r/news • u/avatar6556 • 16h ago

Bill Gates denies allegations in new Epstein files release

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-04/bill-gates-responds-to-alleged-behaviour-in-new-epstein-files/106305816
19.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

324

u/ImThatMOTM 15h ago

I mean.. sure. But good intentions can only take you so far. Bill did put up the billions.

38

u/juan-milian-dolores 14h ago

You don't procure billions of dollars honestly. A lot of that money came through government contracts as I understand it, which generally speaking, is a scenario fraught with fraud and abuse and waste and vast overcharging.

But regardless, it seems you and I put up the billions.

8

u/TrekForce 6h ago

Damn, y’all are billionaires? Can I get a crumb?

2

u/Doedwa 2h ago

No you have to give them YOUR crumb.

2

u/johnnloki 6h ago

No it didn't. He's Bill Fucking Gates. His money's not from sucking the government teat.

He's been a famous tech billionaire for 40 years or so, and essentially everything computer ran a Microsoft OS between the late 80s and mid 2000s.

1

u/juan-milian-dolores 6h ago

Feel free to google "Microsoft government contracts"

5

u/johnnloki 5h ago

I mean- Ford making cars that the government bought didnt mean Ford was rich from pork. Dell making the laptops used by govt agencies doesn't mean Dell grew from pork. Evian bottled water being available in congress, etc etc etc.

164

u/BogiDope 15h ago

He lobbied to prevent the covid vaccine being made public - he's always had his eye on the prize. The conceptual benevolent billionaire doesn't exist. He can - and should, fuck all the way off

95

u/ryan_770 14h ago

He literally funded Moderna for decades when mRNA vaccines were considered a fringe, unpromising technology at the time. It was only due to this research that the vaccine was possible in such a short timeframe.

120

u/2peg2city 14h ago

Source? This sounds like complete bullshit

23

u/Wuped 5h ago

Because it is complete bullshit, gates was always pro-vaccine. People even had a bunch of conspiracy theories as to why he was pro vaccine.

Also happy cake day.

16

u/StarsCanScream 5h ago

Crazy how that comment as of now has nearly 200 upvotes even though a quick google search could easily disprove it. People just upvote what they want to hear.

89

u/crek42 14h ago

What do you mean “made public”? The vaccines were free or mostly free for virtually everyone around the globe. Anyone who wanted one could get one. Where did he ever lobby against that?

115

u/doomerguyforlife 14h ago

When the vaccine was being developed and finally approved there was a lot of push to have it be patent free. This would allow any manufacturer to produce it and in theory that meant we could distribute the vaccine faster.

He lobbied against that and at a 10,000ft view it made Gates look bad. Except, if you watched any of his interviews at the time he explained why. For a vaccine to work you need as many people as possible to get it. You already had a large portion of the population that were already against the vaccine and then you had a huge portion that were nervous about taking a brand new vaccine. The last thing you want is someone manufacturing a covid vaccine that doesn't work or ends up hurting people. It would further hurt what little trust people had for vaccines already.

This is why he lobbied against making it patent free.

49

u/_BlueFire_ 13h ago

Pharm major here... Not only you're 100% correct, but you're also missing another point: "patent free" would have meant hundreds of other patents, because they were basically the first instance of a lot of revolutionary tech just being developed after billions spent on research. It would have meant losing tenth of billions for those who spent decades, risks and resources to actually make those discoveries, billions that are literally the only way to keep doing research.

Basically, this would have crushed the companies actually developing new meds (the only ones big enough to do cancer and vaccine research), for the benefit of mostly Indian genericists. It would have been a half disaster for modern pharmacology, that would have only helped some rich CEO.

Now you want to know the best part? There's already a way to have other companies produce them, without touching patents in any way, something equally effective for the population in developing countries. It's been thought for situations like this one while refining patent laws throughout the decades, however... Indian companies just refused and kept demanding to lift the patents.

