Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation will probably eradicate polio.
Before people jump on the bandwagon about how Gates is evil and problematic, that there are no virtuous billionaires, and a government or an NGO or an equivalent should have been the one to do it... I know. But the question was "name one billionaire that's done anything good," and I think it's pretty difficult to argue that eradicating polio isn't good.
On same tone, Warren Buffet.
He has also donated billions in the same charity and largely lives controversy free.
The company he’s synonymous with is very much not controversy free
Didn't one of the Koch brothers die? That was pretty cool.
I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
-quote
Yup rest in piss
It's pretty easy to come up with some things billionaires have done that are good. Bill Gates funding cures and prevention of diseases in the third world is one that comes to mind.
Now, if we're talking about finding an example of a billionaire whose life is on balance a good thing for humanity...that's pretty much impossible.
Elon Musk got me to stop using Twitter.
He also got me to stop using Reddit after hanging out with their CEO too. What a great guy 👍
Good acts do not make a good person. Plenty of billionaires have done good things, but they don't even come close to outweighing the bad.
I love a quote I read once in a thing about alignment. "If you fix twenty neighbor's roofs, you're Jimmy the Helpful Thatcher. But if you eat the neighbor's daughter, you're Jimmy the Cannibal, and no amount of additional carpentry assistance will change that."
Traditionally this joke is:
Bad Scottish Accent Engaged
I build 200 ships, do they call me Seamus the shipbuilder? Nae.
I paint 100 houses, do they call me Seamus the Housepainter? Nae.
But ye fuck one sheep...
A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.
True, and they generally get ample praise for the good. The bad has, unfortunately, rewarded them with their billions.
Give them a cookie and the wall
In what order tho?
They get to chew on the cookie as we load the guns, it's only fair
IDK if it works in this case.
The people with power over you will inevitably use that logic to demand constant praise.
The issue is that any philantropy a billionaire does comes from money "earned" through exploitation and is never enough to un-make them a billionaire. Even if they did, it's still a single person taking the resources of millions of people and controlling it themselves to put into their pet projects, in a completely undemocratic manner - so Gates gets to benefit from the looting of Africa and then turn arounf and tell Africans how he will be allocating that stolen loot. Oh, and that man controlling so much policy in various African nations thinks Africa is overpopulated, an extremely racist eugenicist myth.
The good and bad are not separste things you can judge in isolation, any "good" a billionaire does is only possible by causing disproportionate harm. It is not as though these billionaires are personally doing much of anything, they are simply seizing resources from the public to inefficiently address problems that the public could have managed themselves if they were permitted to control their own lives, if they aren't just doing what Gates does of using donations as money laundering.
Yeah, the wording of OP's question is dumb for this reason. What person on this planet has done literally only evil things? A better question would be more like "What billionaire is genuinely a good person and why?" Personally the size of my list of "overall good" billionaires is a rounding error but at least the thread would be more interesting.
Then all of them. They are human beings, not black holes of pure evil.
I need a source for that.
Elon Musk:
Destroyed Twitter
Currently engaged in a protracted war to kill all Tesla owners
Destroyed the myth of meritocracy
Grifting the Pentagon for all the money he can and then just not doing what he's paid to
Paul Allen funded a bunch of scientific and medical research, as well as quite a few museums and other public works around Seattle. He was the largest private donor to the fight against Ebola in Africa.
Sergey Brin is a big Wikimedia contributor, as came out a few years back when their donor list leaked.
also you should check out his card
It's even got a watermark.
TRY GETTING A RESERVATION AT DORSIA NOW!!!
This is probably a slightly misguided idea to go after them as bad people because as soon as they do do something "good" you leave the door open for people to think that perhaps on balance they're not so bad after all.
The problem of billionaires being billionaires is itself the chief complaint people should have. It doesn't matter if they're Mr Rogers and Santa Claus combined, because they can choose to be so entirely at will and can be selfish assholes too entirely at will. They can also be other things entirely, given they are actually human beings after all they can try to act on best intentions, but like all humans, with great ignorance or with flawed thinking. When you or I do that the consequences can be terrible, but mostly, we'd be unable to come close to the scale of impact these demi gods can leave in their wake, not to mention the "original sins" that allowed them to become billionaires in the first place leaving a legacy of nasty indirect consequences for society at large.
