WARREN AND BILL

An account of a friendship among moguls that has led to world-changing efforts—for better or worse.

“This book is about a friendship, one of the most impactful friendships of modern times,” writes filmmaker, novelist, and biographer McCarten. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates met in 1991, bonded over bridge and golf, and learned about each other’s business. In time, with Gates’ then-wife Melinda, they became the sole trustees of a foundation with more than $70 billion in assets. The author writes fluently about the origins of the Buffett and Gates fortunes: Buffett by investing in unsexy stocks with small returns that added up in the aggregate, Gates by founding Microsoft and, to some extent, monopolizing the personal computer market. Both made billions, for a time trading the world’s-richest-person title—and McCarten is helpful in explaining just what that means, likening the average American’s wealth to a grain of sand compared to their Moon-sized fortunes. As Steinbeck said, the ultra-rich spend two-thirds of their lives greedily seizing every cent they can only to spend the last third giving it away, and Gates and Buffett have poured billions of dollars into such social goods as family planning, access to abortion, women’s education, agricultural reform, and, most recently, Covid-19 research and medical delivery. (For this, strangely, Gates has become a QAnon trope of evil, while Buffett has gone largely unchallenged.) Throughout, McCarten raises critical questions about the wisdom of allowing individuals so much economic power—Gates may have given away billions, but “he was still a plutocrat holed up in his dream house, staring at yeomen tossed about on stormy seas”—suggesting that, for all the foundation’s good deeds, we need more discussion “about the role we want big money to play in our lives.”

A lucid biography that subtly questions the role of private philanthropy.