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Cake day: March 29th, 2025
  • dwazou@lemm.eetoNews@lemmy.world•Bill Gates to give away $200 billion by 2045, accuses Musk of harming world's poor
    131·
    10 days ago

    Bill Gates is probably one of the best billionaires. But it is very important that we all remember how he ended up with $200 billion dollars. Predatory monopolistic behavior.

    Everyone should carefully read this 1999 article that I found in the archives of the New York Times.

    How Microsoft Sought Friends In Washington - Nov. 7, 1999

    Twenty months ago, Representative Billy Tauzin walked into the office of William H. Gates 3rd, chairman of Microsoft, bearing a 10 inch by 10 inch white box and a warning.

    Mr. Tauzin, Republican of Louisiana and the chairman of a subcommittee that oversees the telecommunications industry, placed the box on Mr. Gates’s desk. Inside was a lemon meringue pie, a reminder of another pie that had been thrown in Mr. Gates’s face several weeks earlier by a Microsoft critic. The message to Mr. Gates, the richest man on earth and the leader of the digital world, was blunt: You need to make friends in Washington.

    Mr. Gates apparently took Mr. Tauzin’s message to heart – with a vengeance. While Microsoft and its executives contributed a relatively modest $60,000 to Republican Party committees in 1997, those contributions shot up to $470,000 as part of the company’s overall political contribution of $1.3 million in 1998. The 1998 figure included donations to political candidates, with the bulk of the money going to Republicans. This year, the company’s contributions of nearly $600,000 have been more evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, according to Federal Election Commission records.

    Mr. Gates and his top lieutenants have made dozens of trips to Washington, cultivating powerful figures in both parties and hiring some of the city’s priciest lobbyists. Microsoft has retained Haley Barbour, former chairman of the Republican National Committee; Vic Fazio, a former Democratic congressman from California; Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota; Tom Downey, a former Democratic congressman from New York and a close friend of Vice President Al Gore; Mark Fabiani, former special counsel to the Clinton White House; and Kerry Knott, former chief of staff to Representative Dick Armey of Texas, the House majority leader.

    Microsoft has also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to research groups, trade groups, polling operations, public relations concerns and grass-roots organizations. It has financed op-ed pieces and full-page newspaper advertisements, and mounted a lobbying effort against an increase in the Justice Department’s antitrust enforcement budget.

    In June, Mr. Gates met for lunch with the Republican leaders of the House in the small whip’s room off the House chamber. They discussed Microsoft’s public policy agenda, ranging from exports of encryption software to Internet privacy to antitrust actions, said several participants at the meeting. Mr. Knott, now a top official in Microsoft’s Washington office, attended the session.

    Eight days later, Mr. Armey introduced what he called his ‘‘e-Contract,’’ a list of Republican legislative initiatives that pointedly adopted Microsoft’s view of the role of government antitrust actions, like the one that now threatens to dismantle Microsoft.

    Microsoft has hired as two former heads of the Justice Department’s antitrust division and a dozen or more prominent academics and writers, who publish articles and give interviews advocating Microsoft’s position.

    Among them are Charles Rule, director of the Justice Department’s antitrust division in the Bush administration, and Paul Rothstein, a professor of law at Georgetown University and frequent network and cable-television commentator.

    Another Microsoft move on Capitol Hill drew criticism for heavy-handedness. Its lobbying to trim the antitrust division’s budget brought a flurry of editorial condemnation. The Washington Post said Microsoft’s actions were ‘‘a comical caricature’’ of a company trying to bully its way through Washington.‘’

    One Justice Department official said, ‘‘Even the mob doesn’t try to whack a prosecutor during a trial.’’

    https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/07/us/us-versus-microsoft-the-strategy-how-microsoft-sought-friends-in-washington.html