Bill Gates article in Chicago Daily Herald highlights TPI's Karoff

Gates sets bar higher

NEW YORK — Bill Gates this week strengthened his position as a standard bearer for U.S. tech billionaires who are building a charitable legacy well before they retire.

At 50, Gates announced a two-year plan to move out of a daily role at Microsoft Corp. , the software empire he founded as a college drop-out, to focus full-time on the $30 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Because of his emphasis on health and education charities, philanthropy experts liken Gates to John D. Rockefeller Sr., the 19th-century founder of Standard Oil who spent the last 40 years of his long life funding such projects.

Others compare his apparent ambivalence to personal wealth and a pledge to donate most of his riches to the religiously inspired giving of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.

But above all, Gates represents a modern paradigm of the ”giving while living” brand of charity more recently adopted by the nearly overnight billionaires from other tech giants like eBay and Google.

“Now people have earned money more quickly . . . and after the rush of it is over, they struggle with what the meaning of that wealth is,” said Peter Karoff, chairman of The Philanthropic Initiative in Boston, who advises the rich on how to choose charitable causes.

No small motivation is the fear that great wealth not only comes with great responsibility, but corrupts those who have not earned it themselves.

“They do not want to leave such huge sums to children and grandchildren,” said Karoff. “They feel that is really a disaster.”

Gates drew fire for hard-nosed business tactics and an aggressive management style but in his personal life cut a more modest figure, often clad in monochrome polo shirts and khaki pants.

“I wish I wasn’t,” Gates said last month of his ranking as the world’s richest man with a personal worth estimated at $50 billion. “There is nothing good that comes out of that.”

Like Gates, many of the younger executives who made their billions with the mercurial rise of technology companies eschew the old style of paying for their name to appear on a school or public theater.

Instead, they pour money into programs that aim to solve complex social or political ills.

These include Pierre Omidyar, founder of the eBay online auction site. He created a $400 million fund to spur development in poor countries.

Google creators Sergey Brin and Larry Page, now in their early 30s, have set aside at least $1 billion for projects tackling poverty and energy consumption.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen also created a charitable fund, which awards nearly $30 million in grants annually.

Gates’ wife, Melinda, has said it was a letter from his mother on the eve of their wedding that reminded them of the responsibility for moral action tied to great wealth, inspiring their charitable campaign.

“It was certainly a surprise to people in philanthropy,” said Ian Wilhelm, a senior reporter at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. “Ten years ago he (Gates) wasn’t even involved that much . . .  it took his parents to push him into it.”

John Vogel, an expert on corporate citizenship at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, said Gates was acting on a social impulse shared by many, though few can afford it.

“At 50, Bill Gates is saying what’s most important, developing the next computer operating system or curing AIDS in Africa?” he said.

“I’m not sure he’s making the wrong decision.”