Material World – The closed world of billionaire power
You can’t throw a brick these days without hitting one… philanthropic billionaires. One of them has been in the capitalists’ news cycles: Bill Gates has been in the news recently not so much for the atrocious spyware-laden Windows 11 operating system, but for his business ties and friendship with serial child exploiter Jeffrey Epstein. Yet Gates is still treated by the media as a kind of global saviour. A benevolent technocrat. A trusted voice on health, population, food, and development.
Philanthropy or social currency of ‘soft power’
Gates’s relationship with Epstein reveals the closed world of billionaire power. According to recently released documents, Epstein first contacted Gates in 2013 to propose a ‘donor-advised fund’ that would serve as ‘cloud computing for the giving world’, a vehicle to attract ‘the most money any charity has ever had’. Over 18 months, Gates’s family office head and foundation general counsel engaged in extensive correspondence with the convicted sex offender about this charitable vehicle.
But here’s the thing: why did the world’s second wealthiest individual require introductions to wealthy donors from a registered sex offender? The answer lies in understanding that billionaire philanthropy operates not as charity but as a mechanism of class consolidation an exclusive club and you’re not in it. Where the extraction of surplus value is celebrated through tax advantages. Barry Josephson and Epstein revelling through criminal interactions. Bill’s conundrum: what to do about the poor.
And we know exactly what they discussed. In an email exchange, Epstein wrote to an associate: ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about that question that you asked Bill Gates ‘how do we get rid of poor people as a whole’ and I have an answer/ comment regarding that for you’ (from the document provided, dated 3 February, 2011, showing correspondence between Jeffrey Epstein and Barry Josephson). This is what they talk about on the island. This is what billionaire philanthropy really means.
The population … problem?
Gates believes that the problem isn’t over-extraction, capitalism or the profit motive. Greed or billionaires don’t concern him, instead he sees African birth-rates as a threat to global capitalist progress. He has stated in a TED talk that he wants to reduce global population by 15 percent.
The Gates Foundation’s 2024 budget totals $8.6 billion, with family planning separate from the $8.3 billion for ‘fertility management’. Gates pledged $100 billion for this on World Population Day, not International Women’s Day. Fertility management in the Gates Foundation has its own budget and targets: $150 million for 2024 and $143 million for 2025. Not through maternal care or with improving material conditions like clinics that could continue afterwards. The money does not flow from charity to women; it flows from tax sheltered wealth to pharmaceutical corporations.
The Depo-Provera scandal
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), backed by hundreds of billions, claims moral authority to influence the health, agriculture and family lives of millions across Africa and the global south. This is about Sayana Press, Pfizer’s injectable contraceptive, a reformulated version of Depo-Provera that was previously subject to over 2,000 brain tumour lawsuits in Florida. The UK and US government both subsidise the use of this drug.
A 2024 study in the British Medical Journal revealed that women using Depo-Provera face a 550 percent increased risk of developing intracranial meningiomas, AKA brain tumours, requiring invasive surgery, radiation, and often causing permanent neurological damage. Pfizer knew of these risks for decades while failing to warn patients. European and Canadian labels now carry meningioma warnings; the US label was only updated in December 2025 after litigation began.
The Maxwell precedent: intelligence and institutional power
Robert Maxwell, press tycoon, scam artist, and former Labour MP too knew how to create institutional power. He had intelligence contacts in Mossad and with the KGB and did work for British intelligence. He also hobnobbed with the queen, (prince) Charles, Thatcher, Mother Teresa, George Bush and so on. He was the go-to guy for dirt on the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
The Epstein-Gates nexus is modelled on these earlier networks of elite control. Epstein’s own operations, his ‘black book’ of contacts, his mysterious wealth, his lenient 2008 prosecution, suggest similar intelligence community protections. The ‘Lolita Express’ flight logs and island visitors represent not merely criminal activity but the mechanisms through which ruling-class loyalty is ensured through mutual incrimination.
The socialist alternative
Socialists do not oppose access to contraception, nor deny the importance of reproductive choice. On the contrary, we insist that women must be free from economic compulsion in deciding whether and when to have children. The Gates Foundation model, in which pharmaceutical corporations, backed by billionaire ‘donations’ and government co-funding, experiment on vulnerable populations, represents the antithesis of reproductive freedom.
True reproductive freedom requires the social ownership of pharmaceutical production, democratic control over healthcare priorities, and the elimination of economic coercion in all its forms. When contraceptives are developed through producer-controlled research, distributed through publicly accountable health systems, and provided as genuine choices rather than population control measures, then we will have achieved something worth calling family planning.
Until then, we must recognise billionaire philanthropy for what it is: the velvet glove of the ruling elite sanitising exploitation while the iron fist of king capital maintains its grip.
A.T.