>He gave 37billion to Bill Gates charitable foundation. He stated in an interview that he waited 50 years to find the right foundation to give to. What I don't understand is why the wait? There are plenty of worthy causes that don't have a high administrative overhead.

That's, in a nutshell, the reason I don't believe in charities, either :).

The whole philosophy is that it takes several steps:

1) I get rich and accumulate enough money
2) I then start thinking about those over whose backs I climbed
3) I still get to decide how much of the money to give back... and actually not have to give back in form of taxes, which would go wherever the law says, but would go wherever I say - so I'm giving it away, but I'm still in charge, and it'll do miracles for my image.

I've seen examples (doing a little web (re)search) of non-profits owned by profitable companies where the nonprofits really wouldn't make any profit, but still charged outrageously for whatever they were doing. How so? Well they had to cover their costs, which were incurred by purchasing goods and services from their parent company. Simple as that.

There's at least one famous example from the current or previous year, where the guy made a huge fundraiser and even added some of his own money, to get some kids into a special school of some kind - which is run by a charity non-profit he owns, but the school itself is for profit and the dorms and the campus are operated by one of his for-profit companies.

Speaking of Bill Gates's foundation, I keep remembering the "Constant gardener" book and movie. My mantra that Microsoft can't be trusted doesn't exclude "the man called doors, who sells windows".