Opinion: Gates Investments Undermine Foundation’s Good Works

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s stock portfolio, which includes hundreds of millions of dollars in investments in oil, pharmaceutical, and mining firms, undercuts its efforts to improve health, reduce poverty, and limit environmental despoliation in the developing world, The Nation argues.

The liberal magazine notes that foundation head Susan Desmond-Hellmann, in her previous position as chancellor of the University of California at San Francisco, divested her holdings in the tobacco industry and suggests she could “draw on her personal experience” to address how the philanthropy manages its $40-billion investment, which the article terms a “puzzling ethical blind spot.”