December 2, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
As Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, promise to continue pouring billions of dollars into their foundation — now the largest in the nation with over $17-billion — two magazines focus their attention on the people responsible for overseeing that money.
* In an article titled “Father Gives Best,” Town & Country (December) publishes the questions and answers from an interview with William H. Gates, Jr., who is helping his son and daughter-in-law run their foundation.
* Elle magazine (December) profiles Patty Stonesifer, a former Microsoft executive and the foundation’s other co-chair, in an article titled “Meet Ms. Moneybags.”
In the interview, Mr. Gates said that a foundation should be run like a business, especially in dealing with grant applicants.
He said it was important to “run your business in a way that those people are responded to with the alacrity that you would respond to a customer in a store or a client at a law firm.” He added, “I don’t think we’re all very good at that; there’s a good deal of grumbling among the applicant world that foundations are very, very slow, very cumbersome.”
Elle magazine’s profile of Patty Stonesifer focuses on the challenge of giving money wisely.
“Patty Stonesifer, the woman Gates has put in charge of distributing his money,” the magazine says, “may be as important to this world — certainly as powerful in terms of her ability to effect change — as anyone who has come before her, including the Buddha, Jesus Christ, Copernicus, Freud, Marx, Einstein, Alexander Fleming, and Elvis.”
And, the article continues, she and the elder Mr. Gates “not only must figure out the most beneficial ways to give away such unprecedented sums, but must do so with a clear-sighted and panoramic view of its worldwide consequences.”
