With the release of his latest book, Bill Gates is enjoying fawning profiles meant to set him apart from other tech billionaires, such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, who have all come under increased scrutiny for their recent turn to the right. While he may not be using technology to further political divisiveness, Gates does have an important kinship with his fellow billionaires, past and present: the paternalistic belief that his fortune, no matter how ill-gotten, is a good thing, because hes using it to save the world.This philosophy was first laid out in 1889 by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest Americans in history, in an influential essay titled the Gospel of Wealth. Carnegies response to the rising progressive sentiment of his day was to argue that wealth concentration is beneficial to society because it incentivizes innovation, efficiency, and economic growthand it also provides a further social good through philanthropy. The harsh treatment of workers and environmental degradation became worth the price of thousands of libraries.Sound familiar? Todays tech leaders provide almost the exact same logic for the legitimacy of their fortunes and as a justification for inequality. Influential venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, for instance, explicitly refers to this as a deal he believes exists between Silicon Valley and society, such that tech moguls should be given significant freedom to generate wealth through the innovations they create, and any negative societal or environmental impacts that result will eventually be offset by their future generosity.Andreessen says Joe Bidens breaking of this unspoken compact is what led to his and other tech leaders rightward turn and support of fellow billionaire Donald Trump.But of all the philanthropists following the neo-Carnegie deal, Gates is the pacesetter, despite the fact that there has been significant criticism of this model. Carnegies ideas are so discredited that when I taught a class on philanthropy at Harvard Kennedy School a number of years ago, we read Carnegies Gospel in the first session as an example of what not to do. Not only is the idea that business success somehow gives individuals both the right and the expertise to determine solutions to vexing social issues problematic, the Carnegie model is a blatant guidebook for philanthropy-washing and undermines democracy by concentrating decision-making in the hands of unelected billionaires rather than public institutions.Like Carnegie, the start of Gatess philanthropy was closely tied to significant critiques of his business practices and the source of his wealth. Twenty-five years ago, Microsoft was sued by the U.S. government for bundling Internet Explorer with other products in anti-competitive ways. When videos of Gatess deposition for the case were made public, his image took a significant hit. He came across as evasive and arrogant, refusing to acknowledge basic facts, denying understanding of common words like concern and support, and often dodging accountability.While at the time he and other tech moguls were known as the cyber-stingy for their lack of giving back, like Carnegie he came to see philanthropy as a way to restore and eventually burnish his reputation. Today there are many public testaments to the work of the Gates Foundation. For instance its funding of vaccines for polio, rotavirus, and COVID-19 and its work on malaria and HIV prevention have been estimated to have saved well over 100 million lives.But like Carnegie, Gates work has also come under criticism for a selective focus, and reflecting a billionaires know best ideology. While Carnegies interest inbuilding libraries and museums was laudable, it reflected his own biases and priorities, not the needs of the communities he sought to serve. At the time, the working-class and immigrant communities that suffered from his businesses employment practices often had little access or interest in these institutions, and would have benefited more fromlabor protections, housing, or public health infrastructure.Some of the Gates Foundations most well-known failures also illustrate an underlying imperial style that reflects Gatess own idiosyncratic interests rather than grassroots, democratic solutions, resulting in questionable outcomes.The Foundations education reform efforts pushed for standardized testing and charter schools in the U.S., which ignored teacher expertise and worsened inequality. In Africa, it has promoted industrial farming and genetically modified cropsoften against the wishes of local farmers who advocate for sustainable, small-scale agricultureand a number of reports have shown that these activities have not provided food security. Similarly, Gatess focus on addressing climate change centers on questionable technologies like direct air capture and geo-engineering that require extensive financial support rather than addressing emissions reductions solutions that consider climate justice needs.Many of my students who had worked in nonprofits expressed significant frustration about the dominance of the Gates Foundation in skewing the nonprofit landscape to Gatess personal interests, and further, how its bias toward quantification reflects a rigid, engineering-style approach to problem-solving that ignores the cultural, social, and historical contexts that shape human behavior. This is seen as a root cause of its educational reform failures. A focus on creating measures of teaching effectiveness and tracking them in detail led to stress for teachers, and contributed to teaching to the test, as opposed to more meaningful learning.This overly data-driven approach to philanthropy also closely tracks with effective altruism (EA), a philosophy that has wide resonance among the tech-elite. EA advocates a strict utilitarian logic to ethical decisions and treats problems as optimization puzzles rather than complex moral or social dilemmas. For example, its focus on assessing the outcome of charity based on the metric quality-adjusted life years ignores how such measures implicitly devalue certain groupssuch as the disabledand any approaches that dont fit into a neat cost-benefit framework.Disgraced crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was an effective altruist, and Elon Musk has described EA as a close match for his own personal philosophy.The level of hubris exhibited by Gates, Musk, and Andreessen when rationalizing their actions hasnt been seen since the Gilded Age. But we cant forget that theres a reason why these 19th-century industrialists were known as robber barons.Our current era has much in common with Carnegies day, when leaps in industrial, communications, and transportation technologies transformed the ways that people lived, and also led to extreme income inequality and the rise of a new class of ultrarich entrepreneurs. There was political gridlock and significant backlash against immigration too. Eventually, outrage at the widespread and systemic injustice of the Gilded Age led to the Progressive Era.But will todays polycrisis of climate change, economic inequality, public health challenges, and more create enough momentum for a fundamental shift in how we assess wealth and its sources? During the second Trump administration, it may be tempting to rely on Gates and his cohort of good billionaires, as newly elected Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin recently suggested. But there will be no 21st-century Progressive Era unless we start to question how one person is able to amass such wealth in the first place.