Development is meant to alleviate problems in the interests of the public good, yet thegrowing dominance of private donors problematizes this conceptualization. Workingthrough a political-economic analysis of development, we see global communications asan industry that channels wealth from citizens into the hands of few corporate moguls,who then have the resources to assert their agendas in a global development context.We begin by conceptualizing development and social change within communicationstudies, paying attention to the privatization of aid within global capitalism. Next,we contextualize our case study, describing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundationand ONE, promoted by Bono, as the funding and management settings of the LivingProof campaign. We analyze the initiative’s construction of development problems,its articulation of how communication is expected to work toward social change, andits conceptualizations of success. The dominant theme of Living Proof program is that“real people” have achieved development success, which can be shared as “proof” withwebsite consumers. We conclude by considering how such a framing serves the agenda of privatized development within a neoliberal project.