so they re not paying bank fees and a lot in health, new vaccines. so we re by far the biggest funder on malaria, coming up with new bed nets, new drugs. ..a vaccine, a way of killing mosquitoes. yeah, but if you think about this in terms of ethics, are you driven in your philanthropy mostly by excitement, by the potential outcome, or does it come from some deep psychological motive, you know, guilt, a feeling that you should live a life that s purposeful, a feeling that, you know, you genuinelyjust don t know what to do with this cash? i not only want to put the money in, but i want to put my time in and assemble people so we can learn, you know, what health systems work, which ones don t. i, you know, find the work very fulfilling. i get to learn new things. get to go to interesting places. yeah. there s no sacrifice involved. it s. well, it s quite a lot of financial sacrifice! sure, but i don t have any use for that money. i mean, i m not denying myself, you know, the wor
0h, about 30 billion. about 30 billion a year. about 30 billion. money buys you power. it s given you extraordinary power. a lot of people would say that the nature of the power it s given you, which you now use philanthropically, is undemocratic, because nobody voted for you. what do you say to that charge? i think spending money on malaria, reducing malaria deaths is a good thing. so when we did ourfirst big grant, we became the biggest malaria funders, or diarrhoea, or pneumonia or sickle cell or hiv. you know, other than a few categories, where the us government spends more than we do, we re the largest funder on every single one of those things. so, yes, somebody can disagree with the choices i ve made. you know, democratic processes don t always let you do the most innovative work. so if you want to do risk, like curing sickle cell or curing hiv, governments are too conservative.