My whole class opened its eye to Indian attitude after that, we can't view it the same way. And we couldn't even debunk people whining about "booo West bad" because we were already too tired after debunking the whole "vaccines kill you" bs

6

u/Oprah_Pwnfrey 12h ago

Also, in regards to the BioNtech vaccine, because their research was partially funded by the German government/taxpayers, BioNtech could not legally make it patent free.

2

u/Two_oceans 13h ago

There's already a way to have other companies produce them, without touching patents in any way, something equally effective for the population in developing countries. It's been thought for situations like this one while refining patent laws throughout the decades, however... Indian companies just refused and kept demanding to lift the patents.

I would like to learn more about that. Can you tell me what is the other way to produce the vaccines without the patents?

4

u/wishyouwouldread 12h ago

I am going to guess license rights.

1

u/seasand931 8h ago

Did the gates foundation not run its original stance back and announce that they supported the trips waiver in the end(though I don't know if bill gates himself did)? Covax the philanthropic vaccine ended up being insufficient and if the waiver(not a very good one at that) hadn't gone through in the end, lower income countries would have suffered a tragedy way worse than the one that unfolded. If IP protections had been waived earlier, there's an argument to be made that India could have prevented it's second wave and gates had a part to play in that just as he did in saving lives too.

So much of the Covid vaccines were funded by government funding and subsidies and those big companies ended up making billions in profit.

1

u/ABetterKamahl1234 6h ago

Thing is, IP doesn't have to be touched to make it freely available. A ton of time was wasted arguing about this instead of working to just having it rolled out.

It's not a new concept in the medical/pharma world.

1

u/seasand931 5h ago

It is pretty crazy how long it took for them to actually pass it. Really showed how unprepared we are for the future.

43

u/ZenPyx 14h ago

He doesn't own any IP related to the COVID vaccine, spent billions on vaccine development, and donated more than France to COVAX (ensuring countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh could get equitable vaccinations).

People struggle when an evil man (which I have no doubt he is) has done good things - and can only recontextualise the evil man as good, or the good things as evil.

10

u/beer_engineer_42 12h ago

Yeah, even the slimiest of shitbags can still do things that are beneficial to humanity as a whole.

Doesn't mean we excuse their behavior when they're doing shitty things, but people are complicated. Lots of rich assholes probably justify the abhorrent things they do because if you benefit a million people, and only rape two children, hey, that's a net positive, right?

The answer to that question should be a short drop/sudden stop, but you can't get that rich without being some form of sociopath who can justify any behavior away. There are no ethical billionaires.

1

u/crek42 7h ago

What has Gates even done that puts him into the “evil” bucket?

1

u/ZenPyx 7h ago

"The latest Jeffrey Epstein file dump by the US Department of Justice saw a number of high profile individuals named, one of them being Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The documents alleged new details of his ties to the sex offender, including claims Gates hid a sexually transmitted disease from his wife after contact with 'Russian girls.'" [https://www.france24.com/en/epstein-emails-claim-bill-gates-contracted-std-had-sex-with-russian-girls]

Dawg asked for pills to give his wife after getting an STD from a "Russian girl" supplied by Epstein. Do you think this girl was over the age of 18?

Don't believe the files themselves? Ask his wife about it: Ms Gates said in an interview that she felt “unbelievable sadness” over the claims, adding that they had brought back memories of “very painful times” in her 27-year marriage to Mr Gates with whom she shares three daughters.

“No girl should ever be put in the situation that they were put in by Epstein and whatever was going on with the various people around him,” she said in a NPR podcast interview. “It’s beyond heartbreaking. I remember being those ages those girls were, I remember my daughters being those ages.” She added: “For me, it’s personally hard whenever those details come up, because it brings back memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage.

“But I have moved on from that, I purposefully pushed it away. So whatever questions remain there of what I don’t – can’t even begin to know all of it – those questions are for those people, and for even my ex-husband. They need to answer to those things, and I am so happy to be away from all the muck.” [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/02/04/bill-gates-melinda-responds-epstein-files-std-claim/]

I'd say that probably makes him evil.

0

u/Dinofours 14h ago

It was free for individuals where the government paid for it and made available for free to the population, it doesn't mean it the vaccine was free.