There's actually a lot of examples of billionaires philanthropy and as you likely expected to point out when people mentioned that, some of those acts hide less pure intention, but undoubtedly they probably really did do some good and that itself is enough to completely undermine your whole point that they never do anything good. The issue is that, with the sheer vast quantity of concentrated wealth and power they can wield, the society that supports them is bereft of a real voice in how it's resources are used. So much of the fruits of our labour end up closed off in private coffers and it undermines public institutions like democratic governments because while we may theoretically have a say in what they do, we legally have no say at all in how a billionaire spends his bucks (and I say his intentionally). They might say we oughtn't since it's their money and no one typically has a say in what the rest of us do with our money but as with most things, there's a point of extreme where this logic becomes perverse.
Most/all of them have done good things. A better question is are there any that have done enough good to outweigh the bad
You conveniently left out the definition of "good" so you can move the goalposts if you don't like the answers you get.
Good is never a perfectly internally consistent category, we always have to discuss it. We just don't start with the incorrect preconception that there's such things as universal definitions except as relative claims. "The only universal is the relative" or something like Hegel said.
Good is anything that Pixel of Life annoys
Elon Musk helped mastodon grow
low fucking bar mate
Google "what s funny", bruv
I Googled "what's funny" and it showed me a Mr. Beast video, so now I don't trust you.
There’s a lot. In the late 1800s it started becoming something of a tradition for billionaires to move on to philanthropy after their retirement. J.D. Rockefeller was worth several hundred billion dollars in today’s money. He gave away close to 200 billion of it.
A more modern example that people have brought up is Bill Gates.
As Hedberg said, say what you will about Hitler, he did kill Hitler.
... slowly?
...😅
He sacrificed billions for the destruction of twitter. I can respect that. Now do Facebook
...That one guy's stupid submarine provided like a week of entertainment
That one Koch brother died. The submarine guy too, he was a Standard Oil heir who took at least one other billionaire with him.
Before anyone jumps on me, billionaires suck, without exception, for reasons I don't really need to go into here, you've all heard them a million times over, and whatever good they do does not offset that in the slightest. None of them probably have been or will be a net positive influence in the world.
That said, you can probably pick out a few good things that any individual billionaire has done (and you can absolutely feel free to debate their motivations for doing those things, many of them I'm sure we're done for tax reasons, vanity, etc.)
Some of the old robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie (Carnegie was not technically a billionaire, but if you adjusted his wealth for inflation he would be the richest person today by a pretty comfortable margin) funded a lot of universities, libraries, etc.
Bill Gates has done some good work with vaccines despite his shitty business practices with Microsoft.
Musk is overall a shithead, I don't like him, I don't like his companies, I don't even like his vehicles. That said, I think it's pretty fair to say that Tesla has helped (though he is not solely responsible) to kick open the door for EVs to start gaining wider acceptance and adoption. And SpaceX is doing some exciting stuff, though again I dislike a lot of their methods, disagree with a few of their goals, don't like how they're run as a company, etc. But long-term I think we need to have our eyes to the stars, whether it's for settling on other worlds, mining asteroids, asteroid defense, or if I dare dream it, building a Dyson sphere, or just for scientific advancement for it's own sake, and unfortunately SpaceX is one of the major players in that field now.
Bezos hasn't done anything too flashy that comes to my mind, and like musk he is also a shithead that I dislike for pretty much the exact same reasons, excuse me for not repeating them, but he does have and donate to quite a few charities.
Again, none of that is enough to offset the shitty things they do, but I'd be surprised if you could find any very rich people who haven't at least donated to a handful of charities.
Chuck Freeney. He basically invented "Duty Free" stores and became a billionaire in the process. Then decided he should die "broke" and created The Atlantic Philanthropies secretly staking it with a little over a third of his wealth. In 2020 he closed the organization because he had given away the vast majority of his net worth. Mostly as grants to universities all over the world. He also may have low-key helped fund the IRA.
