The Megadonor (Extended Cut)
Nikolic, Walker, Maxwell, Raikes, and an emblematic interview
Bill Gates took a lot of flak during the COVID era, albeit not from the press.
The BBC ran a piece titled, “How Bill Gates became the voodoo doll of Covid conspiracies”1. USA Today ran “Is Bill Gates a modern witch? COVID conspiracy theories involving billionaire similar to witch hunt.”2
Reuters3, CNN4, and many other outlets did sympathetic interviews.
The fascinating thing about the press’s choice to summarily categorize those who distrusted Gates as unhinged conspiracy theorists without, at bare minimum, also doing its job and informing the public of Gates’s staggering conflicts of interest, was that in a previous life, conspiracy had been Gates’s business model, as was famously ruled at the turn of the century by a US District Court Judge.5
The press’s pronounced incredulity that the public would distrust Mr. Gates was made all the more baffling by the fact that the pandemic transpired shortly after the Jeffrey Epstein revelations, in which Bill was implicated, and for which he had uniquely bad excuses among those who’d rubbed elbows with the disgraced “financier”.
For one thing, Gates met with Epstein repeatedly in the years after his 2007 conviction, which was the point at which many with reputations to protect had cut ties.
In an October 2019 article, just a few months before Gates’s rebranding as the savior of COVID, no less than the New York Times ran an article titled “Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past.”6
Per the Times, “Mr. Gates met with Mr. Epstein on numerous occasions — including at least three times at Mr. Epstein’s palatial Manhattan townhouse, and at least once staying late into the night.” This late-night rendezvous included "Dr. Eva Andersson-Dubin, a former Miss Sweden whom Mr. Epstein had once dated, and her 15-year-old daughter.” Notably, according to Virginia Giuffre Roberts’ May 2016 deposition, Eva’s husband, Glenn, was the first powerful person she was sent to have sex with “after my training.”7 Moreover, the Dubins’ former chef testified he’d witnessed Eva handling one of Epstein’s distraught victims herself.8
After the encounter, Gates sent an email to colleagues, saying “A very attractive Swedish woman and her daughter dropped by and I ended up staying there quite late,” and “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.”9
Gates’s spokesperson said that Gates’s comment “was in no way meant to convey a sense of interest or approval.”
Beyond the fact that intrigue and interest are synonyms, interviewed just one month prior to the Times article, Gates had stated (on the topic of his relationship with Epstein), ”Every meeting where I was with him were meetings with men. I was never at any parties or anything like that.”1011
Thus, at bare minimum, his ostensible forgetfulness of the presence of women, one of whom was a former Miss Sweden, and the other of whom would subsequently be named one of the “15 hottest freshmen” by the Harvard Crimson (along with earning Epstein’s affections to the point of open consideration for marriage)12, in a night which Gates was able to remember well enough the next day to produce an email with attentive descriptors such as “intriguing”, “Swedish”, and “very attractive,” was a noteworthy lapse.
Per the Times, Epstein followed up their “intriguing” late-night with an enthusiastic email to friends and associates of his own.
“Bill’s great,” he crowed.
In March 2013, Mr. Gates also flew on Mr. Epstein’s Gulfstream plane. Per the Times, his spokesperson stated, and presumably expected people to believe, Gates (owner of his own $40 million jet), hadn’t been aware the plane was Mr. Epstein’s.
Amazingly, these revelations were the backdrop in the immediate wake of which the public was castigated for being a bunch of witch-hunting conspiracy theorists for their distrust of William Gates.
