Research exclusively shared with Breitbart News identifies hundreds of millions of dollars flowing from Bill Gates’ foundation to 11 of the 26 organizations that signed an open letter last month urging Twitter advertisers to boycott the company if Elon Musk restores free speech on the platform.
Breitbart News’ report, based on research and analysis from the newly-formed Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), analyzed public filings to trace hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions from the letter signatories back to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
American Businessman Bill Gates attends a discussion during the ‘Munich Security Conference’ in Munich, Germany, Friday, Feb. 18, 2022. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
In total, 11 of the 26 anti-Musk organizations received funding from a Gates-backed entity.
The New Venture Fund, which in 2020 received the largest one-year commitment the Gates Foundation had made in more than half a decade, funds four of the signatories:
- The Center for Media Justice
- The Media Democracy Fund
- The National Hispanic Media Coalition (via the Media Democracy Fund)
- Accountable Tech
The Tides Foundation, also a recipient of Gates Foundation money, funds five of the signatories:
Two other signatories are tied to Gates Foundation money:
- Empowering Pacific Islanders Community (funded by Gates-backed Community Partners)
- Reproaction (a project of Gates-backed NEO Philanthropy)
The open letter’s connection to the billionaire Microsoft founder is significant, as Gates is in the middle of a public feud with free speech advocate Musk. Last month, Gates revealed his $500 million short position against Musk-owned Tesla, prompting Musk to call Gates a “b*ner” killer alongside a meme of Gates as a pregnant man emoji.
Gates is also an outspoken censorship proponent, frequently calling on tech companies to do more to stop “health misinformation” spreading online.
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Musk threatens to reverse Gates’ strongly desired censorship policies — and now faces the wrath of Gates-funded NGOs.
Recently, Musk asked his 94 million Twitter followers to uncover the funding behind the 26 NGOs who signed an intimidation letter threatening to destroy the company’s advertising revenue if Musk reversed its censorship policies.
Musk followed up his request by highlighting one particular shadowy group, Accountable Tech, musing: “I wonder who funds them”.
His curiosity was prompted by a Washington Free Beacon investigation into Accountable Tech, which sought to get to the bottom of the nonprofit’s financial sponsorship. The Free Beacon visited Accountable Tech’s corporate office in Washington and concluded the organization doesn’t “actually exist.”
Rather, “Accountable Tech” was merely a “registered trade [name] for the North Fund, a shape-shifting nonprofit group that uses aliases to push an array of left-wing causes from a shell office in Washington, D.C.”
Via the Free Beacon:
Free Beacon then spoke with Caitlin Sutherland, the executive director of the watchdog Americans for Public Trust, who identified North Fund as receiving significant capital infusions from two further nonprofits, the Sixteen Thirty Fund and the New Venture Fund:Sutherland found that the North Fund received $19.3 million from the Sixteen Thirty Fund and over $11 million from the New Venture Fund, two organizations that share an address in D.C. Similar to the North Fund, the groups operate under at least 50 trade names—including “Fix Our Senate,” “Floridians for a Fair Shake,” and the “Voter Engagement Fund.”However, the Sixteen Thirty Fund and the New Venture Fund don’t disclose their donors either, leading to a dead end in the money trail.
But the trail may not be so cold.
What is known about New Venture Fund’s dark money funding is this: it is backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Per FFO’s analysis, disclosure files for the Gates Foundation grantee list show a whopping 102 separate cash grants to or through New Venture Fund, totaling an incredible $457 million since 2008.
Source: Foundation for Freedom Online
Philanthropy watchdog Sludge noted that the $70 million in cash grants it identified from the Gates Foundation to New Venture Fund in 2020 is the single largest one-year contribution that the Gates Foundation had made to any other single grantee since 2014, and its second-largest ever.
That figure may be even higher. Influence Watch reports $126 million in 2020, while FFO corroborated at least $85 million that year from public records. Per FFO, Gates funding dropped all the way down to $11 million for 2021, after the 2020 election cycle ended.
The sharp pullback in funding after the 2020 election makes sense, given the political nature of the New Venture Fund’s work. It is the parent organization for what has been described as one of the largest pro-Democrat dark mon..., the Sixteen Thirty Fund — which happens to be another megadonor to anti-Musk signatory Accountable Tech.
Via Sludge:
Sixteen Thirty Fund was a major player in the 2018 midterm elections, but played an even more significant role in the 2020 cycle, spending roughly $60 million funding the most prominent pro-Joe Biden super PACs, including seven-figure donations to Future Forward USA, League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, Take Back 2020, Priorities USA, Unite The Country, American Bridge, America’s Progressive Promise, Pacronym and other groups that spent hundreds of millions of dollars combined on anti-Trump and pro-Biden ads. The Republican-led anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project received $300,000 from Sixteen Thirty Fund in 2020.The nonprofits of Arabella’s network spend millions funding other political organizations and dark money groups, such as America Votes and Center for Popular Democracy—but they also spend millions of dollars annually on lobbying the U.S. government.
That means Gates’s biggest one-year act of “charity” in more than half a decade – while running the world’s largest “philanthropy” network – was functionally a pass-through payoff to surrogates of the Joe Biden 2020 presidential election campaign.
So much for ending AIDS, world hunger, and disease — by the numbers, the Gates Foundation’s top priority seems to be electing Democrats.
Musk recently announced he’ll be voting Republican for the first time in.... On top of his stated intention to reverse a half-decade of creeping censorship on Twitter, that puts him square in the path of Gates’s philanthropic freight train of paid political proxies. Bill Gates is funding a veritable NGO army — and it is zeroing in on Elon Musk.
Breitbart News requested comment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the other organizations mentioned in this article but has not received a response.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal T... Follow him on Twitter @LibertarianBlue.
