What, Pray Tell, Is Bill Gates Up To Now?
Whatever it is, it's undoubtedly odious.
Several years ago, a new family moved into our neighborhood. The dude—I’ll call him Dick—was sporty and outdoorsy like my husband Joe, and I had high hopes for the friendship. The two had gone hiking, fishing, kayaking, wakeboarding, shooting and armchair quarterbacking before Joe realized that Dick had never once initiated a single man-date. (Dick also had a habit of showing up empty handed, borrowing tools and not returning them, and “forgetting” his wallet everywhere he went, but only a wife particularly petty person keeps track of stuff like that.)
Joe decided to leave the ball in Dick’s court, so to speak. Not as any sort of test of the friendship, but just to make sure it was in fact two-sided.
One day Dick texted Joe. “Yo,” he wrote.
ME (to Joe): “That’s so cute! Look at him, making the first move! The bromance is back on!”
JOE (to Dick): “Sup?”
DICK (to Joe): “Hey, can I borrow your Yeti this weekend?”
Dick borrowed the Yeti. Dick did not make any effort to return the Yeti. When Joe asked him about it a few weeks later, Dick graciously informed Joe that he could grab it from his garage any time he wanted. Dick did not clean or even empty the Yeti.
Ding! Dick texted a few weeks later. His car battery was dead; did Joe have cables (and could he bring them over and do the jumping part)? Ding! Hey, could Dick get the name of Joe’s electrician? Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Did we have a pop-up tent? A hedge trimmer? An extra can of propane? The key to Pandora’s box and perhaps an extra roast beef sandwich lying around?
Anytime Dick would ding, Joe and I would deadpan—in perfect unison—“Wonder what he wants now.”
Dick reminds me a lot of Bill Gates. Because if that porky, pretend humanitarian is endorsing, peddling, or promoting something, there is unequivocally something massive in it for him. Oh, Billy Boy is buying up farmland? You can bet your beanie baby collection he’s not using it to grow organic crops to feed the unfortunate or somehow make Mother Earth more sustainable. (On the contrary, owning 270,000+ acres makes him the largest private farmland owner in the US, raising legit concerns about his motives—namely monopolizing the food supply and making bank off government subsidies for agriculture.) Those vaccines he selflessly distributes across the globe in the interest of “public health”? It’s a hard story to swallow when he openly boasts about the 20-to-1 return on his investment. The educational initiatives he’s funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars—of course he was behind the disastrous Common Core curriculum—have been proven to be an utter bust (unless, of course, you don’t just want to rid the planet of 90% of its populace but also dumb down and/or indoctrinate the remaining proletariat and also you happen to be a software developer—like, you know, he is—so your helpful “initiatives” create a demand for all new educational materials and technology in the classrooms). And the billions-with-a-b he’s “donated” to the WHO and the United Nations Depopulation Population Fund may not have done diddly for the wellbeing of the world, but they have conveniently bought him the ability to push his own sinister, self-serving agendas (vaccines and fake meat for everyone! Yay!).
So when headlines whisper about Gates’ latest super stealth stock purchases, this substacker’s ears prick up, hard. What exactly is that Dick guy up to now?
After selling off nearly a quarter of his shares in Microsoft over the past year, apparently our fauxlanthropic friend decided to use some of that freed-up cash to snap up a million shares each of global shipping giant FedEx and PACCAR, the maker of mega-truck brands including Peterbilt and Kenworth. “The investment reflects Gates optimism that falling interest rates and an improving economy could spark a recovery in transportation demand,” the Daily Mail explained. “The trucks are known for their ability to haul over 33,000 pounds and are the backbone of global commerce, moving everything from raw materials to consumer goods.”
[*No mention of dead bodies, so that’s good*]
A connoisseur of media propaganda would likely leap to the charitable conclusion that the marshmallowy mogul has some sort of benevolent Meals-on-Wheels plan up his sleeve. Perhaps he’s planning to use the trucks to distribute coffee on college campuses during finals week or deliver tiny puffer jackets to hairless cat sanctuaries. A conspiracy theorist, on the other hand, might take the heinous high roller’s $373 million investment in two flailing transportation companies and spiral it into some wild (and entirely baseless) hypotheses. For example:
1. He’s stockpiling trucks for vaccine deliveries.
Nervous anti-vaxxers and trad moms might fret that Gates plans to control global vaccine distribution using his very own fleet of trucks. By owning key transportation assets, he could ensure that his precious death shots—laced with tracking chips, graphene oxide, sterilization agents, or alien DNA—reach every corner of the globe. Knock, knock. Who’s there? Bill Gates with a needle. I’m not shaking; you’re shaking.
2. He’s thinking ahead.
With control over transportation, nut jobs like me might worry he’s positioning himself to manage post-apocalypse supply chains, deciding who gets food, medicine, and other essentials. [*reluctantly resumes prepping*]
3. People aren’t going to walk into those FEMA camps themselves.
Hey, buddy! Need a ride? You won’t need that Uber app anymore—Bill’s got you for free.
4. Surveillance delivered right to your door!
Turned off tracking on your devices? No problem! The GPS Gestapo will come to you. You’re welcome.
5. Forget lockdowns; you’re locked out.
If you own the major transportation systems, you basically hold the world’s leash. You get to decide who travels where, which goods make it to the shelves, and who eats and who starves. Go ahead and let your Amazon Prime membership expire. Bill will tell you what you can have and when you can have it. You know, for the good of humanity.
Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe the patron saint of pandemics simply saw an opportunity to turn several million into a few billion, which you would do too if you could so quit being so jealous and resentful. Speculate about Microsofty’s motives in the comments, and please don’t feel the need to be kind or generous. ;)
Jenna, you have a great editor who clearly is looking out for your best interests. Your strike-outs are hilarious.
Good try, but Gates is not a bad investor. Sociopaths are like that. Being shallow top-down types, they see patterns decently better than most as the rest of us tend to see too many details of humanity and our pattern recognition is confused by our assignment of basic human values. Sociopaths don't recognize basic human values. They only see how money and power flow and chase these instead. Yes, the economy has been fine despite the fear porn of the last 30mos. The orders for new Class 8 trucks has exceeded the capacity to manufacture them. Demand is high. Despite the media telling all that AI is the only investment worth noting, we continue to recover from COVID lockdowns and are ramping up reshoring of manufacturing to avoid the issues with supply chain disruptions. Gates sees this and invests accordingly. The economy is much better and has been much better all along than the media publishes. Good news does not sell advertising the way fear motivates viewership.
That Gates is as evil as they come does not diminish his pattern recognition.