Put together 6 mega-billionaires and direct them towards the world of energy: they will certainly choose the green one because that's where the business will be done for the next twenty years. And so it was: Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and great Scrooge now out of his "old" passion, announced Sunday that he had set up a Fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures Fund, with an endowment of 1 billion dollars and the obligation to invest them are in alternative sources. He is in excellent company since, together with him, the patron of Alibaba Jack Ma, the owner of Reliance Industry Mukesh Ambani, the founder of Virgin Richard Branson, the father of Amazon Jeff Bezos, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, the founder and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla.
In short, a nice pool of billionaires who promise to give Trump a hard time, given that the US president-elect denies global warming and has chosen as Secretary of State, the equivalent of our foreign minister, a man of the caliber of Rex Tillerson, number one at ExxonMobil, certainly on very friendly terms with Moscow, the living icon of the world of fossil energy that he knows and governs from the top of a group where he entered production as an engineer in 1975 and has covered all the steps of the command ladder up to his post as CEO in 2006. 16 years have passed since then and he has never left the chair leading a group with 16,2 billion in profits in 2015 and 15,1 billion in dividends distributed to shareholders.
Tillerson, however, is not a denier and in the portrait he painted the The Washington Post he positions himself to President Trump's left on the environmental issue. So much so that as CEO of ExxonMobil, the group has taken a position in favor of the Paris climate agreement. Will she be able to change Trump's mind? Perhaps. But Gates and the other founders of the Green Fund have a better chance of succeeding, with business arguments to which the newly elected president is more sensitive.
The Breakthrough Energy Ventuires Fund (Bev) is already online, will become operational starting from 2017, will last 20 years and will have the sole purpose of investing in technology and innovation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions in almost all sectors: production and energy storage, transport, industrial processes, agriculture, manufacturing, construction. "We are open to anything that can lead to the generation of clean, cheap and sustainable energy" said the founder of Microsoft. A man with a $75 billion bank account. Considering also the assets of the other co-founders of the Fund, it easily reaches 170 billion dollars. A good business card, no doubt about it.
