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Bill Gates Invested in a Dark Money Fund to Attack Elon Musk

Hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing from Bill Gates' foundation to 11 of the 26 organizations that signed an open letter last month urging Twitter advertisers to boycott the company if Elon Musk restores free speech on the platform, according to research exclusively shared with Breitbart News.

Breitbart News’ report, based on research and analysis from the newly-formed Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), studied public documents to track hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from the letter signatories to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

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(FREDERIC J. BROWN/Getty, BNN Edit)

American Businessman Bill Gates attends a discussion during the 'Munich Security Conference' in Munich, Germany, Friday, Feb. 18, 2022. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)On Friday, February 18, 2022, American businessman Bill Gates attends a talk at the 'Munich Security Conference' in Munich, Germany. Michael Probst/AP Photo

A Gates-backed firm provided funds to 11 of the 26 anti-Musk organizations.

Four of the signatories are funded by the New Venture Fund, which got the highest one-year contribution from the Gates Foundation in more than a decade in 2020:

The Tides Foundation, also a recipient of Gates Foundation money, funds five of the signatories:

Two other signatories are tied to Gates Foundation money:

The open letter’s connection to the billionaire Microsoft founder is significant, as Gates is in the middle of a public feud with free speech advocate Musk. Last month, Gates revealed his $500 million short position against Musk-owned Tesla, prompting Musk to call Gates a “b*ner” killer alongside a meme of Gates as a pregnant man emoji.

Gates is also a vocal supporter of censorship, constantly urging tech companies to do more to combat the spread of "health misinformation" on the internet.

Musk has threatened to alter Gates' much-desired censorship rules, provoking the fury of Gates-funded NGOs.

Musk recently requested his 94 million Twitter followers to find out who funded the 26 non-governmental organizations who signed an intimidation letter threatening to wipe off the company's advertising revenue if Musk modified its censoring policy.

Musk went on to mention one such shady organization, Accountable Tech, and speculated, "I wonder who pays them."

His curiosity was prompted by a Washington Free Beacon investigation into Accountable Tech, which sought to get to the bottom of the nonprofit’s financial sponsorship. The Free Beacon visited Accountable Tech’s corporate office in Washington and concluded the organization doesn’t “actually exist.”

Rather, “Accountable Tech” was merely a “registered trade [name] for the North Fund, a shape-shifting nonprofit group that uses aliases to push an array of left-wing causes from a shell office in Washington, D.C.”

Via the Free Beacon:

Free Beacon then spoke with Caitlin Sutherland, the executive director of the watchdog Americans for Public Trust, who identified North Fund as receiving significant capital infusions from two further nonprofits, the Sixteen Thirty Fund and the New Venture Fund:

Sutherland found that the North Fund received $19.3 million from the Sixteen Thirty Fund and over $11 million from the New Venture Fund, two organizations that share an address in D.C. Similar to the North Fund, the groups operate under at least 50 trade names—including “Fix Our Senate,” “Floridians for a Fair Shake,” and the “Voter Engagement Fund.”

However, the Sixteen Thirty Fund and the New Venture Fund don’t disclose their donors either, leading to a dead end in the money trail.

However, the route may not be as frigid as it appears.

What is known about New Venture Fund's dark money funding is that it is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Per FFO’s analysis, disclosure files for the Gates Foundation grantee list show a whopping 102 separate cash grants to or through New Venture Fund, totaling an incredible $457 million since 2008.

Source: Foundation for Freedom Online 

Philanthropy watchdog Sludge noted that the $70 million in cash grants it identified from the Gates Foundation to New Venture Fund in 2020 is the single largest one-year contribution that the Gates Foundation had made to any other single grantee since 2014, and its second-largest ever.

That number might be far greater. Influence Watch claims $126 million in 2020, whereas FFO found at least $85 million in public documents that year. After the 2020 election cycle finished, Gates funding plummeted to $11 million for 2021, according to FFO.

Given the political nature of the New Venture Fund's mission, the steep reduction in financing after the 2020 election makes reasonable. It is the parent organization for what has been described as one of the largest pro-Democrat dark money groups in America, the Sixteen Thirty Fund — which happens to be another megadonor to anti-Musk signatory Accountable Tech.

Via Sludge:

Sixteen Thirty Fund was a major player in the 2018 midterm elections, but played an even more significant role in the 2020 cycle, spending roughly $60 million funding the most prominent pro-Joe Biden super PACs, including seven-figure donations to Future Forward USA, League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, Take Back 2020, Priorities USA, Unite The Country, American Bridge, America’s Progressive Promise, Pacronym and other groups that spent hundreds of millions of dollars combined on anti-Trump and pro-Biden ads. The Republican-led anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project received $300,000 from Sixteen Thirty Fund in 2020.

The nonprofits of Arabella’s network spend millions funding other political organizations and dark money groups, such as America Votes and Center for Popular Democracy—but they also spend millions of dollars annually on lobbying the U.S. government.

That means Gates’s biggest one-year act of “charity” in more than half a decade – while running the world’s largest “philanthropy” network – was functionally a pass-through payoff to surrogates of the Joe Biden 2020 presidential election campaign.

So much for ending AIDS, world hunger, and disease — by the numbers, the Gates Foundation’s top priority seems to be electing Democrats.

Musk recently announced he’ll be voting Republican for the first time in 2022. That places him squarely in the line of Gates' philanthropic freight train of paid political proxies, on top of his declared goal to overturn a half-decade of increasing control on Twitter. Bill Gates is sponsoring a huge army of non-governmental organizations, and it's focusing on Elon Musk.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the other organizations featured in this article have not responded to Breitbart News' request for comment.

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