Bill Gates Moving Toward Closing Out Gates Foundation

In not totally unsurprising news, because of his pledge to give during his lifetime, the NYTimes has the story of the Gates Foundation 25 years in announcing plans for the foundations termination. From the story:

“Today the Gates Foundation celebrates its 25th anniversary by announcing its plans to close up shop.

Established in 2000 — when Melinda French Gates was just 35 and Bill Gates was 44 and the world’s richest man — the foundation quickly became one of the most consequential philanthropies the world has ever seen, utterly reshaping the landscape of global public health, pouring more than $100 billion into causes starved for resources and helping save tens of millions of lives.

For all its pragmatic public-health spade work, the foundation has also served as a kind of valorous abstraction — the seeming embodiment of “the Golden Rule,” in a phrase that Bill Gates likes to use, and the face of an increasingly anachronistic era of elite optimism.

“You could say this announcement is not very timely,” Gates says, but the timeline isn’t short: He is committing the foundation to 20 more years of generous aid, more than $200 billion in total, targeting health and human development.”