The Gates-Epstein connection goes down as far as one is willing to dig. For example, Boris Nikolic, prominent Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation science advisor seen posing with Gates and Epstein at the top of the Times’s 2019 article, was directly named executor in Epstein’s will.13 Melonie Walker, senior program officer at the Foundation, described by the Times as being in Gates’s “inner circle”, had a tight relationship with Epstein going as far back as 1992 (up to and including becoming particularly close to Prince Andrew14). She became Epstein’s science advisor in 1998, and remained close to him throughout her work with the Foundation15. Between these roles, Walker served as a “practitioner in the developing world” in China with the World Health Organization.16
More recent reporting by the Wall Street Journal revealed a single day in which Gates and Epstein as a pair met with Thomas Pritzker, Leon Black, Mortimer Zuckerman, and Kathryn Ruemmler in consecutive appointments. The nearly 7-hour marathon where the only constants were Epstein and Gates was hardly suggestive of a casual relationship.17
In addition to digging up an Evening Standard article indicative of Gates and Epstein’s relationship extending over a decade earlier than typically acknowledged18, journalist Whitney Webb documented an early bit of trivia involving the Maxwell family, relaying a scene from the year 2000. Originally reported in the Guardian19 , Isabel Maxwell (Ghislaine’s sister), had just secured a lifesaving investment in her struggling company from Gates’s Microsoft. The act already smacked of a favor, as the company had never turned a profit and was hemorrhaging millions in funds. Nonetheless, she joked about persuading Gates to make an additional, personal investment.20
In a faux southern belle accent, she purrs: 'He's got to spend $375m a year to keep his tax free status, why not allow me to help him.' She explodes with laughter.
Webb finds it “worth highlighting the odd way in which Isabel describes her dealings with Gates (“purring,” speaking in a fake Southern accent), describing her interactions with him in a way not found in any of her numerous other interviews on a wide variety of topics.” Perhaps most disturbingly, the most in-depth reporting suggests both Epstein and Gates as something more like middle managers in a larger network of intelligence and shadow interests than head honchos themselves.212223
Some of the media defensiveness of Gates may have been due to the fact that in the COVID era, setting the tone of coverage as to who would be lionized and who would be demonized, the pharmaceutical industry’s 2020 US TV ad budget increased to 4.58 billion dollars, accounting for a whopping 75 percent of the total TV ad spending in the United States.24
In terms of the global press apparatus, there was also the BBC-spearheaded Trusted News Initiative, a partnership of AP, AFP, BBC, CBC/Radio-Canada, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, Information Futures Lab, Google/YouTube, The Hindu, The Nation Media Group, Meta, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, Twitter, The Washington Post, Kompas – Indonesia, Dawn – Pakistan, Indian Express, NDTV – India, ABC – Australia, SBS – Australia, and NHK – Japan25 with a special focus on combatting “‘anti-vaccine’ disinformation” such as “widely shared memes which link falsehoods about vaccines to freedom and individual liberties.”26
Notably, the BBC alone received no less than 17 committed grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation27, including 20 million dollars in a single award28, a staggering amount for a lone newsroom. More broadly, a review of the Foundation’s database revealed Gates has dished out, at bare minimum, roughly a third of billion dollars on positive press coverage, and almost certainly substantially more, as the review was non-exhaustive.29
Thanks in part to all the glowing press, there is a general belief that Gates should be above criticism because he is “a kindly genius who made a lot of money from computers, and then decided to give it all away to eliminate malaria.”30
While this is indeed possible, there is an alternate theory.
For one thing, Gates only started giving to his foundation in earnest during the PR-low of his antitrust trial, donating over 20 billion dollars “during the 18 months between the start of the trial and the verdict” in what Microsoft called a “charm offensive.” He’d given less than 2% of that in the three years his foundation had existed prior, and in the years following, his giving declined precipitously.31
Moreover, as Forbes pointed out32, the Foundation has “provided Bill Gates with what might be called the biggest tax break in history,” although exact numbers are hard to come by. (Co-founder of progressive talk radio network Air America and IRS tax expert Sheldon Drobny derided the Foundation as a “shell game.”33)
The Trust accrues ample wealth from its slammed-as-hypocritical34 investments, and the Foundation is not beholden to any standard higher than Bill himself. The influence this grants him is unimaginable. Gates can, and has, used millions to get governments to spend billions and billions to get them to spend trillions. Long before calling shots on COVID, Gates single-handedly imposed the disaster of Common Core on the American education system with an investment of just over $200 million.35 The public’s bill on the program worked out to nearly a hundred billion dollars36, an expenditure which the Washington Post pointed out benefited Microsoft in particular.37 38
Moreover, the Foundation, amazingly, donates billions of dollars as tax-deductible “charitable” donations directly to preferred private companies, “including some of the largest businesses in the world, such as GlaxoSmithKline, Unilever, IBM, and NBC Universal Media.”39 That such gifts to industry are allowed to be classified as charity is nothing less than astounding.