He's still got enough to live comfortably, and I'm sure his family is set up nicely.
Funding one of the biggest terrorist organisations of the 20th century doesn't sound like a very good thing to do... Same goes for all the other Americans who gave them money without realising they were (are) pretty much universally hated across all Ireland - much like how most Muslims hate IS
say it again for those in the back, Lord Mountbatten!
Up the RA
Comparing the IRA to ISIS is legit disgusting.
Not at all, they're both disgusting groups of people (as were & are unionist extremists) who ruined the lives of people they claim to be liberating
Frankly they're incredibly similar organisations
You understand that there's a difference in like, motive right?
Like however you feel about the IRA's methods, their motives is still something worth fighting for. And honestly like when you REALLY fight for something like that, like actually do what's necessary, its a messy process and you're going to do things that moderate liberals look down on as going too far. We can argue about if all of their actions actually serve the cause, but what they wanted to do is something I agree with.
Versus ISIS? Really? What noble and positive goals does ISIS have?
To some people pleasing god and liberating people from sinful leadership is something worth fighting for. And when you REALLY fight for something like that it's a messy process and you're going to to things that moderate liberals look down on as going too far.
That is the exact argument you are trying to make, and if you think that it is a deranged extremist view you should take a good look in the mirror - I can see autism shining through here due to your utter inability to see others points of view and draw equivalences.
Lmao nice ableism asshole.
Don't worry, I'm autistic too, it just so happens that I don't hide behind it or use it as my whole identity and I'm self-aware enough to put in a bunch of extra effort trying to do the things which don't come naturally, like seeing things other points of views
It's fucking hard but at least I don't live in a perpetually online bubble
What the fuck are you talking about, most Irish don't dislike the IRA, what kind of brain-dead take is that? The 1916 IRA are heroes, the British were bombarding Dublin. The black and tans were gunning down civilians, and the IRA were fighting back.
Now, the PIRA was a lot more disliked by the Irish, but after Bloody Sunday feelings became mixed. A lot of folks were vehemently against the PIRA, a lot were in support, but the vast majority just wanted the bloodshed to end.
Even then, by % of civilian casualties, the PIRA had a 30% civilian casualty rate, which isn't great. But it's literally better than some of the loyalist paramilitaries which had OVER 50% CIVILIAN CASUALTY RATES.
You go to County Clare and yell Tiochfaidh ár lá on a Saturday night and see how ""universally hated"" the RA are.
And you compare them to ISIS? My god.
Tell me you're either not Irish or a teenager without telling be you're a not Irish or a teenager.
Very few people who lived through the IRA of the 70s to 00s would be saying "BuT tHeY wErE tHe GoOd GuYs 100 YeArS aGo" - to most people the Provisional IRA are the IRA because the original IRA is a thing of history books these days.
As for the loyalist paramilitaries, they were terrorists too. Just because they were doesn't mean the IRA weren't.
pretty much universally hated across all Ireland
tell me you aren't irish without telling me you aren't irish
Posted 4:39 Irish time
Either you're perpetually online and in an echo chamber (hexbear moment) or you're very much not Irish.
Regardless, republicanism and republican slogans are rightly popular, but the (provisional) IRA is not in the slightest, again just like the Islamic symbolism which is used by Muslims but also by extremists who regular people would want no association with.
Wrong
Just spamming wrong everywhere isn't going to win you any debates nor convince anyone.
Funding the IRA is one of the one things anyone has mentioned here that I might give a pass.
Warren Buffet invented the buffet (I think) and I met my girlfriend at a buffet. She is a paramedic, I lost consciousness because I drank 4 litres of the truffle bechamel (I did the maths and this would have cost the restaurant slightly more money than the admission fee, hence hurting Warren Buffet's bottom line)
What, do you think they just sit around smoking cigars and laughing evilly all day?
Its not that they dont do anything good, their evik acts just offset it.
"The Carnegie Library, Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, and the Carnegie Hero Fund"
He helped a lot with anti-imperialism and education, he's a large reason why there are public libraries in America, establishing 3,000 of them. He also helped space exploration by helping fund the 100-inch hooker telescope.
