Bill Gates released his annual letter on Friday and it was a bit disturbing. The Microsoft co-founder titled his letter “Optimism with Footnotes.” The footnotes are dark, to say the least.
“Friends and colleagues often ask me how I stay optimistic in an era with so many challenges and so much polarization. My answer is this: I am still an optimist because I see what innovation accelerated by artificial intelligence will bring. But these days, my optimism comes with footnotes,” Gates wrote.
Gates points to the way that the world went backwards in 2025 in one very important way: the number of deaths of children under 5 years old.
“Over the last 25 years, those deaths went down faster than at any other point in history,” wrote Gates. “But in 2025, they went up for the first time this century, from 4.6 million in 2024 to 4.8 million in 2025—an increase driven by less support from rich countries to poor countries. This trend will continue unless we make progress in restoring aid budgets.”
Gates has previously warned about the destruction of USAID, calling out fellow billionaire Elon Musk specifically for taking a chainsaw to the federal government and destroying the foreign aid agency. If we can reverse the trend, Gates says humanity could get back on track.
“The next five years will be difficult as we try to get back on track and work to scale up new lifesaving tools. Yet I remain optimistic about the long-term future. As hard as last year was, I don’t believe we will slide back into the Dark Ages. I believe that, within the next decade, we will not only get the world back on track but enter a new era of unprecedented progress,” Gates insisted.
If you want to read the letter in full, you’re welcome to do that, but you’ve probably read enough depressing shit this week, from the killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis to Elon Musk’s robot making child sexual abuse material.
Instead, why don’t you take this moment to check out a video of a 13kg deer taking on a 1.7-ton rhino? The deer is named Tata and the Rhino is named Maruska, according to the Telegraph and they’re at the Wroclaw Zoo in Poland.
🦌 🦏 Tiny 13kg deer takes on 1.7-tonne rhino at Wroclaw Zoo
A case of David vs Goliath at Wroclaw Zoo, as a tiny 13kg deer takes on a nearly two-tonne rhinoceros and appears to come out of the clash on top.
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— AFP News Agency (@en.afp.com) January 9, 2026 at 4:59 AM
Isn’t that much more fun than staring at the horrors all day or reading an annual letter from some dude who keeps showing up in the Epstein files? We thought so too. Until we noticed that people were questioning whether the video of the deer and rhino was real. As far as we can tell, it’s not AI, especially since AFP is a reputable international news outlet. Also, the zoo posted the clip to its own Facebook page.
But you never know, do you?
Read the full article here
