Is Bill Gates a closet liberal?
By Andrew Leonard, The Culture of Technology

In 1997, Bill Gates contributed $35,000 in support of a Washington state ballot initiative supporting gun control. In 1993, he ponied up $80,000 to fight a conservative initiative seeking to roll back state taxes. And ever since 1994, the William H. Gates III Foundation, Bill's private philanthropic funnel, has been busy channeling millions to groups that specialize in "reproductive health and family planning."

Gates is far from the first plutocrat to turn his attention to social welfare -- the tradition goes back at least as far as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. But Bill Gates has always enjoyed a singularly apolitical reputation. Unlike the dynamo tycoons of yesteryear, Gates is a cipher, a platitude-spouting uber-entrepreneur who is indistinguishable, in the public eye, from his alter ego -- the formidable, and rapacious, Microsoft corporation.

Indeed, given Gates' current obsession with prying the Department of Justice off of his corporate back, one might assume that if the man has any political sympathies, they would most likely be of the techno-libertarian bent. Certainly, his struggle with the federal government has been adopted as a cause célèbre by many Net-based libertarians.

But for once let's try to separate the man from the Microsoft. Look at the personal checkbook record: pro taxes, pro birth control, against guns. The evidence is clear -- Bill Gates is a bleeding heart do-gooder liberal.

Of course, you'll never hear him say so, nor are you likely to find any of the recipients of his largesse eager to utter the dreaded L-word. His own father, Bill Gates Sr., who administers the approximately $300 million William H. Gates III Foundation, summed up the situation most succinctly: "If you think you're going to get me to characterize what he does as liberal or conservative, you're crazy." Bill Jr.'s politics are not for public consumption. (Ignore those Roman numerals after Bill's name; to avoid confusion we'll refer here to Gates pere as Sr. and Gates fils as Jr.)

It's the very opacity of Bill Jr.'s politics that makes them intriguing, and the money trail of his gift-giving sheds the only light available on them. Gates' more grandiose gestures -- $20 million for a computer center here, $12 million for a biotechnology building there and a whopping $200 million for wiring up rural libraries to the Internet -- get the headlines. But his smaller philanthropic statements give us the few clues we have to what Gates, the man -- as opposed to Gates, the software marketing machine -- really cares about. And we ought to pay attention to what the richest man in the world thinks is socially important -- especially if he lives up to his own oft-made promise to give away nearly all of his wealth before he dies.

To be sure, judging Bill Gates' politics by what he gives away is an exercise in tea-leaf reading that teeters on the brink of absurdity. After all, 35 grand for gun control adds up to about .000001 percent of his total current wealth. Until just a few years ago, the rap on Gates had always been that of the skinflint supreme, our nation's leading subscriber to the miser persuasion. Especially locally.

"There has been a lot of pressure to have him make donations that impact the region that has allowed him to become so wealthy," said Don Chalmers, a fund-raising consultant and editor of the Northwest Nonprofit newsletter.

Few people in a position to know the details will go on record criticizing the pattern, or lack thereof, of Gatesian charity. Seattle Foundation president Anne Farrell dismisses local sniping as generated "more out of ignorance than anything else." But the facts are hard to ignore. Sure, Bill Gates has given away close to $600 million. But more than 90 percent of that sum has been disbursed since 1994, and more than half the total was given away in 1997 alone.

1994, incidentally, was the year Bill Gates' mother, Mary Gates, died of breast cancer. A longtime United Way board member, Mary Gates, by all accounts, persistently encouraged her son to do more with his wealth than simply accumulate it. After years of single-minded, voracious focus on the Microsoft bottom line, Bill Gates appears to finally be heeding his mom's advice. Charity does, it seems, begin at home.

Since 1994, the philanthropy tap has been jacked wide open. Hardly a soul in the wired world can have escaped hearing the much-ballyhooed pledge from Bill and Melinda Gates to spend $200 million over the next five years on library Internet access. Less well publicized has been Bill's 1997 gift of $115 million worth of Microsoft stock to the Gates Foundation, which has brought the total endowment of the foundation up to around $300 million. After a slow start, the foundation gave away some $40 million in 1997, a big jump from 1996's $6.5 million.

Microsoft spokesman Greg Shaw said that in addition to the library grant and the foundation endowment, Gates has also given away at least another $100 million. This includes large-scale donations, such as $12 million for a law school library at the University of Washington (to be named after his father), $10 million for student scholarships in the name of his mother (also at Washington) and $1 million to Ursuline Academy in Dallas (where his wife, Melinda French Gates, was high school valedictorian) and smaller scale grants to museums, theaters, playgrounds and even a Seattle area rowing club.

The big-ticket donations do not come without associated waves of skepticism from Gates' stable of critics. That $12 million grant for the new biotech building at the University of Washington? Just the price tag necessary to lure a star biotech professor to the Seattle area, where he can serve as Gates' informal advisor on biotech investments. Last year's $20 million pledge (through the Gates Foundation) to Cambridge University for a new computing center? A fine way to keep a close eye on one of the world's most illustrious centers for cryptography research -- and an investment sure to pay huge dividends as digital security becomes ever more paramount. And that oh-so-noble deal to wire up the libraries? An insidious scheme: Hook the poor kids on the Net, and then make sure that they're all using Internet Explorer as the browser of choice. Future generations of Microsoft market domination will be assured.

No businessman as famous for being as ultra-competitive as Bill Gates can ever escape cynical accusations that his every move is motivated by greed. Nor should he. But the smaller details of Gates' giving lead us to a different truth. It is much more difficult to discern strategic Microsoft advantage in his support for handgun safety. And his cold-cash concern for family planning could even be construed as asking for trouble. The groups that the Gates Foundation is giving money to have close ideological and organizational ties with pro-choice bastions like Planned Parenthood. Religious right zealots are already beginning to pay attention. Who needs that kind of controversy today?