It’s also been noted that Gates since Gates famously unveiled a plan with Warren Buffet in 2010 to give more than half of their wealth to charity, Mr. Gates’s fortune has more than doubled.40
Gates uses Michael Larson, the money manager of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's $41 billion endowment, as the manager of the vast majority of his personal wealth as well. As reported by the Wall Street Journal41, the immensely secretive Larson is called the “Gateskeeper,” making investments “cloaked in nondescript names to make it harder to trace the deals back to Mr. Gates.” The Journal also confirms the pair attend Allen & Co’s annual tight-lipped collusion club for billionaires42 in Sun Valley, Idaho together. (Bill’s previous money managers were felons43 whose convictions Gates was aware of, and yet remained in his employ until the connection started getting attention in the press.44)
While the culture of secrecy makes direct identification of alliances difficult, overt self-dealing has been shown within the Foundation itself, whose records are public. Confronted about giving massive grants to the very for-profit companies in which it invests, a Foundation spokesperson said it “tries to avoid this kind of financial conflict but that doing so is difficult because its investment and charitable arms are firewalled from one another to keep their activities strictly separate.”45
In other words, the spin is that the reason for the Foundation’s self-dealing activities is because the firewall is so good that no one can see past it. Except, apparently, for journalists with access to the internet.
The purported firewall is especially rich because it is essentially a repetition of the “Chinese Wall” lie Microsoft used in attempt to ward off antitrust litigation. In the memorandum opinion of the Justice Department after the antitrust trial, the DOJ stated, “Microsoft has stated to the Press over the years that there is a "Chinese Wall" between its operating systems and applications divisions. [In] Microsoft's submission to the Court, it maintains that there is no such separation and that one is not necessary.”46
Ultimately, the idea that Gates would not be capable of exploiting the overall, convoluted situation to his advantage is beyond the pale. The question is instead whether Gates is a good enough person not to.
While this cannot be answered definitively, the character references are unsettling. For example, Gates’s only notable medical experience before becoming “the world’s most powerful doctor"47 was when his lifelong partner Paul Allen came down with Hodgkins disease. Still undergoing radiation therapy, Allen overheard Gates and Steve Ballmer discussing how they could dilute Allen’s shares of the company down to virtually nothing by issuing themselves stock options. Allen burst in on them and shouted, ‘This is unbelievable!” As Allen relayed in his 2011 memoir, "I had helped start the company and was still an active member of management, though limited by my illness, and now my partner and my colleague were scheming to rip me off.”484950
Allen, who likely knew Gates better than anyone else, painted a very different picture of him than the media’s adoration of “Saint Bill”51. His message to the world as he rushed to finish his memoir before his eventual passing was that his experience with Gates was “like being in hell”.52
To those with consciences, it must have seemed that way. Beyond dropping examples of classic Microsoft villainy like stealing software from smaller companies (such as Micrografx and Go), Wallace & Erickson’s 1993 book “Hard Drive” treated readers to a glimpse of the company culture as well;
Gates said his products managers ought to wake up thinking about their main competitor. He even suggested they go so far as to get to know the names of their competitor’s children and birth dates.
"It is a competitive edge we try and hone," said Jeff Raikes, then manager of Microsoft’s word processing division… Raikes has a photo of WordPerfect’s executive vice president’s children on his desk.
One naturally wonders how a Microsoft manager’s focusing on his major competitor’s children was supposed to hone his “competitive edge”. Was it somehow supposed to help motivate him to drive their parent out of business?
Incidentally, Raikes would go on to succeed Patty Stonesifer in 2008 as the CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
While some appear to believe Gates’s heart really did grow three sizes during his infamous trial, many remain skeptical.
