Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting
The Bill Gates Problem by Tim Schwab
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

The Bill Gates Problem

Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire
Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.
Narrator Tim Schwab

This audiobook uses AI narration.

Weโ€™re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 15 hours 55 minutes
Language English
  Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Brought to you by Penguin.

You know him as the founder of Microsoft; the philanthropic, kind-hearted billionaire who has donated endless funds to good causes around the world. But there's another side to Bill Gates.

We might like to think of the Gates Foundation as an innocent charity giving away money, collaborating with stakeholders, and listening to the desires of the populations it hopes to help, but that's simply not how it works in practice. The charity internally sets a policy agenda for how to fix the world - based on one man's worldview - then imposes this vision onto the developing world by funding groups that align with it.

Combining rich storytelling and ground-breaking reporting, The Good Billionaire offers readers a provocative and timely counter-narrative about one of the world's most widely recognized individuals - a true global celebrity with a truly global audience. But more than that, this book speaks to a vital political question around economic inequality and the erosion of democratic institutions - why should the super-rich be able to transform their wealth into political power, and just how far can they go?

ยฉ2023 Tim Schwab (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Tim Schwab is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. His 2019 investigation into the Gates Foundation won multiple awards, including an Izzy from the Park Center for Independent Media and a Deadline Club Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and was nominated for a Pulitzer prize by The Nation newspaper. His reporting on Gates has appeared in The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review and the British Medical Journal, and represents some of the only investigative journalism ever published on Gates. Earlier in his career, Tim worked as a journalist for two daily newspapers and as a researcher for the watchdog group Food & Water Watch.

Tim Schwab is a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. His 2019 investigation into the Gates Foundation won multiple awards, including an Izzy from the Park Center for Independent Media and a Deadline Club Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and was nominated for a Pulitzer prize by The Nation newspaper. His reporting on Gates has appeared in The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review and the British Medical Journal, and represents some of the only investigative journalism ever published on Gates. Earlier in his career, Tim worked as a journalist for two daily newspapers and as a researcher for the watchdog group Food & Water Watch.

Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Nowโ€™s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, weโ€™ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Reviews

An extraordinary and detailed work of investigative journalism into an underexplored nexus of influence in global affairs. Read it and learn the brutal truth: there is nothing altruistic about the worldโ€™s favorite billionaire. Schwab makes a strong case, based on years of reporting, that under the direction of a humbler man the Gates Foundation would probably be a more effective force for good. Schwab's excellent exposรฉ of hyper-billionaire โ€˜mythsโ€™ could yet help to catalyse political murmurations towards...more collective ends. Investigative journalism with a fierce polemical edge โ€ฆ Nobody who comes away from reading The Bill Gates Problem will look at him in the same way. A tale of frustration and even rage at the culture of secrecy and often incompetence inside Gatesโ€™s philanthropic world, it is also strangely heartening. Tim Schwab has written the definitive critique of Bill Gates as bully-philanthropist. Schwab uses the case of Gates to tell a compelling and carefully researched story that raises disturbing questions about the lack of accountability of power-philanthropy. This is not the story of one bad man, so much as a demonstration of the inability for anyone-no matter how smart or rich-to solve the world's problems from the top down with money and technology. In this incisive and penetrating book, Schwab dares to confront a question society has long ignored: should a secretive, unaccountable billionaire dictate policy in public health, education, and science? Fearlessly rendered and much-needed. Tim Schwab follows the money to expose what happens when one man-however intelligent or well-intentioned-amasses so much wealth and so much power, he can literally dictate to governments around the world. With great skill-and given the range of Bill Gates's influence, considerable courage-Schwab pulls back the curtain to deliver a classic of muckraking journalism. Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting