Bill Gates Announced His Latest Charity Work, And So Did Jeff Bezos

A new year is already with us, and tech billionaires are announcing how they plan to give back to the community this year.

The most noticeable is undoubtedly Bill Gates, Microsoft founder, and also a generous and noted philanthropist. Another benefactor is Jeff Bezos. People might know him as Amazon’s founder and CEO, but not many associate him with a person who is interested in charity work.

According to Jeff Bezos, his Day One Fund is giving a total sum of $95.7 million to 24 charity groups in America to help the homeless. This fund was introduced in September 2018 and is the merger of Academics Fund and Families Fund, which dedicate to give scholarships for children of low-income households, and awards for organizations that provide for poor communities respectively.

The Day One Fund is not a selfless act as many may think. It is believed to be a way Amazon uses to save its reputation after the company took the initiative to block a new business tax proposal, which would otherwise raise about 50 million for charity causes. If the tax were imposed, Seattle would charge any company that makes more than 20 million a year.

Back to Bill Gates and his effort to make the world a better place, in his recent blog post, Gates announced that his foundation is working on a new vaccine for polio. If things go as expected, the shot will be implemented in 2019 and may even stamp out the disease.

Another project of Gates is his joint force with Breakthrough Energy Ventures, an investment fund dedicated to clean energy. The names of companies they plan to invest in have been made public. The effort aims at advancing wind and solar power.

TerraPower, another company Gates founded a decade ago, on the other hand, is focusing on introducing new technology in nuclear reactors. Its target is to find a quick substitute to coal energy plants.

We may not see any positive signs from these above projects in the immediate future, but if you want to know about a plan that has already gained a certain level of success, it will be Gates’s spending on the flush-less toilet, which is estimated to cost as much as $200 million. And another $200 million is expected to be sent. This invention is supposed to help people in poorer areas to have sanitary toilet even if they do not have enough running water.