gems, AI, artificial intellegence, pyschology, income inequality

Bill Gates, who as the richest American has become one of the foremost advocates of philanthropy, has reduced the pace of his own giving to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation over the last decade. After starting the foundation with gifts of $356 million from 1994 to 1997, Mr. Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, vastly expanded it into the nation’s largest with a burst of gifts totaling $24.6 billion over the next four years. Since then, however, he has dialed back this giving. From 2002 to 2012, he gave $3.7 billion, according to foundation disclosures and data from a Gates spokesman. In that same period, he sold an estimated $22 billion in Microsoft stock. The pullback reflects the foundation’s rapid growth — to a size that has tested its ability to give away money at the pace required both by law and by the fast-rising contributions of another donor, Warren E. Buffett.