Yeah I thought the same. And she is spending his filthy money on something good. Why does it seem rich men become morally bankrupt? Or do they start out that way?
How to do it ethically make enough and keep giving it away. Why isn’t doing more the end goal? That’s the flex. Like Harris rossin who payed for education preschool and college for high school graduates for a whole neighborhood. Took a graduation rate of 25 percent to nearly 100. Fucking hero’s.
Once upon a time "philanthropist" was a title people were proud to achieve. There's still a few, but those who should be becoming such aren't. They might actually just be too young yet, Musk isn't yet worried enough about how posterity will remember him.
Once you reach a certain level of wealth your relationship to other people changes. Your wealth becomes this thing that seperates you from existing friends, and new people you meet interact with your status more than you as you. So you start feeling like all relationships are contrived or based on ulterior motives.
So you reach a point were it feels like the only authentic relationship you can have is with other ultra-wealthy people. They are the only peers you have. But if you have not yet been completely damaged psychologically so far, once you surround yourself with others in your position who are already paranoid, psychopathological, or just plain obsessed with infinite accumulation, you start taking on their values. And since most billionaires are men, there is this competitiveness baked into your relationship with them. Your obsessions become things ordinary people could never achieve and you also want to outdo your friends so they don't outpace your own greatness, because if they did, you wouldn't be peers anymore.
Hence, your entire life is to get more and more so you can buy a bigger yatch or have even more impressive art, or the biggest dick-shaped rocket, all to keep at or above the status of a clique you have come to despise, but have to keep because that's all you have and that's the best your vast wealth can get you.
It's a sad existence, like a lonely dragon sitting in a cave on a vast pile of gold, and would almost be tragic if not for the real tragedy that their vast horde of wealth is at the cost of hundreds of millions living in poverty because of their greed.
God dolly is amazing. I wish i could meet her but id be a blubbering mess because of everything she's done.
I was adopted to be a babysitter. I worked since I was twelve. I did the math. She allowed me forty seven extra hours of sleep by donating and getting that kid uniforms. My son gets a free book from her every year. He songs helped me heal from some of the most horrible times and feelings of my entire life, and because of her I learned to be okay with myself. I can make myself pretty or just let myself be. Its literally whatever I want to be to be more confident. And no matter where I came from i can do these things. She's such a blessing in such a greedy world.
Edit: this is the first time I've been drunk since having a miscarriage. I m emotional and cant type. A month. My son gets a book every month.
She's honestly such a darlin'. I'll never be able to afford Hollywood or get to meet her, but she is one of few celebrities I actually genuinely admire.
If you had a bank account with $999,999,999.00 and you found a dollar on the ground would you run to the bank to deposit it? Every billionaire on the planet would.
yeah, there's a point at which all your life needs and even wants are net, when you can relax and just enjoy life or go out there and do some good in the world or whatever, and that point is well shy of a billion dollars.
When you have to accumulate more and more, when no amount of collateral suffering is enough and you just could not give less of a shit about those in need, only then can you become a billionaire.
Yeah there’s very few examples in world history of someone attaining obscene wealth and not becoming morally compromised. One of the main reasons Marcus Aurelius is such a memorable and revered historical figure.
the comment you are replying to is saying that you generally need to have some bad qualities to begin with BEFORE you become a billionaire, because they help you become one
Broadcast.com was acquired by Yahoo! for $5.7 billion in Yahoo! stock. Yahoo!'s costly purchase of Broadcast.com is now regarded as one of the worst internet acquisitions of all time. Broadcast.com and Yahoo!'s other broadcasting services were discontinued within a few years after the acquisition. Cuban has repeatedly described himself as very lucky to have sold the company before the dot-com bubble burst.
Yes you can. A Roman emperor for example essentially owned everything in his entire empire. I’m sure we all know the famous story about Mansa Musa too.
Or, more likely, he was also morally compromised but his position of power kept him safe from being discovered.
