What happens when you make a lot of money? Then you have a lot of taxes. There are various ways of paying those taxes. One of such ways is by making tax deducti

What happens when you make a lot of money? Then you have a lot of taxes. There are various ways of paying those taxes. One of such ways is by making tax deductible charitable donations. Another one of such ways is doing tax deductible research & development. Most billionaires are also philantropists because they donate sizable amounts of money to different causes. This helps them maintain a favorable public image. It is also a social activity that helps you build relationships with other wealthy people. Bill Gates does have a bona fide foundation that works on important problems and his approach to solving those problems seems reasonably effective. He is an avid reader and reads hundreds of books per year. He is an interesting person, I enjoy his talks, etc... But Microsoft is a different story. Behind every Microsoft key product there's some deceiving business deal. - MS-DOS: Misleading deal involving 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products - Windows: Misleading deal involving developing software for the Apple Macintosh - Windows NT: Misleading deal involving a collaboration with IBM to develop OS/2 - SQL Server: Misleading deal involving a collaboration with Sybase to develop Sybase SQL Server And the list goes on and on and on. In addition to the AARD code many other things happened. Linux was called cancer, there were fear/uncertainty/doubt campaigns against OpenGL, against Linux, against many open source projects. Open source communities got pissed off, developers got pissed off, and that started slowly hurting Microsoft. So now they have decided to co-exist with open source.