Gates-Epstein ties expose philanthropy’s ‘hypocrisy,’ experts say

As the ties between billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein continue to generate headlines, some experts hope the scrutiny of their relationship will broaden into a larger conversation about the power structures underlying elite philanthropy. “Hypocrisy is at the core of philanthropy, and we all have to come to terms with that,” Maribel Morey, a historian of U.S. philanthropies, told Devex. “It’s not usually saints who become industry leaders and who amass significant amounts of wealth,” she said. “The path towards wealth accumulation is fraught from a moral perspective.” Grappling with these inconvenient truths may be challenging at a moment when global health and development organizations are even more reliant on foundation funding due to foreign assistance cuts around the world and the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, once the world’s biggest aid agency. The Seattle-based Gates Foundation awarded $4.5 billion in grants in 2025 and $5.4 billion the year before. It is a major donor to the World Health Organization — from which the Trump administration has withdrawn — and channeled more than $650 million last year to gender equality programs. “The situation and the system that we're in most of the time, honestly, you just have to kind of take the money,” said Alex Evans, a U.K.-based philanthropy consultant. “With something as massive as the Gates Foundation, and with USAID gone, what else is anyone going to do?” Gates has denied involvement in anything related to Epstein’s sex crimes, while saying he regrets meeting him in an attempt to generate donations from other wealthy individuals. “It was a huge mistake to spend time with Epstein” and bring Gates Foundation executives into meetings with the sex offender, Gates told the organization’s staff during a town hall on Tuesday, according to The Wall Street Journal. “I apologize to other people who are drawn into this because of the mistake that I made.” But to some, the links between Gates and Epstein — which continued after the latter's 2008 conviction of soliciting prostitution from a minor — are about more than poor judgement. They are emblematic of a closed-door culture in which philanthropy serves the influence and reputations of the powerful, even as it seeks to assist the most vulnerable. “What we’re talking about here is structured inequality and how power and how hegemony reproduces itself,” said Evans. “Philanthropy is deeply implicated in that.” Editor’s note: Devex receives funding from the Gates Foundation funding for the The Aid Report, although we retain full editorial independence. ‘Struggling to reconcile’ The trove of partially redacted files related to Epstein and his network released by the U.S. Department of Justice last month includes a surreal mix of lurid exchanges and mundane financial planning. Gates has denied an allegation contained in an email written by Epstein, in which he claims to have helped Gates procure medication for a sexually transmitted disease Gates acquired from “sex with Russian girls.” A spokesperson for Gates told NPR at the time that the claims are “absolutely absurd and completely false.” In another 2013 email to Gates’ then-science adviser Boris Nikolic, Epstein wrote: “Bill risks going from richest man to biggest hypocrite, melinda a laughing stock, pledges will disappear as a result.” At Tuesday’s town hall with staff, Gates acknowledged he had two affairs with Russian women, according to The Wall Street Journal. Some members of the foundation’s staff were also involved in discussions with Epstein about establishing a donor-advised fund that might generate contributions from other wealthy individuals. “On the basis of Epstein’s claims that he could mobilize significant philanthropic resources for global health and development, a small number of foundation employees interacted with Epstein to try to secure this potential funding,” the Gates Foundation said in a statement posted on its website. “At no time were financial payments made by the foundation to Epstein, nor was he employed by the foundation at any time,” the statement read, adding that the foundation “regrets having any employees interact with Epstein in any way.” Despite the damage control, questions about Gates’ relationship with Epstein appear to be creating anxiety inside the world’s most prominent global health and development foundation. During an internal town hall meeting on Feb. 5, staff told Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman that some of them were “struggling to reconcile their commitment” to the foundation’s goals with the news they were reading about its founder, according to the Financial Times. Suzman, according to the report, admitted to feeling “somewhat sullied by just any association of Epstein with the work we do.” Last week, Gates pulled out of a keynote speech at the AI Impact Summit in India to “ensure the focus remains on the AI summit’s key priorities,” the foundation announced less than 48 hours after previously stating that Gates planned to give the speech “as scheduled.” The Gates Foundation did not respond to an inquiry from Devex. ‘Flawed people’ Philanthropic giving is a recurring theme in the Epstein files. “He's very deliberately using philanthropy to launder his reputation,” Evans said of Epstein. “It's all about these very powerful people who form these networks which are actually quite undemocratic.” While Epstein’s case might be extreme — he also apparently engaged a company called “Reputation Changer” in the wake of his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution — philanthropic giving has long served to shape the public perception of the rich and powerful. There is often a tendency to idolize foundation founders and to view them as morally righteous philanthropists, rather than as complicated, flawed people with enough wealth and power to determine who lives and who dies, Morey said. “I would imagine that if one looked at Bill Gates not with the rose-tinted eyes of a philanthropist, but from the perspective of his lived experience as an industry leader, one wouldn't put him up on a pedestal as this morally righteous individual,” she said. Working under a philanthropic figurehead in a culture that mythologizes them can also be constricting, Morey added. “What if now the Gates Foundation staff and leadership feel more free to work on behalf of the global public rather than on behalf of some idealized vision of who Gates is and what he values?” she said. That is not an easy evolution, but it is one that other foundations have had to attempt after critical reassessments of their founding figures. The Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation have both grappled with their founders’ historic involvement in the racist eugenics movement during the last century. Some have launched internal investigations to uncover the extent of their involvement. “It's healthy for all of us to humanize leaders, whether they're political leaders or industry leaders, because that frees us to realize that the world around us is complicated, and if there are problems, we can try to fix them, and it’s not going to be some wealthy or powerful individual who's going to come and save us,” said Morey.