Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead may or may not have said this, but it is Melinda Gates’s favorite quote, and it aptly sums up the philosophy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gateses are changing the world. Since its founding in 1997, the Gates Foundation has transformed the medical and research fields for diseases like malaria and pneumonia and is at the center of an education reform movement in the United States. The Gates’s recent efforts to publicize philanthropy, and their ability to leverage their wealth for social change, are encouraging other billionaires to commit to the Giving Pledge to donate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes. The transformation of Bill Gates’s image over the past two decades is remarkable. Gates, the ruthless, greedy monopolist, caricatured by Tim Robbins in the 2001 film Antitrust, has been supplanted by the earnest, humble Bill, a “worldwide force for good.”1 Melinda Gates, the other half of the foundation, is a shyer Samaritan, but is equally influential in shaping the foundation’s trajectory.
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