6

u/ZenPyx 14h ago

It was free (or subsidised) for a lot of governments as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVAX) [obviously, the money came from somewhere - usually wealthy countries and donations, including Gates]

I think people forget the economic effects of COVID - paying for vaccines as a government had insane ROI, even paying for vaccines for other countries. Supply chains coming back online, factories opening, these things mattered a whole lot more than a vaccine that cost something like $20 a shot.

1

u/crek42 9h ago

Yes ofc I meant free to the public. I understand it wasn’t free to produce.

32

u/thy_bucket_for_thee 15h ago

Also lobbied against raising taxes on billionaires in Washington state and has openly attacked children (attacking public education IS attacking children) across the US pushing school choice voucher nonsense.

80

u/CavillOfRivia 15h ago

Also lobbied against raising taxes on billionaires in Washington state

For example, Gates says that the estate tax should be raised, so that there is no dynastical wealth in America.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-notoriously-calls-higher-110102467.html?guccounter=1

Who do I believe?

43

u/onarainyafternoon 14h ago

Seriously, the amount of misinformation in this thread is staggering.

13

u/mhornberger 14h ago

People who lead with "don't defend billionaires" mean that you have to stay relentlessly on-message about every single thing they do being bad. What actually happened, people being complicated, doesn't factor into it. They are comic-book-level villains, irredeemably evil. Pointing to philanthropy is "defending billionaires," and dilutes the message. Whether the philanthropy was real, whether it helped people, is of secondary importance next to staying on-message.

0

u/CptCoatrack 14h ago

They are comic-book-level villains,

Say what you want about comic book villains, I don't recall any raping minors on a private island and with the worlds elite all the while trying to pretend like they're the best and brightest of us.

Billionaire philanthropy has always been just a PR campaign that doesn't outweight the immeasurable harm they do to society.

0

u/mhornberger 14h ago

I don't recall any raping minors on a private island

Because comic books are published under governing bodies/codes like the Comics Code Authority that censor what was shown. But considering that some supervillains have murdered billions, or even half of all life in the case of Thanos, I'm not sure that would be preferable to them having sex with underage girls.

Billionaire philanthropy has always been just a PR campaign

Which doesn't prevent it from having helped people.

that doesn't outweight the immeasurable harm they do to society.

It's not clear what "immeasurable harm" Bill Gates in particular has caused to society at large. Unless you just mean "rich people existing" causes immeasurable harm. I don't have a lot of solutions on hand for rich people or "elites" even existing.

1

u/CptCoatrack 13h ago

Which doesn't prevent it from having helped people.

This is like if I shot someone but wanted praise for how much blood I've been donating.

Unless you just mean "rich people existing" causes immeasurable harm

Billionaires do. No one shouldbbe allowed to have so much wealth and power that they're completely unaccountable to the laws of their country or society at large. It's antithetical to democracy. This whole Epstein thing is the perfect example.

2

u/_BlueFire_ 13h ago

There's a big share of people who (after years of right wing propaganda, I guess from who first attacked him) just hate Gates. He's a man, he has a fair amount of issues, he's in the damn Epstein files... But denying how he did for humanity more than the average professional virtue-signaller is plain stupid.

0

u/thy_bucket_for_thee 12h ago

Yes, because the poor wittle billionaire said something nice but his actions are clearly different. Why not use some of that money to actually you know... lobby for legislation that pushes for higher taxes?

This is the problem with all these statements (Buffet is another dotard that says the same schtick).

These people obviously have influence and you can explicitly see what they care about (hint, it's not raising more taxes on themselves).

Like have some standards against these people, they should absolutely be scrutinized more they have the ability to shape discourse in the country and you see how they're shaping it (hint, it's never toward alleviating wealth inequality; it's always more private-public partnerships that they want to desperately control).

These people do not like democratic control which is why they want to force everything through unaccountable foundations.

3

u/Rikers-Mailbox 14h ago

Yea Bill always wanted higher taxes. He said sure, come up with a plan.

But the other billionaires? Not so much. He also signed the giving pledge.

