Being rich isn't evidence of anything except the ability to make money

The title of this post is a reaction to what Bill Gates is quoted to have said about the subject of climate change.

The trouble here is that a guy who is as rich as Gates is viewed as an authority on any subject just because he is rich.  Yet, in my estimation, I am not impressed by Gates' initiatives with respect to energy.  For instance, he has a program called TerraPower or something like that.  It sounds really impressive, but what Gates may not realize is that everything that TerraPower is trying to do has already been done.  It was done with molten-salt reactors forty years ago.  Basically, he is just reinventing the wheel.  Not only that, but he's not even making as good of a wheel as the original.

I think Gates is really smart about how to make money in selling software.  Outside of that core area, he may not be nearly as smart.  Maybe not even smart at all.

Throwing money at a problem isn't necessarily an answer either.  Once heard a story about how the Americans had spent a lot of money trying to get a pen to write in space.  A Russian solved that problem rather easily by giving the American astronaut a pencil.  See?  Sometimes a problem that seems really hard isn't hard after all.  It could be the assumptions underlying the problem.  In this example, there wasn't necessarily a need for an ink pen to work, just needed something that would write in space.  Didn't matter whether it was an ink pen or not.  That wasn't the problem.  The problem was in getting something that would write.  America has a lot more money than Gates, but the solution to that problem took a pencil that would cost less than a buck.

There was a recent post here about Gates making a new toilet.  But you don't need anything high tech in order to improve sanitation.  Off-the-grid "solarcabin" LeMar Alexander came up with a solution that uses very simple technology and works.  Just don't use water!   Or not much of it.  Then, let the sun dry it out.  Finally, bacteria will break down the waste naturally.  No need for anything fancy.

Gates cannot solve these types of problems because he's really not very good at these kinds of problems.  If he had to do this for a living, he'd starve.  The kinds of problems that Gates is good at is making money with software.  This doesn't make him an expert at anything else unless he can demonstrate otherwise.