Bill Gates Leaves Corporate Job to Work Full Time for Nonprofit
What Mr. Gates' decision means for charities—and we discover why you can't find the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Form 990 from Guidestar.
In leaving the corporation for a charity gig, Bill Gates is consciously following the model of Andrew Carnegie, in three respects:
- the commitment to philanthropy is total (not a part-time job),
- the goal is to give away an unprecedented fortune while still alive, with
- a strong focus on a single issue (Carnegie: libraries, Gates: neglected diseases).
Mr. Gates' choice of medicine might also have an important side effect of offering a better perspective on the relationship between charities and technology. Technology itself has little impact in most of the world where basic infrastructure is lacking. The most effective use of technology is in its application in the developed world to find treatments and cures, not in giving technology toys to kids in developing countries.
And of course, it shows once again that charitable impact flows from large scale organizations. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (EIN 91-1663695) had assets of $28.8 billion at the end of 2004. From its founding in 1999, it has lept to the top of US foundations, another demonstration that successful charities are often born that way.
So, why isn't the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation Form 990 available on Guidestar? It turns out that it is available on the foundation's financial reports web page. But hold on to your bandwidth, the complete PDF file is 98Mb. The file has been broken down into four slightly more manageable chunks. Even at that , the listing of investment holdings is 81Mb.
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