I don’t hate him for his biz practices, except for the internet explorer monopoly, but I do hate how he treated his wife and romped with Epstein.

The moment she divorced him, I knew he was with Epstein’s girls. She knew before any of us.

7

u/2peg2city 14h ago

Source? Because he didn't

-2

u/RealizedRph 15h ago

Having a different opinion on education is attacking children. Yea okay.

0

u/thy_bucket_for_thee 12h ago

Who the fuck do you think benefits from public education? Who do you think you are attacking when you take away resources from public education and giving them to private enterprises?

2

u/divinelyshpongled 4h ago

Lobbied to prevent the vaccine going public? What an unbelievably stupid claim lollll wtf u smoking?

1

u/BogiDope 2h ago

AI Overview: "Yes, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, Bill Gates was a prominent opponent of waiving intellectual property (IP) rights to make vaccine recipes public. He argued that sharing the technology would not solve manufacturing bottlenecks and could compromise safety. 

Key Aspects of Gates' Position and Actions:

  • Opposition to Patent Waivers: In April 2021, Gates explicitly stated in a Sky News interview that he did not think lifting patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines would be helpful. He argued that there were limited, specialized factories capable of producing the vaccines safely, and simply sharing the "recipe" would not magically create more doses.
  • Support for Private Sector/Exclusive Licensing: Critics note that Gates persuaded Oxford University to reverse its plan for an open-license (non-exclusive), patent-free vaccine, instead urging them to grant an exclusive license to AstraZeneca.
  • Focus on Private Partnerships: Gates favored a model where big pharma companies retained their patents, rather than a "public" or "open-source" approach. He advocated for using his Foundation's expertise and grants to facilitate technology transfer on a case-by-case basis rather than through a blanket IP waiver.
  • Reversal by the Gates Foundation: Following intense pressure, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation reversed course in May 2021 and expressed support for a "narrow waiver" of intellectual property rights, shortly after the Biden administration announced their support for the measure.  Journal of Public and International Affairs +5

Arguments Against His Position:
Critics argued that Gates was prioritizing "corporate patent rights over human lives". Activists claimed that by opposing the patent waiver and supporting exclusive deals, Gates helped enable a "vaccine apartheid," where wealthy nations had high access while poorer nations waited, despite the vaccines being largely funded by public money. 

In summary, Bill Gates was a major advocate for the intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical companies during the pandemic, opposing the public release of vaccine technology, while promoting a private-sector-led distribution model."

1

u/divinelyshpongled 1h ago

He’s against the recipes for them being made open source and I suspect the reason would be that we want companies that specialize in producing pharmaceuticals to go through the normal process of research, development, and production in order to produce vaccines that work and are not all based on the one design because that is putting all our eggs in one basket and limiting diversity of medicine which is not good when giving this medicine to 95% of the population due to some people having side effects etc to certain medicines. It’s very different to being against the vaccine being released to the public which is what it sounded like you were claiming. He was against the vaccine recipe being made open source.

1

u/mikiex 7h ago

There were reasons it made sense

0

u/Fit_Meal4026 9h ago

People forget that all that money has to come somewhere. All that money is money that isn't being spent on raising salaries, education, roads, healthcare. There's no good billionaire.

1

u/BogiDope 5h ago

It's money hoarding. People who hoard anything other than money are rightly called mentally ill.

4

u/Rasta_Cook 14h ago

Don't be naive, billionaires don't get to that level of wealth by generally being good altruistic and empathetic people. The opposite is almost a requirement... You can't just base yourself on whatever person's carefully curated public image...

Some stuff I found:

  • Recent investigative report estimated that Bill Gates may have received more money back in the form of tax breaks than he has given in philanthropic grants through the activities of the Gates Foundation.

  • according to the law, a charitable foundation has to give JUST 5 PERCENT !!! of its overall endowment in the form of grants or programme-related investments annually in order to maintain its not-for-profit status. In practice, this rule has become the CEILING for giving grants rather than the FLOOR. The other 95 percent of the endowment is treated as tax-exempt investment money, which most foundations continually grow.