A number of people, for instance, find it irksome that Gates invested in BioNTech in September 201953 (occasionally noting the agreement’s well-placed pandemic clause54), proceeded to champion the company’s novel mRNA products with more zeal than virtually anyone else on the planet, sold in the third quarter of 2021, netting over a quarter of a billion dollars in profit (roughly 5x his investment), and immediately proceeded to denigrate the shots he had just stumped for, publicly lamenting that the vaccines didn’t block transmission, and that “we need a new way of doing vaccines.”55 (His suggestion has been nasal vaccines56, a product developed by Bharat Biotech57, an Indian company beholden to him58.)59
In fairness to Gates, while the selling and change of tune are suspicious, he’d been putting money into other eventual COVID behemoths for some time. Financial advisory website The Motley Fool affirms Gates had long held ownership in Pfizer, (which teamed up with BioNTech early in 2020). The Foundation first invested in the company in 2002, at the time for the purpose of "expand[ing] access to the pharmaceutical company's all-in-one injectable contraceptive.”60 Gates poured 20 million into Moderna several years before the advent of COVID6162, and was openly hawking the tech in Time Magazine in 2018, along with drug administering devices that could be placed underneath the skin.63
More broadly, many have lambasted Gates’s utter “dedication to monopoly medicine” even in cases of massive public funding, and torpedoing hopes to the contrary via e.g. the ACT-Accelerator at the WHO.64
In perhaps the most emblematic news segment of the entire COVID era, Sky News’s Sophy Ridge interviewed Gates, who started off stating that the vaccines were developed due to Act-A, a collaboration between the UK, France, Germany, and philanthropic organizations Gates helms personally, along with US R&D money. Given that this implied that they were funded largely by governments and organizations advertised as philanthropies, Ridge asked Gates the obvious question; “In terms of that, there’s been some speculation that the changing of intellectual property rules, and allowing these vaccines, as you say, the “recipe” for these vaccines, to be shared, would be helpful. Do you think that would be helpful?”
The rapidity with which Gates says “No” and the mirth in Ridge’s reaction are a simply not describable in text.65
The reason Gates scrambled to provide was that there weren’t any “magically safe" factories sitting idle with regulatory approval, so sharing IP would be unsafe. This was a blatant irrelevancy, as patents have never been conflated with the regulatory approval of factories, without which governments wouldn’t purchase the products. Moreover, AP had put out a piece explaining that there were a multitude of immaculate factories across the globe in unjustifiable disuse66, while the Guardian found several in Canada alone.67
In truth, Gates seemed concerned about vaccine injury only to the extent that the injured party might be the pharmaceutical companies, successfully lobbying for the pharmaceutical industry to be protected from liability, gutting the primary economic incentive for safety altogether.68
Gates was also at the forefront of digital health certificate advocacy69, a project for which his own Microsoft was leading the charge.7071 (Attempts were made to hide this advocacy72, but the internet has a tenacious tendency to remember.73)
Hopefully, those who distrust Gates really are just kooks, because not only is Gates the WHO’s largest private funder through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but if one also counts the Gates founded-and-controlled organization Gavi, he’s often the number one funder, period.74
If the distrustful are right, historians may one day opine that the big clunky computers of the 90s were mere Gateway drugs. After all, with “a regular phone call with the pharmaceutical CEOs”75 and unprecedented dominance over the WHO and affiliated organizations, Bill has moved up to become a kingpin of injectables.
Coupled with overt WHO initiatives to streamline digital health passes76, he may well find himself at the helm of full-circle integration.