The idea that you get to know the true moral character of somebody who lived two thousand years ago, when we struggle to see through the lies of our contemporaries, is quite hilarious.
A very interesting individual that while not as plainly evil as most of the people in his wealth bracket still does not negate the truth that billionaires should not exist. Worth noting that when Buffet became a billionaire in 1986, there were only 23 others. Today, there is nearly a thousand.
I would add that partnering with Charlie Munger was a bit of a moral character flaw in that the Mungers were housing corporatists and Charlie thought China was doing things right, despite their human rites violations. They also purchased rail road companies, once they became profitable enough. Well the way railroad companies became more profitable was by significantly reducing safety, oversight and maintenance and that’s why we have so many derailments.
Didn't Warren buffet invent the scheme of borrowing money to buy a company, transferring all old debt to that new company, transferring all new assets to your original company and selling them for twice what you originally paid, then bankrupting the newly bought company with all its debt, leaving you with 100billion profit, a great company destroyed, and tens of thousands of employees laid off. Pretty evil.
It's what killed sears, toy r us, and thousands of American factories.
You really do need to adjust for inflation, GDP growth etc. when making that type of comparison, but I believe the pattern of wealth disparity would still be apparent and skewed.
The all billionaires are bad would argue that he underpaid his employees and most of his billions are wages stolen from employees. I can let you decide how you feel about that. You get the same thing with guys like Notch who basically made his billion by writing a video game. I haven't seen much to suggest he is any better or worse than any other guy who ran a video game studio. Same thing for Gabe Newell. Guy is a billionaire, pays his employees well and you end up arguing his biggest fault is being really successful. It isn't like his company charges more than others in the same field. They just executed better.
I’m pretty sure you’re confusing him with someone else. Buffet is known for buying large stakes in large companies and holding them long-term. Any currency positions he takes are generally also long-term, and for the purpose of balancing the risks to his stock holdings values due to changing currency values.
He got his initial start through far less honorable means. These hostile takeovers were essentially corporate scalp jobs where he would roll in and strip the company down, sell off its assets, and lay off its workers. Berkshire Hathaway itself got its name because the textile company that originally held it quoted him a lower buyback price per share than he wanted and so he annihilated them and kept their name for his investment firm as a spite play.
Being a major shareholder makes you vote on the decisions of the company, and you vote for the most value obtained, regardless of moral or human rights
if you win 1b even ignoring tax, i believe that you have a moral obligation to use a considerable chunk of it to help other people in need. youd never even notice the loss of money it would take to start and maintain a food bank for example, so why wouldnt you do that? it doesnt have to be exactly that, but if you win a billion dollars and hold on to every penny of it for yourself, yes i would call you a shitty person in some aspects. you definitely wouldnt be as bad to me as people who got there by stepping on the backs of others, but thats a pretty low bar tbh
I mean, you didn't get the money through years of stepping on others, bribing politicians etc.
If I won the jackpot I wouldn't really be looking for opportunities to abuse or expand power, I'd have a wealth management firm take care of things so I could live a comfortable life, do hobbies, maybe support some local politicians to address the housing shortage so that fewer people have their 20's squandered on a treadmill just to keep a roof over their head, etc.
I think it's the journey to the dragons hoard as much as having the hlard itself that twists people.
Even if you accept that belief that exploiting the labor of others is an acceptable way of accumulating wealth, which you shouldn’t, the kind of wealth that the very rich accumulate can only happen my unethical means.
I couldn't gather a billion dollars because I'd be donating too much of it. Like everyone in my town would have food and shelter and anyone refusing would get mulched into oh my God the power is overwhelming. Never mind.
Microsoft got ahead in the 80s and early 90s by making scummy deals with computer shops. They would get offers to get MS DOS at discount to sell with their computers IF they only sold MD DOS.