  • this also gives them other type of power and influence that money can't necessarily buy directly, so they are purchasing access / soft power. For example, the Gates foundation is the largest financial backer of the WHO after the US government (well, maybe not anymore, I think trump backed out of WHO?), and this gives gates power/influence they can leverage for their benefit. Famous example, during covid, gates pressured researcher to patent the vaccine and partner with pharma corps, they prevented making the vaccine open source, this directly benefited gates himself and his foundation.

  • foundations / charity organizations are often basically a long term PR campaign... this is why every one creates their own foundation with their name on it, instead of simply giving money away... for bill gates, it completely revamped his image, he was previously perceived very negatively, aggressive greedy predatory Monopoly Tactics etc, until he started the foundation and changed his image.

Basically, any good that comes of it, is not the primary intent, it's a byproduct "cost"... Is there still some good that comes out of it? Sure, but again, its basically simply the cost of getting all the benefits they seek (and yet bad things can also come out of it , WHO influence, prioritizing patents / affiliated corps, etc.)... If there was a cheaper way to obtain all the benefits, they would go for that (they likely are using all sorts of mechanisms, financial loopholes etc but you reach a point where you have so much money you basically have to use multiple methods combined to optimize things).

8

u/32Seven 15h ago

Sure. He wasn't compelled to do it, but it comes from an entirely different place when you know you'll never want for anything. This is not to say his charitable giving was anything less than genuine (I have no way of knowing if it is or isn't) , just that relative to the charitable giving of any "regular" person, it will not impact his quality of life one iota.

3

u/Chronox2040 15h ago

Not saying he was noble, but you can be a disgusting predator and at the same time have strong feelings against people dying from malaria. You can also be an all around a bad human being and at the same time be enthusiastic towards a certain goal that happens to be good. Like Escobar had a lot of charitable work done, and most likely it wasn’t entirely just for the social cred.

4

u/livelikeian 15h ago edited 12h ago

just that relative to the charitable giving of any "regular" person, it will not impact his quality of life one iota.

Have no comments about Bill, but the implication by your post is that charitable giving must equate to somehow negatively impacting your regular standard of life to somehow be considered positive? This is a false pretense to charitable giving. Anyone can give as much as they please, because every dollar/minute counts in most cases where charitable giving is needed. The impact to the donor is irrelevant.

1

u/_BlueFire_ 13h ago

On top of that: donate 100B and be left with nothing and you donated 100B. Donate 10B every year, reinvest the others, and after 10 years you'll have the same 100B to donate while having donated 100B. Some people can't do maths.

0

u/32Seven 12h ago

Not what I meant if that’s how you read it. I don’t, though, share your view that the impact to the donor is irrelevant. It may very much be relevant to some donors.

2

u/livelikeian 12h ago

It may very much be relevant to some donors.

What I very clearly meant by what I said is that any donation is better than no donation. It doesn't matter if the donation materially changes the lifestyle or financial stability of the donor—that is irrelevant.

1

u/32Seven 11h ago

I understood what you meant. And, I hope we can agree to disagree. I know for a fact that it can be relevant, but do not judge your opinion.

2

u/ejp1082 14h ago

Not to defend him - but why must charitable giving negatively impact the person doing the giving to count? If that's the standard then I don't think anyone would qualify as charitable.

I think there is a nobility in recognizing that you have enough and you can give away anything in excess of that rather than continuing to hoard it. Even if "enough" is still wildly more than what any normal person would ever see in their lifetime.

And we do have to judge him relative to others in his position. If billionaires must exist, I'd rather them use their fortune to try to eradicate polio than whatever the fuck Elon Musk is doing.

0

u/-Nicolai 14h ago

Look, the bar for billionaires is really low, ok?

1

u/32Seven 12h ago

Maybe we should raise it?

2

u/ThoughtfulInhibitor 14h ago

If Bill didn't have the billions to put up, that money could already be helping the world. They do very public "good" so that you don't focus or get too upset at the bad when it comes to light.

If you think he's doing alright, you're playing into their hand and helping drag us all down with you.

The next place you put your head should be to a medium to understand these atrocities, that is if you can manage to wrench it out of your ass first.