He also helped building the peace palace in the Hague, unfortunately the United States have since declared that they don't respect the jurisdiction of the International court over American citizens, therefore seriously diminishing it's credibility..
I dont know her name
Jeff bezos ex wife, who has donated a lot of money to charity
MacKenzie
who has donated a lot of money to charity
where did they get that money in the first place? the dollar mines? the grand tree of bills? if the only way to get money is to work for it and dollars don't magically fall from the sky, which I think is a reasonable theory, then it's necessarily true that they stole it from us. not even being glib, that individual person didn't do the labor to get that much money - it's literally impossible, it would take millions of years of work to get billions of dollars at any reasonable wage - they had to take the surplus value of the labor of other people to obtain it.
it's akin to a thief stealing the money of a group of people and then giving a fifth of it back and demanding we bask in the light of their charity
Well, not to diss on giving to charity but two technical arguments against. One is, you are acting as an additional tax on the worker (the source of the surplus) and then redirecting that tax to charity. It's fine but the elected government has democratically selected priorities that they can rarely fund so it is better to just give it to the treasury. And 2, just don't collect this tax in the first place, allowing the worker to spend it on the local economy.
No he is alright of cours , he spends Milllons on Media to obscure why he keeps the patents .....
if you dont think Bill ates is good and awsome , those millions would have been wasted , so please inthe name of the most influencal Patent holder for third World Country illnesses ...
he is good , No really! Have you read the papers he pays...
The question was about whether a billionaire had done anything good.
Agreed - he is somewhere between a shitty husband or a monster, but he definitely has helped rid the world of some bad diseases, and his charities continue to do quite a bit of good around the world.
In the old days, you could just pay the church for absolution; now, you have to rid the world of diseases. SMH
Inflation is everywhere nowadays. In my day you could get absolution for a nickel.
Thank you
Paywall, login popup shite. I hate websites like this.
That article is much ado about nothing. He knew Epstein and met him occasionally. So did every other billionaire and politician. Unlike some other of Epstein's associates, there's nothing to suggest Gates indulged or was even aware of Epstein's excesses.
the Titan that shipwrecked on the way to the Titanic shipwreck was pretty neat.
Still waiting for bezos to launch himself into the sun tho
Nah, his rockets aren't good enough to do that. He's going to get stuck in orbit and asphyxiate, and we can all watch his rocket burn up on re-entry and point and laugh.
Chuck Feeney. He gave away everything to charities.
Edit: it was around 8bn.
So only good billionaire is someone who is not a billionaire.
In a sense, voluntarily choosing to not be a billionaire is the goodest thing a billionaire could do.
If they do it right before they die though, that makes it pretty dubious.
In spirit I agree with you, but I can imagine a scenario in which someone ended up with a group of people who aren't explicitly evil but do exploit employees and end up helping their "friend" who doesn't exploit people to become a billionaire, either to ease their own conscience or for any number of selfish reasons. The person ends up as a billionaire and doesn't get rid of it in their life for whatever reasons (people usually like to appease people they know personally)
It's mostly just a thought experiment, the existence of a good billionaire, but it's technically possible for sure, even if not actually possible.
It's interesting as a thought experiment because there's no real world example of this. Which I guess is the gotcha OP was going for, but kinda fumbled.
Arguably hoarding the wealth for yourself (and even your immediate family), never mind how you accumulated it, is still not "good". It's indirectly oppressive to collect a bunch of money, while many suffer, and say "noone else is touching this, it's mine".
Yeah I still find it hard to digest that someone with a conscience actually made that much money in the first place. I'd love to see how he arrived at this decision, and if he could convince others too.
I have billions of Zimbabwe dollars and I picked up litter for 2 hours a few weeks ago. So there's at least one!
I would imagine all the billionaires have done something good at least once.
Wikipedia isn't a valid source. Didn't your teachers tell you that in 9th grade?
Wikipedia has citations on every one of those points.
A combination of citations that are either useless for demonstrating anything (see reference 25) or hinge on the western pop-politics conspiracy that there is a genocide of the people of Xinjiang (21, 26, 30), looking in the intro.