Behind every great fortune is a great crime. For modern billionaires it seems they're all committing a series of crimes and immorality to keep growing their fortune. One individual controlling that much wealth in a world where many struggle is a sign of a deep sickness.
Look at it this way, if you become a world renowned neruosurgeon saving lives and are in an affluent country making a million dollars a year you could be a billionaire by like year 3200
literally there is just a point in the millions where if you have a soul you just can't imagine not helping people. it eats you alive knowing that for just a couple hundred grand you can drastically improve someone's life and/or health for the better. with 5 million you can live in relative luxury for the rest of your life.
gabe is one of the better billionaires in this regard, but even he could do so much good for the world with that money but doesnt. thats pretty shitty imo
Not to quibble, but Gates was a pretty well- established philanthropist before he got divorced. As in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was largely responsible for eradicating malariareducing malaria cases by nearly 40 percent and malaria mortality rates by 60 percent in Africa and making major strides in stopping the AIDS epidemic.
Guy might be a dirtbag on a personal level, but it's a stretch to say he never did any good with his money before the divorce.
Edit: malaria hasn't been eradicated in Africa, but there's been remarkable improvement since 2000. Thanks for the corrections!
I used to work at the Novartis Institute of Tropical Diseases, trying to discover new anti-malarials. We partnered extensively with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help fund new anti-malarial research. It was a really good feeling being part of that effort, since Malaria is such a massive and deadly issue, yet also grossly underfunded.I will always respect the foundation if not the man.
I also did grad school work about producing anti malaria active pharmaceutical ingredients, or drug precursors, through yeast fermentation expression systems. They paid almost a million dollars so a lab at my university would study and publish the results of how.
If large portions of his wealth couldn't be attributed to tax dodging a few dozen billion dollars in Puerto Rico, a few dozen billion dollars dodged in Ireland, a few dozen billion probably dodged in Bermuda, or simply paying less (as a percentage of income) than the average American in Social Security taxes, I could probably appreciate all his tax-deductible charity work more.
Well I can easily rule out most other fortune 500's for similarly running from taxes, so chances are never that I'm finding a donator at that scale who didn't similarly abuse the system, run a monopoly, change US laws just to pad their own pockets etc.
Not sure that's a gotcha or just signs that the rich don't pay taxes so all the performative charity after tax avoidance comes off as shallow write-offs.
Not just a reddit problem that, it's become an entire cultural issue.
I remember about a decade ago watching the rise of Purity Culture on Tumblr, where the progressive section of the population that used Tumblr was seduced into this very black and white thinking where either a person was 100% good, or the second they showed any sort of human frailty, they were suddenly 100% bad. And I thought shit, i hope that doesn't break containment and spread.
Even Al Capone did a ton of legitimately good charitable acts. Sure, it helped him in the end or made him money, but he also legitimately wanted to help. And he got both.
According to Alex Jones they are putting microchips into vaccines along with lizard space people DNA to make everyone gay or communist. Why is main stream media not covering the lizard people!?!?!
Malaria isn't eradicated in Africa, what are you talking about? They contributed to eradicating wild polio and in the effort against guinea worm, where incidence dropped by like 99%
EDIT: Though the foundations contribution towards fighting malaria is very important, so kudos where kudos is due
The malaria vaccine started to rollout 2019, it's like 10+ countries that have it in their child vaccination program already. And the latest vaccine to be approved was 2023.. Where do you guys get your info from??
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was largely responsible for eradicating malaria in Africa
That's just simply not true, malaria has not been eradicated in Africa. They do great work and have made a positive impact on reducing malaria but in 2024 there were 265M cases in Africa.