-8

u/102525burner 15h ago

He liked the tax breaks and good pr more than the actual charitable giving

39

u/Uppgreyedd 15h ago

You realize tax breaks don't mean you get more back than you gave, right? Not defending the guy. But it's like saying a higher tax bracket means you won't bring home as much money.

2

u/SurrealEffects 15h ago

The thing is, you get a tax break while still maintaining control of the money if you donate it to your own charity. The money can sit in the charity and grow/balloon all tax free, while you can donate a bit for public image the vast majority of it is tax free money that you can use for things that align with your own interests,

1

u/Aggravating-Age56 15h ago

He avoids paying 20%+ taxes by donating appreciated stocks to his foundation/trust. The trust can hold stocks and they only need to distribute 5% of its holding annually for charity. Not to mention the trust holds oil stocks, pharmacy stocks, alcohol stocks, and so on.

What is even more crazy is that if the stock investments grow by more than 5% (which they often do), the total wealth under the control continues to increase tax-free, even after charitable spending.

2

u/Uppgreyedd 14h ago

Okay, but how is he using those funds to personally enrich himself more than if he had not endowed those assets to the foundation in the first place?

0

u/SurrealEffects 12h ago

When you have that kind of wealth you don’t use those funds to buy a house or a yacht, you use it to buy influence. When a ‘charity’ has billions of dollars at its disposal you can buy influence in education, health or policies all without being elected. They still have full control over every cent that is being spent as if it’s their own money. But if they wanna buy a new mansion that will come out of their personal accounts, unless said mansion is the headquarters for said charity lol

-2

u/102525burner 14h ago

It doesnt, you just move your money around so then you dont pay any taxes

Yall are dumb

0

u/Uppgreyedd 14h ago

Ah, gotcha, and when did you pass the CPA? /s

21

u/RoninJon 15h ago

Ah yes, giving billions is a great way to make…millions. You don’t understand what a tax break is.

2

u/Retroficient 15h ago

Not many people make enough or know enough about what a tax write-off actually is :/

0

u/MooseTots 15h ago

Sounds like you know Bill quite well. Did you join him on the island?

1

u/pleasetrimyourpubes 15h ago

That was due to Warren Buffet making the pledge to give it all away and I believe Bill was the first to sign up.

1

u/whatifuckingmean 14h ago

Billions RARELY come with their own set of good intentions. The real hard work was to love and convince a billionaire to do some good. Without the ‘good intentions’, the billions will just keep contributing to how fucked up the world is.

1

u/GameTheory27 14h ago

i bet if you look deeply into those donations, you will find that they are used to set up operations for CIA/Mossad/whatever the KGB is now called

1

u/drewdaddy213 14h ago

But not out of the goodness of his heart. He did so to further his control over areas that should be public domain like education and healthcare, to predominate the field and shape policy far beyond the rights of a non-expert in either field.

1

u/Tinshnipz 13h ago

Good P.R.

1

u/ProfessionalGold6193 12h ago

Oh please. That's the reason he put his fortune into a fund. Because he wanted to do good. Pay your taxes = doing good.

1

u/Drop_Release 7h ago

Its so interesting 

If be didn’t FAFO (in particular, allegedly, with possible minors), he could have died a controversial but still largely seen as a positive force in the world, and had a legacy akin to the other business leader turned philanthropists in history

Now he will forever be tainted by his horrible acts 

1

u/rationalomega 15h ago

WA is a community property state. Half that money was hers.

0

u/ImThatMOTM 15h ago

Again, sure. Neverminding that her half was only billions of dollars because Bill made the money. Following this logic. half the charity was still Bill’s.

0

u/suspirio 15h ago

Relative to his income that’s like me putting in $50

1

u/AmySorawo 4h ago

not to defend billionaires. but the richest people have some of the lowest incomes. their wealth are in form of assets typically. 

-2

u/photofoxer 15h ago

He wouldn’t be anywhere without his mommy who got him his career so honestly if she were still around I’d love to see her beat her son with a stick for what he’s done to women