K
I don't mean to tell you your job, but this seems awfully flippant for "combating authoritarianism" or whatever neoliberal bullshit you characterize yourself with.
I'm undeniably pro-gulag so thanks for letting me know this source is for me!
I believe all billionaires have done something good. I don't think that makes them good people due to the staggering amount of wealth they withhold from the population.
Doing good things, doesn't make you a good person. Donating millions is nothing when you have billions.
If I had to choose a specific, I'd say Bill Gates. I've never fact checked it but I've heard he set up multiple charities and donates for helping children, seems like a great thing to do.
Gabe Newell is the least shitty billionaire I can think of, I'm not sure what he does for philanthropy though but at least it doesn't seem like he tries to influence the country for his benefit.
Oh wow I've never really considered Gabe's wealth, he would be exceedingly wealthy, wouldn't he?
Google said he's worth just shy of 4 billion.
I love Valve, but I really don't understand why gamers give Steam so much praise. It is a closed platform filled with DRM on which you don't truely own a copy of the game (unlike gog), and on top of that they take a 30% cut of every sales and transactions which is enormous for small studios to pay. Support is poor and the algo/front page distribution of traffic and promotions is a black box.
Don't get me wrong, Gabe seems like a sensible human, and Steam is successful because it offered such a great service to players. But it's been almost 20years now since Steam, and I have not seen Valve slow down the greed. They don't need the money as this point. They don't need 30% of every game sale on PC. This is just as greedy as the other company people hate.
For all his shortcomings, Forrest Gump put a lot of the money he made from his Apple stocks back into his community.
Brian Acton is the only billionaire I can think of that hasn't been a net negative.
Co-founded WhatsApp, which became popular with few employees. Sold the service at a reasonable rate.
Sold the business for a stupid large sum of money, and generously compensated employees as part of the buyout.
Left the buying company, Facebook, rather than do actions he considered unethical, at great personal expense ($800M).
Proceeded to cofound signal, which is an open, and privacy focused messaging system which he has basically bankrolled while it finds financial stability.
He also has been steadily giving away most of his money to charitable causes.
Billionaires are bad because they get that way by exploiting some combination of workers, customers or society.
In the extremely unlikely circumstance where a handful of people make something fairly priced that nearly everybody wants, and then uses the wealth for good, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with being that person.
Selling messaging to a few billion people for $1 a lifetime is a way to do that.
Makes sense that suddenly becoming billionaire with every intention to not remain one by turning into a force of good is arguably one way to be a decent human. In other words, the only good billionaires are those not trying to be, or remain billionaires.
There is also a point where you have to be smart and patient with how you distribute your money, or else you simply risk some other greedy asshole to pocket it.
Hell, I'll take someone who wants to be a billionaire, as long as they do it without exploitation. It's just that that's nearly impossible to do, since very few people actually individually create a billion dollars worth of value.
ITT: people who can't understand the difference between doing something good and being good.
Of course there are plenty of billionaires who have done good things, and pointing out all the ways they are still a shit person doesn't change that. Shitty people occasionally do good things, even if for shitty reasons.
This query is counterproductively reductive. Every human alive, even the worst of them, has done at least one good thing. Many even do their bad things because they were misled to believe they were doing an overall good.
The point should be that it doesn't matter what good they've done, because the state of being a billionaire necessarily requires one to have done more net bad to the world than good. You could save a million lives by your own hand, but if you're a billionaire, it is a given that you have destroyed far more lives than that. No billionaire's heart was ever weighed by Anubis and judged worthy of the Field of Reeds.
All of them, without exception, end up as greasy streaks on the gleaming teeth of Ammit.
Not a modern "billionaire", but you can make an argument that Andrew Carnegie spent a lot of his fortune on things that weren't awful.
Carnegie is probably the "best" billionaire in modern history. You can't go to a town in America without seeing some park or public building that was built with his money. I wish more 1% actually followed the Gospel of Wealth.
Not just America - my home town in New Zealand had a Carnegie library. I live in Scotland now, where his birthplace is a museum. https://www.carnegiebirthplace.com/ His money is still funding various trusts in the UK.
