Why Bill Gates Is Giving Away His Fortune

Whatever one may think of Gates as a businessman, he is doing AMAZING work as a philanthropist and is well on his way to leaving one of the all-time great legacies in this area.  Kudos!

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Why Bill Gates Is Giving Away His Fortune

Voices: A Weekly Feature on 'This Week'

Nov. 6, 2005— - People already know that Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has more money than anyone in the world. What they may not know is that he's also giving away more money than anyone. Gates is dedicating billions to fight diseases like malaria that are still killers in the developing world even though they have been all but eliminated everywhere else. "This Week" spoke with him earlier this week at a global health summit cosponsored by Time magazine and ABC News.

George Stephanopoulos, host of "This Week:" So how did this all start for you? After you built up Microsoft, made your fortune, you're the world's richest man, how did you decide to start giving it away and how did you choose global health?

Bill Gates: Well, the first thing was the decision that it probably wouldn't be good for my kids, for it to go to them, and so then the question of--

Stephanopoulos: Will they get nothing?

Gates: They'll get something, but not a substantial percentage. Then, the question is how to give it back to society to have the best impact. And so my wife Melinda and I talked about what was the focus in the United States that we think could have the biggest impact? And then we picked education and scholarships. And then on a global basis, what was the greatest inequity? And as we learned about these health issues, we realized that that's where you can make a huge change and that has such a positive effect on all the other things...

[To read the entire article, go to: http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/GlobalHealth/story?id=1286093]