
Through the lens of institutional power, it's not hard to see why Netflix loves Bill Gates: the people who run the company are his colleagues and supporters. Many of them are obscenely wealthy individuals who look and act like he does, and who see in Gates’s story their own narratives.
Everyone needs a hero, I guess, and it’s great that Netflix has found its guy. But where does that leave the rest of us—-the paying subscribers to Netflix, who look to the streamer for entertainment or enlightenment, not misinformation and propaganda about oligarchs and plutocrats? Is this the world we want to live in, where the richest guy gets the loudest voice?
In the days and weeks ahead, I’ll publish several more investigations into ethical problems in documentary filmmaking. I’ll also propose solutions. One obvious remedy is un-subscribing from streaming platforms that refuse to be transparent and accountable, that privilege the voices of the super-rich over all others, and that cowardly amplify dangerous mythologies about multi-billionaires solving the world’s biggest problems.
If you have any inside information to share, please contact me at timschwab2020@gmail.com, or find me on Signal under username yes.60
Yes, we can talk anonymously.
The only way that I can keep producing reporting on this platform is with your support. If you can afford to support my journalism, I’d greatly appreciate your help.
Here’s how else you can support my career:
—Buy my book, “The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire” https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250850089/thebillgatesproblem
—Share my book with friends and colleagues
—Invite me to do a book talk (and pay me, if you can)
—Add my book to your bookclub
—Assign my book to your students
Director Davis Guggenheim’s 2010 film “Waiting for Superman,” which favorably featured Bill Gates, benefited from $2 million in support from the Gates Foundation. If a wealthy patron is going to put $2 million into helping a filmmaker find success, doesn’t that filmmaker owe his benefactor a huge debt of gratitude? Few viewers of Guggenheim’s 2019 series “Inside Bill’s Brain” likely considered such quid-pro-quo questions—or thought too hard about why Guggenheim’s series was so friendly to Gates—because Netflix and Guggenheim didn’t disclose to audiences the filmmaker’s history of financial ties to the billionaire.
Krajicek has virtually no online presence, and there is, for example, no record of anyone with this name ever working in the film industry or producing a different film. Bill Gates’s 2020 podcast, titled “Bill Gates and Rashida Jones Ask Big Questions,” credits Jen Krajicek as a “supervising producer.” And in Gates’s 2021 book on climate change, he thanks Jen Krajicek by name, citing her as being part of his team at Gates Ventures.
One source shared with me call sheets from the production schedule for “Unconfuse Me,” which don’t mention Gates by name, but which do cite the involvement of numerous people from Tremolo, including Morgan Neville. The listed production office on the call sheets is “Unconfused LLC” whose Los Angeles address is the same as that of Tremolo. Likewise, business registration records in the state of California show Neville’s name attached to Unconfused LLC.
The call sheets for “Unconfuse Me” list a 1-800 number for HR complaints—a number that also appears on a Netflix website. Several other sources also list the number as being associated with Netflix.