Some posts mention people giving away billions in their later life. That sounds great.
However, you need to ask yourself how much of their obscene wealth was created by screwing someone else over? Essentially nobody can get so rich without taking money out of the pockets of other people. You can't just generate money out of thin air.
is this a psyop? surely its a psyop
youd probably have a hard time naming one billionaire that hasnt done anything good
theyre still a shit thing to have, practically never got the money they have by being a good person and shouldnt exist in the same world as homeless people, starvation or massively underfunded public projects
You haven't looked beyond the surface of Gates philanthropy. His involvement diverts focus away from critically acclaimedneeded work in these regions for his pet projects - the science doesn't dictate the focus, the whims of the billionaires do.
Philanthropy is just a tax break and PR move.
And a way of manipulating world politics.
Osama bin laden did 9 11
Wasn't a billionaire.
I tougth he was. Then i guess there arent any good ones after all.
It is easy to think that, but it was mostly his father who controlled the wealth. Osama himself had dozens of siblings:
Bin Laden was one of more than 50 children of Muhammad bin Laden, a self-made billionaire who, after immigrating to Saudi Arabia from Yemen as a labourer, rose to direct major construction projects for the Saudi royal family.
David Koch died, which is a very good thing he did for humanity.
Bit of a gimme, though, isn't it?
Jeffrey Epstein, when he killed himself, probably.
Pretty sure he didn’t kill himself any more than Prince Andrew doesn’t sweat.
Tfw you're hanging out in a cell getting ready to testify against a bunch of super-powerful people, in a prison that's prevented every attempted suicide in decades, after having made repeated statements that you have absolutely no intention of killing yourself, and then suddenly both the guards leave to go take a nap, and at that exact time, you notice that the multiple cameras watching your cell all randomly glitch off at the same time, so at that moment you decide to kill yourself using a method that's indistinguishable from being murdered
To be fair, both guards were tired from doing a bunch fo online shopping suddenly for no obvious reason
Thus ensuring Trump's compromat would not get revealed. Suuuure he killed himself...
MacKenzie Scott, Bezos's ex. She's given more than $14 billion to charity.
Trick question.
The billionaires who do good don’t want their names attached to their deeds because that defeats the purpose. The point of altruism is you don’t want credit.
(Seriously there aren’t many, though, because if you’re hoarding money, you’re a horrible person.)
Jack Dorsey bought me lunch once.
What? They're greedy humans who are doing things that have terrible consequences out of selfishness, not mustache twirling cartoon villains out to destroy the world for destruction's sake. I'm sure every single billionaire in the world has done something good at some point. That doesn't justify the kind of wealth disparity that makes their existence possible though.
Wrong
How is what they said wrong lmao. They literally acknowledge that doing individual good things doesn't justify the wealth disparity. Every word of what they said is 100% accurate. The worst humans do individually good things sometimes and the title of the thread is NOT about the net good or bad the person did. I don't think you read the title of the thread. I think you're just dunk/upbear thirsty. I hate this element of hexbear sometimes.
Do you mean net good (more good than bad) or is a good thing like "established public libraries" acceptable even if he also oppressed workers and stifled unions and bought government officials and stuff?
How many libraries is enough libraries to offset it though? That's the question. 5 libraries? Probably not. 10000 libraries? ...🤷
10 billion libraries? Now you're oppressing people in a whole new way. That's more than one library per person. Surely not scalable.
Well that's why I asked OP if this is "net" calculation (good - bad) or if just the good counts.
By my evaluation I don't think any billionaire (or equivalent using PPP calculations) has ever or could ever do enough "good" to overwrite the "bad" they have to do to accumulate that much wealth, unless they literally spend it all on improving people's lives including getting down in the trenches themselves.
His foundations pioneered developments in medical research and were instrumental in the near-eradication of hookworm and yellow fever in the United States.John D. Rockefeller
Markus Persson made a pretty cool game you may have heard of.
He also started to go crazy after selling Mojang.
Sometimes I wonder if that came from the Money or if it would've happened anyways.
I suppose money sort of liberates you from social pressure.
You can shitpost and be multiple kinds of terrible from a different plane of existence with that amount of fuck you money.