Where is that Chinese Wall when you need it?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52833706
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/11/03/bill-gates-conspiracies-share-many-similarities-witch-hunts/8554819002/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-gates-conspiracies/crazy-and-evil-bill-gates-surprised-by-pandemic-conspiracies-idUSKBN29W0Q3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFZnuJC20S4
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/behind-the-gates/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates.html
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/09/glenn-dubin-epstein-questions
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/09/glenn-dubin-epstein-questions
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/bill-gates-praised-pedophile-jeffrey-epstein-kind-of-intriguing
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mind-of-bill-gates-revealed-on-netflix-11568107801
https://nypost.com/2019/12/18/jeffrey-epstein-wanted-to-marry-ex-girlfriends-teenage-daughter-who-called-him-uncle-jeff/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates.html
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/05/investigative-reports/the-cover-up-continues-the-truth-about-bill-gates-microsoft-and-jeffrey-epstein/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates.html
https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeffrey-epstein-calendar-bill-gates-leon-black-thomas-pritzker-62d7590
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/05/investigative-reports/the-cover-up-continues-the-truth-about-bill-gates-microsoft-and-jeffrey-epstein/
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/05/investigative-reports/the-cover-up-continues-the-truth-about-bill-gates-microsoft-and-jeffrey-epstein/
https://www.amazon.com/One-Nation-Under-Blackmail-Intelligence/dp/1634243013
https://www.amazon.com/One-Nation-Under-Blackmail-Intelligence/dp/1634243021
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epsteins-sick-story-played-out-for-years-in-plain-sight
https://www.statista.com/statistics/953104/pharma-industry-tv-ad-spend-us/#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20the%20pharmaceutical%20industry,of%20the%20total%20ad%20spend
https://www.bbc.co.uk/beyondfakenews/trusted-news-initiative/
https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2020/trusted-news-initiative-vaccine-disinformation
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants#committed_grants
http://web.archive.org/web/20200414143731/https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-awards-20-million-to-bbc-world-service-trust
https://thegrayzone.com/2021/11/21/bill-gates-million-media-outlets-global-agenda/
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2022/11/the-truth-about-bill-gates
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2017/08/13/the-biggest-and-best-tax-break-of-all-time/?sh=204a7d8b2b23#:~:text=Thus%2C%20the%20fact%20that%20capital,biggest%20tax%20break%20in%20history.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130912101039/http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0823-26.htm
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/12/gates-foundations-24-most-egregious-investments/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bill-gates-pulled-off-the-swift-common-core-revolution/2014/06/07/a830e32e-ec34-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/4/the-steep-cost-of-common-core/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/07/12/how-microsoft-will-make-money-from-common-core-despite-what-bill-gates-said/
Not to mention that youth familiarization strategies are as old as Joe Camel.
https://www.lung.org/research/sotc/by-the-numbers/10-bad-things-to-entice-kids
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-foundation-philanthropy/
https://www.newsweek.com/bloomberg-warren-buffett-bill-gates-rich-list-1479461
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkW6X3H-dT4
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-foundation-philanthropy/
https://www.justice.gov/atr/memorandum-opinion-us-v-microsoft-corp
https://www.politico.eu/article/bill-gates-who-most-powerful-doctor/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaDQaq_K8nA
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2003/sep/25/microsoft.society
https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-details/biontech-announces-new-collaboration-develop-hiv-and
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1776985/000119312519241112/d635330dex1037.htm
https://www.dossier.today/p/bill-gates-secured-hundreds-of-millions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=038__DssSv0&t=3258s
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-64421961
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/gates-foundation-to-fund-two-cos-for-vaccine-research/articleshow/7784192.cms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGctGh3vvJg
https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/09/24/4-coronavirus-vaccine-stocks-the-bill-melinda-gate/
https://time.com/5066163/bill-gates-thinks-these-6-innovations-could-change-the-world/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Ic4EN0io4
https://apnews.com/article/drug-companies-called-share-vaccine-info-22d92afbc3ea9ed519be007f8887bcf6#:~:text=Across%20Africa%20and%20Southeast%20Asia,claimed%20over%202.5%20million%20lives.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/24/covid-vaccines-patents-pharmaceutical-companies-secrecy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKg40HX6oUo&t=731s
https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/fksnbf/im_bill_gates_cochair_of_the_bill_melinda_gates/
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/digital-transformation/how-microsoft-other-tech-companies-are-assisting-the-vaccine-passport-rollout.html
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/16/tech/coronavirus-vaccine-records-microsoft-salesforce/index.html
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/yes-bill-gates-said-that/
https://rumble.com/v3dyrk4-gates-digital-immunity-proof.html
https://open.who.int/2022-23/contributors/contributor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Ic4EN0io4
https://www.who.int/news/item/05-06-2023-the-european-commission-and-who-launch-landmark-digital-health-initiative-to-strengthen-global-health-security