Bill Gates Slams Google Project Loon, Says “Won't Help” Poor

It's not that Google's Project Loon -- in which balloons floating above Third World countries would provide Internet access to the impoverished masses below -- is a bad idea. It just isn't helping anything, according to someone who may know.

Bill Gates -- the Microsoft founder and current billionaire philanthropist -- says that ideas like Loon just aren't solving any problems, according to PCWorld.

In interviews with Bloomberg, the Microsoft chairman said that Internet access doesn't do much to help a country that is stricken with problems of "poverty" and a lack of "education and health," the Web site reported.

"When you're dying of malaria... I'm not sure how [the Loon balloons will] help you," Gates told the Web site. "When a kid gets diarrhea, there's no website that relieves that."

Google has yet to respond to Gates's point, PCWorld reported.

Gates also had strong words for Google's philantrophic efforts -- or the lack thereof.

Google.org began in 2006 and pledged 1 percent of the company's profits to charity. That stopped, and Google.org now provides "accessible sources of information for people to tap into for disaster recovery, and the like," PCWorld reported.

"The actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor," said Gates, for whom lukewarm public service is not impressive.

Gates is also unimpressed with Silicon Valley -- he calls it "faddish" -- and the crop of entrepreneurs like Elon Musk who are spending big dollars on private space travel.

"I guess it's fun, because you shoot rockets in the air," Gates said. "But it's not an area I'll be putting money into."