Billionaires aren't going to save the planet: Bill Gates and Rutger Bregman
Featuring a defence of Arthur Dent.
The Dutch author Rutger Bregman became famous after he went to the World Economic Forum in 2019 and talked about the rich and tax avoidance. “We can talk for a very long time about all these stupid philanthropy schemes, we can invite Bono once more,” he said,” but come on, we’ve got to be talking about taxes. That’s it, taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit in my opinion.”
Oddly enough just a few days after his appearance in Davos, in an interview with WBUR, Bregman gave an example of “really, really genuine” philanthropy. Bill Gates is “doing great work,” he said, but didn’t go into any detail.
Fredrik Gertten’s documentary film “Breaking Social” recently toured in the UK. The film, which came out in 2023, features Bregman throughout.
At one point in the film, Bregman talks about philanthropy and taxes:
You have these billionaires who say no, no, no, I don’t want to pay too much in taxes, because I actually know what we need to do with this money. So I’m going to give it to my own foundation, where I’m in control.
Well I think that things like health care for everyone, high quality education, these are rights. These are not favours. So those need to be financed by taxes, and then these taxes need to be spent by government, and a government that is accountable to all of us, you know, in a democracy.
The next person to speak in the film is Sarah Chayes, an author of two books on corruption and kleptocracy. She says,
I heard this incredible story. I was asking about corruption, about the social significance of money. He said people with a lot of money intimidate you. I said, really, how do they do that? He said by giving money to you. I said what do you mean? I was imagining, you know, sending thugs to beat you up in the street. He said by giving you money.
I said explain. He said when they give you money you can’t criticise them. They turn you into liars.
Gates and the School for Moral Ambition
In February 2025, Bregman’s new venture, the School for Moral Ambition received a donation of US$75,000 from the Gates Foundation.
In March 2025, Bregman went on the Trevor Noah Podcast. “I’m actually going to say something nice about billionaires,” Bregman said. He talked about the Gates Foundation’s work on a vaccine for malaria. “I think someone like Bill Gates deserves an enormous amount of credit for it.”
Bregman did not mention that his School for Moral Ambition had received funding from the Gates Foundation.
Even worse, the Gates Foundation’s role in developing a malaria vaccine was nothing like as laudable as Bregman says it is.
In July 2024, Stephanie Nolen, a global health reporter at the New York Times, wrote an article that details the Gates Foundations role in the development of the malaria vaccine. In the late 1990s, the Gates Foundation provided US$200 million to test a malaria vaccine. The test results showed that the vaccine cut severe malaria cases by about one-third. But the Gates Foundation stopped its support, saying that the vaccine didn’t work well enough to justify millions more in funding. Instead, the Gates Foundation suggested working on a better vaccine and other strategies such as genetically modified mosquitoes.
By pulling out at that stage, the Gates Foundation actually delayed the malaria vaccine.
Journalist Tim Schwab, author of the excellent book, “The Bill Gates Problem,” sent a link to Nolen’s article to Bregman. He did not respond.
Schwab has written a series of extremely critical articles about Bregman and his School for Moral Ambition.
In an article for Counterpunch, Anita Naidu argues that with the School for Moral Ambition, “Bregman has given elites a playbook for the next chapter of power laundering.”
Bregman’s School targets Ivy League graduates, McKinsey consultants, social entrepreneurs. This is the opposite of grassroots organising. The School for Moral Ambition’s three “cause areas” are food transition (less animal protein, more alternative proteins, and more plants); abolishing the tobacco industry; and tax fairness.
These are all fine, I suppose. But this is a long way from a critique of capitalism, neoliberalsim, colonialism, extractivism, overconsumption, or any of the other forces that are driving the destruction of the planet.
As Naidu points out,
SMA doesn’t disrupt systems of injustice. It rebrands them. It hands the professional class a mirror — not to reflect, but to admire themselves as they uphold the very hierarchies they claim to challenge. It steals the language of movements it has never been part of, draping elite ambition in the borrowed rhetoric of struggle and liberation.
Naidu concludes that “This is not a school for justice. It’s a workshop in elite deodorization.”
Arthur Dent
There are several other critiques of Bregman all of which are well worth a read.
Bregman’s response to the criticism is here.
Samantha Suppiah’s critique is devastating. “But like, we cannot take seriously,” she writes, “when Western media celebrates a white man within the global 1% who talks at Davos about taxing the rich.”
But I have to take exception to Suppiah’s comparison of Bregman with Arthur Dent from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Apart from the fact that Douglas Adam’s trilogy in four parts is superb, I once spent a morning sitting in the mud, chained to a bulldozer next to a man in an Arthur Dent dressing gown. I wasn’t part of the film crew for Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this was one of the protests to stop the destruction of Twyford Down.
If you look very closely, you might just see me in this photo of one of the Twyford Down protests — unfortunately this time without the Arthur Dent lookalike:
