Bill Gates Is No Mister Rogers
The billionaire philanthropist can't dress up a bad association. He is now hopelessly tied to the Epstein class.
This Week In Blunders – May 31-June 6
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” – Warren Buffett
The Wall Street Journal had quite a field day with Bill Gates’ reputation this week, running with this headline: Bill Gates Spent Years Crafting His Image. Now It’s Cracking.
The publication reported allegations of more than 20 affairs during his 27 years of marriage to Melinda French Gates, who divorced him as his name emerged in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
When you’re a legendary tech founder and a billionaire philanthropist, you have a lot of eyes on your life. It must take quite a staff to hide more than 20 affairs in 27 years.
Epstein knew about the trysts and may have used this information to blackmail Gates, the WSJ reports.
One of the ickiest revelations in the WSJ story, though, was its lead focus on a mannequin, which is sized to Gates’ precise proportions and used to test his apparel.
You know how they say billionaires are no different? That they put their pants on one leg at a time? Not Bill Gates.
The WSJ reports that he has a whole crew to choose his outfits for public appearances. The team has to come up with three options and submit them for approval by senior staff, the WSJ reports.
The objective is to make him look like Mister Rogers. Not some billionaire tech monopolist who hooked up with Russian women and ran with the world’s most notorious sex offender. Mister Fred Rogers, and a beautiful day in the neighborhood to you, too.
For the record, the Epstein files include more than 1,000 emails connecting the dead creep to Gates, his foundation, or people who worked for Gates.
Gates long claimed his relationship with Epstein was all about philanthropy.
In 2019, Netflix released a suck-up documentary, “Inside Bill’s Brain,” which barely touched on the subject, except to make room for this denial:
“I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him. … There were people around him who were saying, hey, if you want to raise money for global health and get more philanthropy, he knows a lot of rich people. Every meeting where I was with him were meetings with men. I was never at any parties or anything like that.”
Gates has apologized for his mistake, denied any illegal activities, and plans to appear before the House Oversight Committee next month to field questions.
Maybe he’ll come dressed as Mister Rogers. But as Mister Rogers once said: “Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.”
Read More On Epstein:
Banking On Epstein (Business Blunders)
Sultan Of Sleaze (Business Blunders)
An Epstein Valentine (Business Blunders)
Party With Mr. Dahmer (Business Blunders)
Networking With A Pedophile (Business Blunders)
Meditations With A Sex Offender (Business Blunders)
Winter Is Coming For Summers (Business Blunders)
Was Maxwell Smart? (Business Blunders)
It’s the debt, stupid
Don’t freak out yet, but the national debt will likely eclipse $40 trillion in October.
It’s a nice round number, completely incomprehensible to the average hundredaire or thousandaire voter, yet a milestone that might raise alarm bells.
We’re already at more than $39.2 trillion, so what’s a few billion more? Let’s a have an endless war. Let have another tax cut. Let’s guild all of Washington in gold.
Republicans talk about fiscal discipline and then cut taxes. Democrats talk about fiscal responsibility and then expand domestic programs.
No one knows when it will end, but this is how it will end.
If the Reagan-era “trickle down theory” ever held true, what’s pouring down is debt.
The Federal Reserve reports:
Americans now owe a record $18.8 trillion in household debt.
Credit card balances have eased somewhat but remain near record highs at about $1.25 trillion.
Auto loans total nearly $1.7 trillion.
Student loans hover around $1.6 trillion.
The numbers have grown so large that they barely register anymore, but they will. With inflation still raging, the odds of a Fed rate hike are rising and bond yields have already been on an upswing. So like everything else, the interest rates on all this debt is going to feel crushing.
The most troubling figure may be the personal savings rate, which recently fell to just 2.6% from 4.3% in January. Big debt-small savings leaves households with less room to absorb layoffs, medical emergencies, recessions or market downturns.
Maybe artificial intelligence will save us all.
Earlier this week, I explored the problem with Paul Vigna, my former colleague from The Wall Street Journal, a fellow Substacker, and author of “The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin.”
You’re not probably not going to like his solution: Print More Money.
His idea would be for the government to decree all debts cancelled and print more dollars to cover the damage to creditors. It would be like a Biblical Jubilee, only on a far more Biblical scale.
Does anyone out there have any better ideas? I’d love to hear them here.
I warned about our debt problem in November 2024: “We’ve just elected a man to the White House who has never shown an inkling of restraint.”
Read More: Hello? What About The $36 Trillion Tab? (Business Blunders)
“We face the most predictable economic crisis in history,” Erskine Bowles told me in 2013.
Bowles had served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. He teamed up with a former Republican U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson to co-chair President Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.
They were trying to reach Democrats and Republicans. Nobody cared.
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