As you likely have seen or heard, Bill Gates is retiring to spend full-time working with the Gates Foundation, his charity. In addition, Warren Buffett has now committed the bulk of his 44 billion dollar fortune to the Gates Foundation. The condition? The Gates Foundation must spend a billion dollars additional each year. Just the research alone for that is a daunting task. Over the past several weeks, some have expressed questions over whether the new conglomeration of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett will take away from innovation in philanthrophy. What a crock.
Obviously, not everything the Gates Foundation does is the best thing, yet, they are doing much good with the wealth that they are investing. Will they influence the philanthropic community with their projects? Of course. But I doubt that innovation will be lost.
The real (and harder) question is: what does this all say to you and me? Will it cause us to re-evaluate our own giving? Will is cause us to invest more of our time to charitable causes? What are we doing with the percentage of our wealth that goes to charity and community development? (Yes, we do have substantial wealth, last year this blogsite showed how each of us compare with the rest of the world. See: http://reactservices.blogspot.com/2005/09/are-you-rich.html)
When the world's richest man says he's going to retire from his business and work for his charity, something inside me says, "COOOL!! Even if we have no ability to do that, we can do more. And far from reducing innovation, it seems to me that the Gates Foundation could spur us all on to greater good.
It's done that for the people of Microsoft, by the way. Not counting those who have left the company (like notable billionaire, Paul Allen), Microsoft employees have donated nearly $250 million to charity over the past 20 years. Now, that's innovation!
