When Bill Gates took the stage in Berlin earlier this month, he had planned to talk about his childhood. The nominal occasion for the evening was the release of the billionaire’s new autobiography. But instead, Gates was treated to a rash of protesters who had shown up to call him out on his hypocrisy. “Bill Gates is not a climate hero,” one said while the self-appointed savior of humanity looked on. “His actions mean more than empty words.”
There are quite a few empty words to choose from.
In 2021, Bill Gates announced that the foundation that bore his name had divested all its “direct holdings in oil and gas companies.” But recently available IRS records show that four years on, the Gates Foundation Trust, the entity that manages the Gates Foundation’s $75.5 billion endowment, appears to have done very little to back off oil and gas. In fact, its stake in fossil fuels seems to have increased.
From 2019 to 2023, the value of the stocks and bonds held by the trust increased more than 30 percent, from $216 to $287 million, according to a Jacobin analysis of the latest batch of available IRS disclosures. That figure includes a few bets on big oil companies, like BP ($23 million in stock and $4.6 million in bonds) and Occidental Petroleum ($8.4 million in bonds), and smaller companies that are largely, if not exclusively, involved in the exploration, transportation, refining, and distribution of oil and gas.
What’s more, some of those investments appear to have increased not because a long-term investment paid off, but because the trust bought more securities.
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Auteur: Alex Park
