Amid global hellscape, Bill Gates to tank his wealth ranking, gives away $20B

Enlarge (credit: MONEY SHARMA / Contributor | AFP)

Throughout the pandemic, the world’s richest men added about a trillion dollars to their net worth. The Washington Post reported that SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos pocketed a fifth of that. But while some billionaires spent the pandemic getting richer, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates looked at the world crumbling around him and decided to make a different business plan.

“I will move down and eventually off of the list of the world’s richest people,” Gates declared in a blog, announcing his plan to personally donate funds that will dramatically increase the annual amount that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pays out to support global initiatives in the name of progress.

To address global crises that Gates says have been profoundly exacerbated by the pandemic, “the Gates Foundation intends to increase spending from nearly $6 billion per year before COVID to $9 billion per year by 2026.” The proposed 50 percent annual budget increase has already been unanimously agreed upon “in principle” by the foundation's formal board members.