How did Bill make the decision to step up and make philanthropy an important part of his life?
Until early 1997, Bill Sr. [Gates’s father] was working out of a cardboard box in his basement, going through requests and then sending them onto Bill and Melinda, who would sit on their sofa on weekends and go through them. There was a moment in 1998 when he and Melinda read an article on a Sunday in The New York Times on children’s diarrhea outside the U.S. [The story told how thousands of poor children die every year from this condition.] He did what anyone else would do. He said, “My God, that’s huge.” He tore out the article, sent it to Bill Sr., with a note that said, “Is there something we can do about this dad?” We started small by making some grants [in the field of health services to poor children in Africa and India] and bringing on experts in the field. Then, Bill read a very important World Bank report on the health issues around the world that described the burden of disease on the 4 billion people who are the poorest folks on the planet. Q: So that led to the decision to
