Nothing graces a large personal fortune quite so well as a charitable trust. Having been taunted for his parsimony, Bill Gates, the richest man in the world with $100bn to his name, has risen to the challenge. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, worth $17bn, is well on the way to overtaking the London-based Wellcome Trust (assets of $19.2bn) as the world's biggest charitable trust, given the couple's current habit of giving $5bn a quarter. Gates has pledged to become the biggest single benefactor in history.
The generosity will rightly bring the software billionaire plenty of praise, particularly since he and his wife have chosen some unfashionable causes, such as malaria and Aids vaccines, and maternal health in the developing world. But it is also a canny recognition that great wealth breeds resentment.
Bill Gates is a man with a public relations battle on his hands, with Microsoft the subject of one of the biggest anti-trust cases this century. Gates is a name which inspires as much suspicion as admiration amongst computer buffs the world over. So, like Andrew Carnegie (who made his fortune from building railroads to transport troops to the American Civil War), he has to do some thing to ensure his name is remembered fondly.
There is also a touch of self-interest here. He has donated $200m to providing internet access in libraries across the US and Canada. In the next five years, his largesse is set to reach a total of 11,000 libraries, providing them with training, support and free Microsoft software. Plugging low-income communities into the internet is a worthy cause. On the other hand, Gates is ensuring that they are plugged in via Microsoft.
But the misperception generated by Gates's huge donations is that America has a superior tradition of philanthropy. From that is drawn the tendentious conclusion that lower taxes prompt greater charitable giving. In fact, taken as a proportion of their wealth, the less publicised giving of British-based philanthropists (Vivien Duffield, Paul Hamlyn and the Sainsbury family) is on a par with that of their US counterparts. The largesse of Gates, and his rival philanthropists, Ted Turner and George Soros, is testimony to the prime place of the US in a global economy which rewards a tiny elite with wealth so vast that after financing their lavish lifestyles, they quite simply run out of things to spend it on.