Bill Gates
By: Nasar Karim
Tags: Bill Gates, Philanthropy

Superhero Billionaire

Photo by Mohammad Rezaie on Unsplash

I love Bill Gates. He’s just incredible.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first; the things that everyone already knows about the man. He founded a gargantuan software company that no competitor could challenge for decades. He made billions of dollars in his twenties. He’s appeared on the cover of loads of magazines. Blablabla. But founding Microsoft and becoming the richest man on earth is not what makes me admire him so much. Bill Gates is awesome because of the person he was before all of ‘that’ happened and the person he is now.

The world is a crazy place at the moment. Protesters love to shout anti-Bill Gates slogans. “No to Bill Gates!”, “No to lockdown!”, “No to vaccines!”. They seem so stupid; becoming one of their targets is almost a confirmation of one’s virtue. Some things are worth protesting about, but so many of these angry shouters just seem to want to be angry shouters. Maybe they’ll start protesting about oxygen soon because some conspiracy theorist will ‘reveal’ that the elites want us to breathe oxygen!

Bill Gates is a genius. He finds solutions to problems that no one else can solve. In high school, he took a maths test and his score was the highest in the whole state, across all age groups. That brought the young Mr Gates considerable attention. He was enlisted to sort out a ridiculously complex timetabling problem by older ‘genius students’. The older guys eventually ‘fired’ him despite Bill warning them that the problem might be too difficult for them to handle alone. They pushed him out anyway, then realised they were way out of their depth and had to ask the younger student to come back. Bill agreed, but only on the condition that he would run the show and call the shots. Behind the big smile and the big glasses is an individual with big brains and big balls to match. Bill never took any crap, but that’s because he was aware of his superior abilities. Brains and courage. How can anybody not admire that?

Bill Gates built the best software company in the world on the basis of him being one of the best coders in the world. His brainpower, his ability to solve problems, his work ethic and his drive made him the richest man alive. He was not just another slick capitalist looking to make as much money as possible. I think that makes him much cooler than most of the other super-rich. He got to the top on his smarts. Bill Gates is so cool, he makes me want to be nerdier.

Bill never stops learning, even though he’s probably already smarter than all of us. According to one of his colleagues at The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, when Bill meets experts in any field, he usually knows more about their specialist subject than they do. How does he do it? He reads. Lots. The man’s ability to process and retain information on any subject is astonishing. He averages around 150 pages an hour, and he retains the vast majority of what he takes in. Bill always has a bag containing books, usually more than ten, which he takes with him wherever he goes. He even employs somebody to replenish his reading bag. What is he reading about? Everything he can find that relates to whatever problem he is looking at solving next. Bill absorbs and processes gargantuan amounts of information, then combines it all in novel ways to come up with some deeply impacting ideas.

Bill is a superhero. You can’t be a superhero unless you are virtuous. If simply amassing an enormous fortune is a superpower, there are plenty of rich arseholes who demonstrate that an insane amount of money is not enough to make you a superhero. These other guys are more like supervillains. Who can recall the billionaires (including Britain’s richest family), who grabbed government bailouts to pay their staff as soon as COVID 19 put the world into lockdown? Nice move guys. And when was the last time Jeff Bezos demonstrated remarkable virtue?

Bill Gates is virtuous. He uses his brains and his money to change the world. He’s so good at doing it, that one of the other richest men in the world, Warren Buffet, gave his friend Bill most of his own fortune to put towards his philanthropic projects. Few of us need reminding that Warren Buffet made his billions through investing in companies and their stocks. He is the epitome of a man who uses his money carefully and wisely. So giving it away to Mr Gates says a lot about his faith in the man.

When I say Bills’ ideas are deeply impacting, I mean it. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has positively impacted millions of lives. It’s easy enough to say we would all do good if we had practically unlimited resources, but it’s not very believable.

Bill picks his battles carefully and then he makes moves that most other people wouldn’t have thought of. The Netflix documentary series ‘Inside Bill’s Brain’ details three of The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s projects; sanitation, elimination of polio and clean energy.

When Bill found out that diarrhoea kills three million children a year he was determined to do something about it. There are a lot of charities providing clean drinking water and people are still dying of diarrhoea, so you can bet Bill Gates didn’t go down that route. He’s too smart for that. Dumping human waste into the same bodies of water that people use to bathe in is a major cause of diarrhoea (and other diseases). Building the infrastructure to provide traditional sanitation in third world countries was not going to work. Instead, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded groups of scientists to design and build toilets that could handle human waste without the use of power generators and complex systems of pipes. Not only do the Bill Gates-funded toilets do that, but they also take a shit and turn it into fuel and clean drinking water. That’s genius.

Bill spent hundreds of millions trying to eradicate polio. Polio cases are still rising, but that doesn’t make his efforts any less admirable. All of the people who received vaccinations via the Bill and Gates Foundation are protected from the disease.

Next, Bill decided to look at producing clean energy for the world. We all know that public opinion is immune to the benefits of scientific research and data. Outcomes are decided on popularity. But Bill Gates goes by data. So he picked the most efficient method man has ever discovered to produced power, nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is unpopular and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster made it even more so. But Bill was not deterred. His team looked at all the flaws in existing nuclear power station designs (which are decades old) and found ways to fix them. Bill’s team designed a nuclear power station that was completely safe and found a Chinese team who would be able to manufacture the components. Then-President Trump made it illegal for Bill Gates to continue working with the Chinese, depriving the world of a fantastic way to safely and cheaply generate enormous amounts of clean energy. Nice move Trump.

Besides being amazingly smart and amazingly successful, Bill Gates is also just a nice down to earth guy. Unlike a lot of rich people, he does not parade his wealth with watches that cost more than most peoples houses, private islands, or fleets of expensive cars. Bill wears a $60 Casio and has been spotted in a Mercedes and a Porsche. He’s too cool for bling.

Bill has always been married to the same woman, Melinda Gates. He’s not one of these guys who ditches his wife for a younger model as soon as he gets rich and famous. He doesn't need trophies to massage his ego or show the world how important he is.

Bill Gates is a self-validating entity. He doesn’t need approval. He doesn’t need to show off. He gets his kicks by changing the world.