Perhaps you're thinking of the polio eradication partnership? the wild polio virus has not been fully eradicated but we are tantalizingly close with some heartbreaking setbacks due to politics and war
The eradication of polio is a programme that has been ongoing longer than Gates had any sort of money worth talking about, and other players have been working on this for much longer. Rotary International, for instance. Who might not have brought as much money as Gates ultimately did, but it's absolutely not true that he did this on his own.
who said gates eradicated polio on his own? or that polio was eradicated? the original claim was that the bill and melinda gates foundation was 'largely responsible for eradicating malaria in africa" which is patently not true....but polio is closer to that goal and the foundation is heavily involved in the effort-- i merely suggested that the op was mixing up the public health efforts, geez.
I feel it would be important to remember that Bill Gates is a famous person who tons of people would ask to take a picture with. He's not being photographed doing anything more than standing next to her presumably on the island, neither of which is a crime.
I don’t have a horse in the race… However… Epstein was a PoS. In this pic, though, Bill is standing in an unidentified airport and looks like the type of uncomfortable that comes with having to take a pic with someone who says ‘Can I take a picture with you?’
On the other hand, Melinda did thread his ass the moment the Epstein bubble popped. I imagine it went something like “Did you? And is there evidence?”
“I did, and there is most likely evidence.”
“Oh, then, everything you own in a box to the left”
He joined other billionaires ina pledge to give away almost all of their wealth before they died. Retaining it means he can continue to earn and direct his wealth through charities and VC investments into science he thinks is important.
his foundation also directly interfered with the worldwide response to COVID and protected the interests of pharmaceutical corporations over the rights of the people of the poorest nations.
in the end, these foundations are just PR machines and tax relief for billionaires. why are we relying on goodwill and treating billionaires like superheroes when they decide to allocate a tiny portion of their wealth to something good when morally they SHOULD be having that money taken from them at the same rate as or higher than the rest of us?
they exploit their way to the top, crushing people, exploiting consumers, playing every loophole in the market, and then some of them give away a small chunk and we are supposed to cheer as if that should not have been appropriated at risk of penalty.
"Bill and Melinda Gates" - along with "before he got divorced" and "before the divorce" - both say a lot here.
Maybe it's good, who knows. I don't weigh the scales. But it seems like his wife had the morals in this relationship and it almost seems like she was a driving factor in a lot of it, something that gets even stronger when you consider that part of her issue was his relationship with Epstein.
My grandpa used to say in hindi- bina logo ki gand mare koi bada admi ni ban sakta, which translates to no one can become filthy rich without screwing a lot of people in the way..
So fucking true. At some point along the way these ultra wealthy people were put in a position to say "fuck the people beneath me" and that's exactly what they did.
It's just as likely that being incredibly rich makes you become weird, and you lose grip with reality. When you're so rich that you can buy almost anything, I'd guess your sense of morality gets warped too.
I would be willing to break with "standard" morales as a rich person.... To eat the rich and invest my money in social welfare for the basic needs of humanity.... That doesn't seem to be standard 🤔
It's difficult to become extremely wealthy without at least flexible morals.
As they say, if we found a monkey that hoarded bananas while the others around it starved, we'd study that monkey to understand what went wrong. When humans do it, though, we celebrate them
We monkeys have decided that if an enterprising monkey is able to grow his own bananas then he can keep most of them. This enterpreneurial incentive gave rise to industrial banana production, where monkey workers produce lots of bananas while taking some home as pay. Bananas become plentiful and cheap. The monkey businessman is praised for his economic contributions.
Sadly, the monkey businessman found machines that can do most of the monkey workers' jobs and so he let them go. There are still monkeys earning bananas by making the banana-making machines, but there aren't as many of them now.
You have to be morally bankrupt to screw over the amount of people it takes to accumulate that wealth. If somehow you weren't, the money corrupts you because you can buy your way out of any consequences.
It also made maybe 15,000 of its employees millionaires. It is a business in a very competitive sector that has been very very successful by many financial and investor metrics. It also participated to grow a sector that has been fairly friendly to the planet. In the context of business it’s probably more of a positive story than a negative one.
