Results tagged “thegatesfoundation”

The new $500 million headquarters for The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation broke ground today on lower Queen Anne. The foundation headquarters take up an entire city block, across the street from the Seattle Center and his Microsoft buddy Paul Allen's pet project, the EMP. The planned campus will be 90,000 square feet and include offices for 1,200 employees as well as an interactive museum. Sadly there is no word if there will be a Batman-style signal for Bill Gates and the foundation. (A new economy is struggling? A library needs new computers? You want to talk about health care in Africa? Just flash the Gates Foundation signal!) The Gates foundation hopes to move into their new headquarters, with or without our super hero signal idea, in 2010.

It is the kind of event for which cliche sayings like "it's the end of an era" were made. Today is Bill Gates' last day as the chairman of Microsoft, the software company he created and made into an all-encompassing empire. While Gates will remain the non-executive chairman of Microsoft, his full-time job will be with the Gates Foundation, he and wife Melinda's international health non-profit. One of his first stops after bowing out of day-to-day decisions at MS will be to China, where the Gates Foundation is launching a slew of new health initiatives.

Last week we posted about the story the Los Angeles Times did on the Gates Foundation and how a lot of the Foundations investments are contrary to the charitable work they do. We refrained from heaping scorn on the Foundation because by that time they had agreed to review its portfolio "to determine whether its holdings were socially responsible" and what a portfolio, by the way: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has some $65.95 billion in holdings according to the L.A. Times.

While it's tempting to make fun of the Seattle Times (or the P-I, for that matter) for not getting the story the Los Angeles Times reported this weekend on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the conflicts that exist between the foundation's charitable work and its financial holdings, and while we're somewhat inclined to point out the fact that no one in Seattle is in a position to say boo to the Gates Foundation, it's really just fantastic work by the L.A. Times which continues to be one of the country's best newspapers despite the fact that it's under assault by its owner the Chicago Tribune. The Gates Foundation is based here so it's easy to lose sight of their place in the universe and jump on them for things like buying up the land that contains Seattle's only municipal skatepark and bulldozing it, but they're really a global giant with a tremendous amount of money. Thank you to the L.A. Times for pointing out that while a fraction of that money is injected directly into various charitable causes the Foundation also has a mountain of cash the size of Rainier that can also be working either for, or, in some cases against, those same causes. Take some time out on Snow Day #1 2007 to read the entire article - We learned more about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from that piece than we had previously through years worth of Seattle Times and Post Intelligencer full-release massage pieces. Kudos, at least, to the Seattle Times for reprinting it.

--Turns out 1% of the best hotels in the world are in the Seattle area.

-The nation's fifth Latino-owned bank is coming to a Kent near you.

-Some people loved the new Pride for what it was and some people loved it for what it wasn't. And some people weren't that impressed.

Bill Gates announced today that he's leaving Microsoft to join Robert Scobleizer at Podtech.net where the two will do a call-in style podcast together to air three times a week. It will also include the two of them riffing on the tech news and prank dialing startups ("Hi, this is Bill Gates, I have a billion I'd like to invest in your...olefactorycasts? Ahahahahahaha! Right! Ahahahahaha!"). The two were said to share a moment of sad silence after they mistakenly pranked their own employer, netpod.tech, during a trial run.