Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men and highest profile aid donors, says he doesn’t care if he’s forgotten after his death – as long as polio and other major diseases have been eradicated.
“I don’t need to be remembered at all,” the co-founder of Microsoft, 57, said in New York.
Gates has a fortune estimated by Forbes at $61 billion, second only to Mexican telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim, and the satisfaction of knowing that Microsoft products are at the heart of computers in every corner of the world.
But he says that since quitting the running of Microsoft and focusing on his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it’s the world’s poorest that have his attention.
“None of the people who are at risk of polio know anything about me, nor should they. They are dealing with day to day life and the fact that their child might get crippled,” Gates said in an interview at a posh Manhattan hotel.
Already the foundation has paid out $25 billion to projects fighting disease and extreme poverty. There’s currently about $36 billion left in the pot – and it’s all going to go.
“My wife and I have decided that our foundation will spend all its money within 20 years of when neither of us is around, so we’re not trying to create some perpetual thing,” Gates said.