The conspiracies, controversies and politics of Bill Gates

There was a time when you had Republican party billionaire supporters in Silicon Valley, but by the 2010s, it could be excused for being a division of the Democratic party. Peter Thiel was the only billionaire supporter of the Republican party.

Things have changed in the 2024 cycle with lifelong Democratic Elon Musk jumping into the Republican campaign and going all out in support of Donald Trump. The much-respected Andreessen-Horowitz donated to Trump as did many other prominent leaders of Silicon Valley. And of course there’s Trump’s VP pick JD Vance who was a VC.

The double life of Bill Gates

One person who generally stays in the background is Microsoft founder Bill Gates. While Gates is a confirmed Democrat, this time he has really come out in the open with a $50 million donation to the Kamala Harris campaign. Interestingly when Trump was banned on social media sites, Gates called the prospect of a permanent ban would be a matter of shame. 

In the past the Bill Clinton administration fought an antitrust case in the 1990s, but Gates came out unscathed. He has strong views on climate change, healthcare and education, which have become quite political and polarized issues in America. He is also a strong proponent of things like vaccination and abortion. Another controversial opinion was that rich nations should shun beef and adopt its synthetic lab made version instead. When it comes to the issues of Bitcoin, he is a critic and claims that he owns no cryptocurrencies.

While he is a strong supporter of climate change, he is a rare liberal stalwart who backs nuclear energy as an alternative. While environmentalists hate nuclear, the EU finally accepted it as green energy. TerraPower and Breakthrough Energy have been founded by Gates. He lobbied for Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 as he thought it would help the cause of climate change. 

In India Gates has by and large been a positive figure. I remember attending a Gates lecture at the Intel Developer Forum a few decades back in Bangalore. The amount of cheering, hooting and wolf whistles would have led you to believe that a rock star had arrived. He received the Padma Bhushan in 2015. However, his polio foundation has seen many controverses on Indian soil. He has come out with a lot of interesting concepts like “Reinvent the toilet challenge” and producing drinking water from wastewater. 

Gates’ biggest controversy is probably his “friendship” with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He is the subject of many conspiracy theories: He had a hand in the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, he wants to depopulate the world, he wants the world to start eating bugs as a new diet, he wants to implant trackable microchips on people, he is an alien and a member of the lizard people…

In the last century, he was seen as an evil capitalist by the media. In this century, he has changed his image through his foundation. It shows in the books he has written. While his first two books were The Road Ahead and Business @ the Speed of Thought, his last two have been How to Avoid a Climate Disaster and How to Prevent the Next Pandemic. He is a voracious reader even in this day and age.