Bill Gates to Donate $200 B by 2045, Criticizes Musk Over USAID Cuts

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said on 8 May he will give away nearly all of his personal fortune, pledging about $200 billion—roughly 99 percent of his net worth—to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Under the new timetable, the charity will distribute the funds over the next two decades and shut its doors on 31 December 2045, moving up an earlier plan that linked its lifespan to Gates’s death. Gates said accelerating the foundation’s spending will allow it to double annual grant-making and intensify efforts to eradicate polio, curb malaria and expand childhood vaccination, education and poverty-reduction programmes in low-income nations. The foundation, which has already disbursed about $100 billion since 2000, will focus on projects that Gates believes can deliver the greatest measurable impact. “I refuse to die rich,” the 69-year-old philanthropist wrote on his personal blog. The announcement came with a broadside against Elon Musk and the Trump administration’s decision—recommended by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—to slash the budget of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Gates warned that the cuts could erase decades of progress in global health, predicting “millions of additional deaths” and accusing Musk of “killing the world’s poorest children” by undermining vaccine and HIV-prevention programmes.