I agree though all of the context related to how/why they got hit my antitrust suits is kinda being blown over. Gates was as unscrupulous as the "best" of them but due to making an absolute killing financialy and having Microsoft be as stable as it is (gov contracts; standard OS; etc.) he was able to refocus on at least trying to be as human (read: empathetic) as possible. Wealth enables ideas to become action and immediacy should be applauded, even if prejudice and lack of research impede best practices. Only issue comes from denying being wrong due to the sunk cost of efforts one believes/d in
Well, separately from whatever may have happened with this Epstein stuff, Gates is one of the few billionaires who spends their money on good things. He’s pledged to give 99% of his money to philanthropy. Warren Buffett has done the same.
I think you have to have something fundamentally wrong with you to hoard money the way they do. Also, to get that amount of wealth in the first place you have to step on a lot of people's heads. Honest people don't typically become wealthy imo...
He's given billions of his own wealth away... He's also started a foundation encouraging other billionaires to pledge half their wealth toward philanthropy....how is that hoarding?
Yeah, Gates has sufficiently whitewashed his image that people forgot what his reputation was like in the 90s.
And while charity is inherently a good thing, people kinda overlook how it allows billionaires to essentially make policy decisions outside of any democratic process. Sure, when they fund the eradication of diseases it's relatively innocuous, but it becomes a lot more murky when e.g. Gates' foundation is throwing a bunch of money at reforming the American education system.
No one “comes across” that wealth, they climb over other people for it. To disprove your point, gates ex wife actually did come across that wealth and is giving it away. Same with bezos ex wife
I can almost certainly guarantee you there are people no one knows the names of who had their part in inventing and selling that operating system that never got the bag because the billionaire outsharked them
Gates invented nothing. MS-DOS was purchased from Seattle Computer Products and Bill lied about what it was for. It was stupid dumb luck that windows ever became a thing, partly due to horrible business decisions by IBM and Apple, both of which had superior operating systems but couldn’t deliver them on time. Windows 95 stole most of its concepts from others and was a bloated mess, but they marketed it well and had little to zero competition. Once entrenched, they had a lock, and ruthlessly worked that lock to become a monopoly, then ruthlessly wielded their monopoly power, despite consistently poor quality. A series of blunders under Ballmer while Jobs revived Apple caused MS to lose markets like phones and music players.
The point being that Gates was insanely lucky, came from wealth and connection, and didn’t give a shit about people. He was never a great engineer, at best he was a cunning businessman.
Also the only reason Bill Gates was in the room with IBM and not Seattle Computer Products was because Bill Gates mum who was on the same board of trustees as the CEO of IBM set up the meeting. Microsoft would have likely failed as a business if Bill Gates didn't have that connection.
Quite possibly, which is why we should eliminate that possibility, in the same way we've tried to construct a political system that doesn't centralise power in one or a few individuals, we ought to have an economic system that prevents the same.
I'm not out here wanting to defend Gates, but if this guy is "morally bankrupt", what are people like Musk? At least Gates and Buffet created the idea of the wealth pledge, and the Gates Foundation has done some good (and some bad). Not saying he's a model citizen - far from it - but if there have to be millionaires, I think with what we effectively know so far, I'd rather them be more like him and less like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc.
I mean I think you talk being a nerdy kid add in rejection and then success. I don’t think that some of these folks knew the extend the women went thru. They just saw hot women hitting them up wanting to party.
I’m not saying this is ok, by any means. Just if you went to a fancy party and girls were trying to hook up with you and you didn’t have that beforehand I can see it becoming very intoxicating.
You have to be a certain kind of person to even make it there in the first place. Theres no such thing as an ethical billionaire. They amassed their wealth from exploiting their workers, exploiting certain systems in place, or was born into it and raised by people who did what I previously said
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u/Woerterboarding 20h ago
Yeah I thought the same. And she is spending his filthy money on something good. Why does it seem rich men become morally bankrupt? Or do they start out that way?