The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation lobbied against waiving intellectual property laws that would’ve let countries produce the vaccines themselves. Instead, only the pharma companies that owned the IP could produce it, and those vaccines were immediately gobbled up by wealthy countries leaving millions in poorer countries without a vaccine. So no, he’s not one of the good ones, his philanthropy is still evil with a hint of good purely to launder his reputation.
A null pointer exception is technically memory safe, you can get equivalent behavior with .unwrap() on an Option in Rust.