MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | MONSTROSITIES | FALL 2026

When Helping  Causes Harm: Tech Billionaires, Philanthropy, and Epistemic Foreclosure

As truly monstrous, unprecedented fortunes, driven especially by developments in Big Tech, have raised the profiles of numerous billionaires worldwide, the philanthropy (and philosophies) of the world’s super rich increasingly dominate global health funding (in addition to multiple other domains of public life). In this talk, I examine this aspect of the global power of today’s tech billionaires through the lens of Carlos Slim, Mexico’s wealthiest entrepreneur, whose fortune primarily derived from a cell phone and internet empire that made him the richest person in the world from 2010-13 and still maintains his current standing in 2026 as the 15th richest globally. While his philanthropic gifts have, without a doubt, aided many and his Foundation is one of the Mexican government’s most important collaborators in health reform, his public statements reveal the exceptionally neoliberal character of his “development philosophy” and the values—centering technological solutions and the power of free markets—that underpin his giving. I argue that this philosophy fosters powerful epistemic foreclosures regarding the kinds of public health science and interventions that Slim’s philanthropy imagines and supports. I also compare Slim’s “development philosophy” to that of the Rockefeller Foundation, which significantly influenced Mexican public health between the 1920s and 1950s, to trace the long-term epistemic impact of elite philanthropy on Mexican health politics. Finally, to situate Slim’s discourse among contemporary billionaires, I compare his philosophy to that of Bill Gates and other, more recently emerging super-rich philanthropists, tracking commonalities and divergences in their public statements on how best to build our health futures.

Monstrosities
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