Two years after Gates announced IAVI, he summoned Dr. Fauci to Seattle to propose a partnership that, two decades later, would have profound impacts on humanity. Dr. Fauci first met Bill and Melinda Gates during that Seattle trip. Ostensibly for a conversation about combating tuberculosis, the Microsoft billionaire had invited the NIAID chief to a muster of global health honchos at his 40,000-square-foot, $127 million mansion rising from forty wooded acres on the banks of Lake Washington. After dinner, Gates culled Fauci from the herd and corralled him into his spectacular blue-domed library overlooking the lake. Fauci remembered: “Melinda was showing everyone on a tour of the house. And he said, ‘Can I have some time with you in my library,’ this amazingly beautiful library. . . . And we sat down. And it was there that he said, ‘Tony, you run the biggest infectious disease institute of the world. And I want to be sure the money I spend is well spent. Why don’t we really get to know each other? Why don’t we be partners?’”25
Over the next two decades, that partnership would metastasize to include pharmaceutical companies, military and intelligence planners, and international health agencies all collaborating to promote weaponized pandemics and vaccines and a new brand of corporate imperialism rooted in the ideology of biosecurity. That project would yield Mr. Gates and Dr. Fauci unprecedented bonanzas in wealth and power and have catastrophic consequences for democracy and humanity.
The Microsoft Monopoly
Influence peddling fueled Bill Gates’s drive to power from the outset. Gates came from a wealthy family; his great-grandfather made a fortune in banking and left Bill a trust fund worth millions in today’s dollars. After dropping out of Harvard in 1975, Gates leveraged his passion for software engineering to launch Microsoft in an era when most Americans still used typewriters. At the time, his mother, Mary Gates, a prominent Seattle businesswoman, sat on the United Way board alongside then-IBM chairman John Opel. In 1980, IBM was looking to recruit a software concern to develop an operating system for its personal computer. Mary Gates persuaded Opel to take a chance on her son. That intervention propelled Gates’s fledgling firm into the big leagues and made Gates a billionaire within two decades.
Gates’s closest boyhood friend and the Microsoft cofounder, Paul Allen, described Gates in his 2011 book (Idea Man: A Memoir) as a sarcastic bully who in 1982 schemed to oust him and steal his share of their company. Back at work following a bout with cancer, an anemic Allen, depleted by radiation and chemotherapy, overheard Gates conniving with Microsoft’s new manager, Steve Ballmer, to dilute Allen’s stake. Allen recalled bursting in and shouting: “This is unbelievable! It shows your true character, once and for all.”26 Declining Gates’s $5-a-share buyout offer, Allen left Microsoft with his 25 percent stake intact, becoming a billionaire when the company went public in 1986.27
In May 1998, the Department of Justice and twenty state attorneys general filed antitrust charges against Microsoft, accusing Gates’s company of illegally thwarting efforts by consumers to install competing software on its Windows-based computers. The DOJ asked the federal trial court in Seattle to fine Gates a record million dollars a day for antitrust violations. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled that Microsoft had violated the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act prohibitions outlawing monopolies and cartels, saying, “Microsoft placed an oppressive thumb on the scale of competitive fortune, thereby effectively guaranteeing its continued dominance in the relevant market.”28
Judge Jackson ordered Microsoft to divide itself in halves and divest either its operating system or its software arm. An appeals court overturned that decision. In a settlement, the DOJ abandoned its drive to break up the company, and Microsoft agreed to pay an anemic $800,000 fine and to share computing interfaces with competing firms.29,30 Aside from the financial cost, the litigation had blighted Gates’s reputation. Judge Jackson complained that Gates’s testimony was “evasive and forgetful”31 and observed that “[He] has a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses.”32 The public had seen enough of the trial—and of Gates’s revealing depositions—to share Judge Jackson’s revulsion.33 An online group called SPOGGE gained widespread popularity. The acronym stands for “Society for Preventing Gates from Getting Everything.” Class action lawsuits filed in 2000 against the company for gross discrimination against African American workers and for including racially charged messages in its software further blighted Gates’s pockmarked public image. Legendary plaintiffs’ lawyer Willie Gary complained that Microsoft had “a ‘plantation mentality’ when it comes to treating African-American workers”34 and observed that “there are glass ceilings and walls for African-American workers at Microsoft.”35 Gary settled the case for $97 million.36 Two years later, European regulators levied a $1.36 billion fine against Microsoft, the highest penalty in EU history.
Gates reacted to snowballing popular disgust by lobbying Congress to slash the Justice Department’s budget and by hiring an army of PR firms to soften his image as a ruthless and duplicitous king-baby robber baron. As part of a concerted offensive to recast his public persona, Gates and his wife formed a charity, the Children’s Vaccine Program, with an impressive $100 million donation.37
The Rockefeller-Gates Nexus
A century earlier, America’s first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller, had blazed his own wildly successful exit ramp from public loathing, bad press, and antitrust prosecution by launching a medical philanthropy. John D. Rockefeller’s consigliere, Frederick Taylor Gates, served as John D.’s chief business confidant and philanthropic adviser. Frederick Gates helped Rockefeller structure his foundation, advising the mogul that “judicious disposal of his fortune might also blunt further inquiry into its origins.”38
Practically from his nativity, Bill Gates began coordinating his own foundations’ giving with the Rockefeller organization. In 2018, Bill Gates made the salient observation that “Everywhere our foundation went, we discovered the Rockefeller Foundation had been there first.”