By Paul Homewood
WITH an estimated fortune of $128.9billion, Bill Gates is the fourth richest man in the world, after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault and Elon Musk, according to Forbes.
He’s stepped back from the day-to-day running of Microsoft, the company he founded in 1975, and focuses on his so-called philanthropy through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (GF), and is best known for his worldwide vaccination and anti-malaria programmes.
Less widely known is that he has spent hundreds of millions bankrolling news outlets, in the process turning the GF into one of journalism’s main gatekeepers. According to Tim Schwab of Columbia Journalism Review, by last June more than $250million had gone to news operations including the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, the Guardian, the Financial Times, Univision, Medium, the Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; and…
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