When you're a billionaire you're probably very diversified, and such foundations can serve as convenient vehicles for shuttling money between interests while giving a tax advantage and buying social favor, and who knows, you might manage to actually help some people along the way.
Hypothetical example: Gates sits on the board of the medical company producing covid test kits and holds a large stake. So he directs his foundation to buy huge quantities of the kits and give them away. Gets a number of birds stoned at once.
Here's something I could say about these accusations:
"Interesting, this sounds like something a Koch-funded hit-job on Gates would say. In fact, it also sounds like what a spokesperson for Big Hand Sanitizer would say. Or really, if you think about it, if there are aliens immune to SARS-CoV-2 who want to cleanse the earth, this is a reasonable first attempt as they gauge our reactions."
It is easy to generate adversarial hypotheses with non-zero probability. But that's not an intelligent way to live one's life. It leads to poor life outcomes if effort is not spent on those hypothetical outcomes proportional to their likelihood (and I suspect, in this case, merely stating the hypothesis has exceeded that effort threshold).
The HN folks love Steve Jobs, who paid himself in backdated stock options[1] to get the long term cap gains discount, and took $1/year salary to avoid paying income and social security/payroll tax.
