Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel has accused Bill Gates of using the enormous financial power of his ‘charitable foundation’ to exert pressure on governments and influence how they allocated development funding.
Speaking on the Meckel & Matthes podcast released by Handelsblatt earlier this month, Merkel described Gates as an example of how immense private wealth can translate into political influence despite the person wielding it holding no elected office.
Her comments came during a broader discussion about corporate power and the danger of governments eventually doing “what the corporations order.”
Merkel said her concerns about concentrated private influence predated the rise of artificial intelligence. She traced them back to the establishment of Gates’ foundation, whose financial resources, she said, exceeded “the development budgets of major industrialised countries.”
According to Merkel, Gates’ wealth gave him extraordinary access to world leaders.
“He was suddenly received at least as warmly by some heads of state in the world as I was,” she recalled.
But Merkel said the influence extended beyond access. Gates could use the financial weight behind his foundation to apply what she described as “moral pressure” on governments to increase their contributions to international vaccination programmes.
If governments did not provide enough money to the global vaccine alliance Gavi, Merkel said, “we were immediately in a bad light.”
She recalled Gates telling African leaders that “Merkel had been stingy this year” when Germany’s contribution was considered insufficient.
“And with that, he had gained considerable power,” Merkel said.
Gavi is a public-private vaccine partnership involving national governments, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank and private donors. The Gates Foundation was among its founding partners and provided $750 million in initial funding before contributing billions more.
Germany itself became a substantial Gavi donor while Merkel was chancellor, pledging €600 million between 2016 and 2020 and another €600 million covering 2021 to 2025.
Merkel’s concern was not simply that Gates was spending his own fortune on vaccination. She suggested his ability to determine priorities could also place governments under pressure when deciding how to spend their own limited development budgets.
The former chancellor said the foundation concentrated heavily on particular objectives, including vaccination and diseases such as malaria.
When Merkel asked Gates whether more of his resources could be directed towards education, she said he responded that educational outcomes were more difficult to measure because teachers, students and national systems varied.
Governments, however, could not simply abandon those less measurable responsibilities.
Merkel said this created a difficult situation in which governments still needed to finance education while simultaneously facing pressure from Gates to commit greater resources to vaccination and disease programmes.
“That’s the kind of constraint you get caught in,” she said.
The Gates Foundation’s global health role became particularly prominent during the ‘Covid-19 pandemic’, when it worked closely with major international health organisations and participated extensively in global health and vaccine initiatives.
The organisation was previously known as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It became the Gates Foundation after Melinda French Gates stepped down as co-chair in 2024, three years after the couple divorced.
Their marriage had reportedly come under strain partly because of Bill Gates’ connections with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Merkel’s comments were followed days later by Gates acknowledging that his foundation had abandoned its ambition of eradicating measles worldwide.
He attributed the decision to increasing vaccine hesitancy in wealthy countries.
“At one point, the foundation wanted to eradicate measles, but the vaccine hesitancy in rich countries has meant that’s not on our list of goals,” Gates said, describing the situation as “kind of tragic.”
