Google's For-profit Foundation

When Bill Gates set up his charitable foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I was disappointed.

Here was a guy who had revolutionized the world of the computer, but when it came to philanthropy he was just doing routine stuff.

Of course, he had to, because liberals were all over him like a cheap suit asking him why he wasn’t giving it all away yet.

But the Google guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are different. Their foundation, Google.org, will be a for-profit foundation. What a concept!

Of course, the agenda for their foundation is depressingly blah—tackling “poverty, disease and global warming.” Oh dear. As if everyone and his brother isn’t already spending billions on all this.

Give me a billion or two and I would reinvent education, health care, and the social safety net on the model of the Road to the Middle Class. But hey, that is just my crazy idea.

Guess who is going to be director of Google.org. None other than Dr. Brilliant.

No, seriously! According to Katie Hafner in The New York Times,

Dr. [Larry] Brilliant, a 61-year-old physician and public health expert, has studied under a Hindu guru in a monastery at the foothills of the Himalayas and worked as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Aparently he applied for the job with an email to info@google.com, but they didn’t pay any attention.
Then “Dr. Brilliant was awarded the TED Prize, an award given at the annual Technology, Entertainment and Design conference” and Google invited him to give a talk at the company.

The rest, as they say, is history.