What is the relationship between business success and philanthropic aptitude? Recently, we’ve witnessed a clash of two starkly different responses to that question. The dominant one for most of the last decade is best captured by the newly coined term “philanthrocapitalism,” the title of an influential 2008 book (though the idea itself has much deeper historical roots), whose subtitle neatly sums up its argument: “How the Rich Can Save the World.” How? By “apply[ing] to their giving the same talents, knowledge, and intellectual vigor that made them rich in the first place.” In other words, entrepreneurialism was presented as a quality whose value was fully transportable to the realm of philanthropic practice.
In the past few years, a range of critics have pushed back on this view. In his recent book, Giving Done Right, for instance, Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, points out the many reasons that running a nonprofit requires a different set of skills than running a for-profit company. Then there’s the full-throated critique offered by Anand Giridharadas, who has argued in his book Winners Take All that far from saving the world, entrepreneurs tend to promote reforms that perpetuate the very problems that need solving. The confidence, risk-taking, and vision that might boost an individual to the top of the corporate ladder, in Giridharadas’s account, read much more like hubris, callousness, and cluelessness when applied to world-saving.
The new three-part documentary on Bill Gates, Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, directed by Davis Guggenheim (of Inconvenient Truth fame), released recently on Netflix (at a rather awkward moment, given Gates’ entanglement in the controversy surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s donations to the MIT Media Lab) takes this question as one of its central themes.
Anyone trying to understand Bill Gates can’t avoid it. He is, after all, the world’s most prominent philanthropist, presiding with his wife over the world’s largest foundation, and he’s achieved that status by self-consciously applying the technocratic focus he honed at Microsoft to poverty, disease, and other social ills. In providing an answer to the question, the documentary borrows something both from the philanthrocapitalist view and from its critique.
It makes a strong case that the same qualities that earned Gates billions make him an exceptional, even exemplary, philanthropist today. But there’s also an undercurrent of uneasiness with those traits and an attempt to reckon with their liabilities, at least from an interpersonal perspective. It’s as if Guggenheim has sublimated mounting concerns about the dangers of philanthropy in a democracy into a consideration of the human costs of a singular, unyielding intellect.
From Business to Philanthropy
The three 50-minute episodes of Inside Bill’s Brain guide the viewer through the landmarks of Gates’s biography: his youth in Seattle, marked by an increasingly fraught but powerful relationship with his mother; his student years at a local prep school, where his talents as a programmer develop alongside his friendship with future Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen; his decamping from Harvard to start Microsoft, riding the wave of the personal-computer revolution, and his steering of the software company to the point of (and perhaps well beyond) market dominance; his marriage to a Microsoft manager Melinda French and his creation with her of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000; and his stepping down from Microsoft eight years later to devote himself full-time to philanthropy.
Guggenheim structures this narrative in a way that reinforces the thematic focus on the relationship between Gates’s capacities as a business leader and as a philanthropist. Instead of a traditional chronological portrayal, in which we might watch Gates grow from awkward teenager to awkward CEO to slightly less awkward global do-gooder, Guggenheim pairs scenes from each stage in Gates’s life together, often cutting abruptly and somewhat heavy-handedly from one realm to the other.
(Netflix describes Episode 1 this way: “Bill Gates speaks about his life-or-death mission to get better sanitation to the developing world. Also, his sisters share their childhood memories.” That captures the feel about right.)
If a traditional chronological account of the development of a philanthropist lends itself to particular interpretive framings (usually a story of redemption and expiation for past misdeeds or, more cynically, of an attempt to whitewash them), Guggenheim’s mashup instead insists on considerations of continuity. Several key dynamics at work inside Bill’s brain seem to have remained relatively consistent throughout the years, and these, Guggenheim suggests, are the keys to understanding the man.
The first episode centers on the tension between Gates’s private, introverted nature and the imperative to sociability, first imposed by his mother. It couples scenes from his youth, including clashes with his mother, with his efforts through the Gates Foundation to redesign a toilet and waste-water treatment system that could be widely distributed throughout the developing world. The young and the adult Bill Gates share an analytic precocity, an intense curiosity, an ability to absorb massive amounts of information, a competitive drive, and a willingness to challenge authority — whether represented by a parent or the prevailing public health establishment.
The second episode features his time at the Lakeside School, where he designed a computer program to manage its students’ class schedules, alongside his foundation’s efforts to stamp out the last remaining pockets of polio to achieve full eradication of the disease. Here Gates’s comfort with complex systems (he compares himself to a powerful computer), his “mental intensity” (his own phrase), and his willingness to take on risk provide the common thread. Finally, the third episode braids together Bill’s relationship with Melinda with his efforts to design a modern nuclear reactor that uses depleted uranium that could meet the world’s energy needs without releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Bill’s hyper-rationalism (Melinda catches him listing the pros and cons of marriage on a whiteboard), his single-minded focus, and his ability to detach emotionally form the narrative links.
