$144 MIL.
$4 BILLION
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017
$1.7 BIL.
$1.2 BIL.
$580 MIL.
$461 MIL.
$334 MIL.
2017
TOTAL
$4.4
BIL.
GLOBAL GROWTH AND OPPORTUNITY GLOBAL POLICY AND ADVOCACY
OTHER
Includes water, sanitation, and hygiene
grants and agricultural development.Includes public-awareness campaigns.49
FORTUNE.COM // MAY.1.19
“They are so results-orientated that most
people have no idea all the things that would
not be happening without them,” says Bono,
who, like the Gateses, has been a tireless
champion for global health, and whose own
(RED) and ONE campaigns have received
funding from the couple. “For as long as
I’ve known them, their only interest in their
income is the outcomes it can generate for
others in terms of changing lives,” he adds.
“They don’t ask for acknowledgment; they just
get on with it. They set up the scene, hire the
photographer, but are so focused on results,
they sometimes forget to be in their own
photograph.”
Their work over the past 20 years has
helped transform the lives of hundreds of mil-
lions of people—and will surely affect billions
more if the research they’re funding now helps
prevent and cure AIDS, multidrug-resistant
TB, malaria, neglected tropical diseases, and
the flu. It will help immeasurably more if the
work they’re doing now to empower women,
provide sanitation, boost agriculture, and im-
prove education (as well access to education)
comes to full fruition.
For all that, Fortune has chosen Bill and
Melinda Gates as our 2019 World’s Great-conversation in the U.S. on education reform:
one backed by data, as well as dollars—though
there have been many of those, too. (It spends
$300 million annually on K-12 learning, and
on learning about learning.) The Gateses have
even changed the nature and scale of family
philanthropy—partnering with Warren Buf-
fett in 2010 to convince other billionaires to
give half or more of their money away during
their lifetime or in their will. Today, nearly
200 families have joined the aptly named
“Giving Pledge.”
“Every one of their actions has a multiplier
effect,” says Warren Buffett in a phone inter-
view about the pair, with whom he has been
close friends for decades. His own fortune
became part of that multiplication as well,
when he donated 500,000 Berkshire Hatha-
way B shares to the Gates Foundation—a gift
then worth about $1.6 billion.
But the impact of Bill and Melinda Gates
is due to more than money. Buffett returns to
his earlier thought: “The two of them have a
multiplier effect—the two of them together.
They act with a unity of purpose and with a
difference of style,” he says, chuckling at the
truth of his own line: “That just came to me—
and it’s really true.”Bill and
Melinda
both bring
a kind of
infectious
optimism
that these
are prob-
lems that
can be
solved.”
PETER SANDS
The Global FundGFT.W.05.01.19.XMIT.indd 49 4/17/19 6:00 PM