‘Being Fanatical’
It’s worth stressing that this narrative leaves plenty out, including many of the philanthropic efforts with which Gates is most closely associated. The documentary doesn’t deal with any of the foundation’s controversial domestic programs, such as those involving elementary and secondary education. It also ignores any of the recent push-back to elite philanthropy — at no point during the course of the documentary is he asked to reflect on the legitimacy of the vast power his fortune now gives him (something he’s begun to do, with Melinda, in annual Gates Foundation letters).
Guggenheim has selected to focus on activities in which Gates’s persona has been clearly stamped, whether he’s operating as the head of his foundation or as a private investor — it’s hard to keep the two identities distinct. In all the cases, a relatively bright line can be drawn from an initial provocation (Bill and Melinda reading, for instance, a New York Times report on widespread deaths from diarrhea in Africa brought on by sewage-contaminated drinking water) to the emergence of an ambitious plan to address the problem, to virtuosic feats of analysis, to the relentless commitment to see the plan implemented.
These are huge projects, involving massive teams of actors — engineers, public health workers, foundation executives and staff, corporate leaders, diplomats, government officials. The viewer doesn’t get a clear sense of how these pieces fit together or how they were managed. Philanthropic success is guaranteed by individual, not institutional, capacities. The Gates Foundation is a gigantic philanthropic bureaucracy, with some 1,500 employees; yet Gates sits at the center of each enterprise, a tousled-haired, owlish CPU. The precise mechanisms of this influence are only hinted at: shots of Gates sitting at a conference table, eyeing a speaker intently; Gates poring through books full of charts and figures. But Guggenheim clearly means to show that it is not just the immensity of Gates’s fortune that’s catalytic; it is Gates himself.
“A key advantage I had was being fanatical,” Gates tells Guggenheim about his early years leading Microsoft, though he could just as easily be talking about his leadership of his foundation. “That is, taking all of my capabilities, day and night, and just focusing on, ‘OK, how do you write good software?’ I loved being fanatical. Eventually, I reveled in it.”
This fanaticism, bolstered by analytic prowess, emerges as the key enabler of Gates’s success as an entrepreneur and philanthropist. It allows him to soberly calculate risks and then to take them, absorb setbacks, and push past challenges and critics. At one point, Gates describes being so committed to a code-writing assignment that, in order not to waste time on meals, he subsisted on Tang powder straight from the jar. (Tech bros, young Bill sees your Soylent fad and raises.)
That just sounds sort of gross, but at times his fanaticism can take on a darker (less orange) hue. The transgressive nature of Gates’s eccentricities is one of the underlying themes of the documentary. The first two episodes open with sequences featuring a youthful Gates breaking rules or norms: In the first, after a long night of coding, Gates lets off steam by speeding on an Albuquerque highway. (We’re treated to the 1977 mug shot.) In the second, an even younger Gates and Paul Allen go dumpster diving to find search code discarded by a software firm. These episodes prime the viewer for the encounter with Gates’s best known run-in with the law: Microsoft’s prosecution for antitrust violations (which the company ultimately beat on retrial).
Attempt at Humanizing
How far will Gates go, the documentary asks at various points. The contrast with the key, less fanatical partners in Bill Gates’s life — primarily Melinda and Paul Allen — helps provide the viewer with an answer. But the depiction of these relationships also humanizes him; every time Melinda speaks, we’re reminded that if Bill is a fanatic, he’s now a lovable one. In what’s now a well-rehearsed routine, he makes clear that in Melinda’s co-leadership of the foundation, she provides a different set of skills that balances out his own.
These suggest an alternative set of capacities that can link corporate and philanthropic success: empathy, responsiveness, emotional intelligence. These happen to be all the rage in the philanthropic sector now. Foundations are stumbling over each other to show their mastery of “listening”—and so just by her presence, Melinda complicates the “big brain” theory of social change that Guggenheim seeks to document.
The relationships highlighted in the documentary also provide the clearest accounting of the damage done by Gates’s fanaticism. In the case of his relationship to his mother and Allen, the documentary makes clear that the scars have never fully healed. Guggenheim jumbles together an assessment of the costs of Gates’s “mental intensity” — the human costs with the corporate costs and the humanitarian costs. And in a final sequence, taking inventory of the three philanthropic efforts he’s just surveyed, none of which he believes can be called an unmitigated success, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars channeled to them, he asks Gates to do an accounting as well. Have these costs been too high? He’s talking about the astronomical amounts it takes to root out the final pockets of polio and the fact that Trump’s trade war with China has temporarily scuttled plans to build a model nuclear reactor there.
But he’s also referring to more. It’s a brief moment in which Guggenheim allows himself to entertain the possibility that Gates’s “strength, that diehard relentlessness, might also be a flaw” and to open up to some doubt that his skill in getting money might not translate to a skill in giving it away.
But the doubt is not sustained. It’s raised but then allowed to take its place among the other challenges Gates will push past. The documentary ends with an aerial shot of Gates walking alone in a desolate rocky landscape, accompanied by a clip of a speech his mother once gave on the nature of success.
“Ultimately, it’s not what you get, or even what you give,” Mary Gates instructs us, invoking the twin poles of her son’s biography. “It’s what you become.”
Benjamin Soskis is co-editor of HistPhil and a research associate at the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has supported some of his research there.