In these comments: People who think someone can accumulate obscene personal wealth and then give a small percentage away makes them good. But if someone dares suggest taxing that obscene wealth they are a monster.
Not to defend billionaires, but this post sets an incredibly low bar. I imagine that all people, billionaires included, have done something good in their lives.
Very true.
I was just trying to draw attention to some of the comments that are defending them. You'd think from some in here that a little smidge of philanthropy in retirement makes it all okay that one person can hoarde enough personal wealth to feed millions.
Are we really seeing people say we shouldn't tax billionaires? I wouldn't say that. But this post is basically rage baiting. Like. Yeah. There definitely have been Billionaires who have given all their money away. Or at least the majority of it. They exist. I get why people think Billionaires shouldn't exist. I'm all for taxing them. I'm all for changing regulations to disallow such a large accumulation of wealth and then hoard it so it can't circulate and do what it's meant to do. But are we really suggesting that the majority of people don't think we should tax Billionaires?
Yes. Well, some saying we shouldn't tax billionaires more and others saying that the money is better off with one private individual setting up companies and charities, rather than leaving that to governmental entities.
To me, someone paying only ~25% tax when earning millions per year is obscene.
Reread the title. The question has nothing to do with billionaires being good people.
Reread my comment. I'm commenting on the content of the comments.
Give me a billion dollars and I'll donate some to the ravioli foundation.
Any of the billionaires that have already died did one thing good by nature of having died.
They've all done at least one good thing that's a insanely low bar that's very subjective. Name one that isn't more good than harm in the world? They don't exist.
Mike Cannon-Brookes (co-founded Atlassian) has set up a 1.5b green fund to invest in green energy projects
The problem isn't a billionaire that's done anything good, the problem is a billionaire who has done more good things than bad.
Those don't exist.
There's no amount of good you can do to make up for the amount of exploitation you had to do in order to get to be a billionaire.
It doesn't mean that a billionaire can't do anything good. It just means the world would still be better off without them.
What if you make an app or a game and sell it for 2 Billions dollars?
What if you take a shit, turn around, and find 2 billion dollars in the toilet?
Millburn Pennybags or Uncle Pennybags gave you $200 every time you passed go.
He owed society much more than that, do no.
Bruce Wayne.
Notch made Minecraft.
He's been a little shit since then, but at least Minecraft is pretty cool.
I think his actions as a billionaire are more telling.
Minecraft is just a knock off of Infiniminer anyway and Zachtronics are much more deserving of the billions. Love all their games. What else has Notch done?
MacKenzie Scott
She enabled Jeff's rise for far too long.
Michael Kelly caused Blockbuster to go out of business.
Double dog dare me?
My two cents:
The current problem is rather that relatively many rich people are trying to do good things. The vast amount of private donations and privately funded NGOs, etc., have a strong influence within traditional, often national, political and governmental processes. This has had good and bad consequences and has been done with good and not so good intentions. Even if all consequences were good, the question remains to what extent we object to the fact that the choices of where to put money have been made by individuals and not arrived at through democratic processes, which can also lead to good or bad consequences.
It is unfortunate that "effective altruism" has become the trendy moral framework for many wealthy individuals, especially within Silicon Valley, to make decisions about where they put their money and how. Effective altruism is a questionable moral theory because it is primarily about the question of "how" to act and less about why. The theory suggests no underlying value system. As a result, it remains a values-free form of consequentialism, unlike, say, utilitarianism, a form of consequentialism that does propose an underlying value, namely happiness - and thus happiness maximization as a goal. Moreover, "effective" is a vague term, which also remains relatively free to fill in.
The free-fillability of effective altruism combined with the inherently individual choices of, well, individuals, currently creates friction between wealthy individuals and democratically elected bodies.
This is imho the current issue we need to think about, regardless of any "goodness" of consequences. Where do the responsibilities, rights, duties, freedoms and liabilities of wealthy individuals start, lie and end with respect to those of democratically elected governments, other representatives of the people, and, of course, 'regular' citizens.
Anything? That seems like an easy goal to score on. Maybe you mean "done good overall"?
Current Agha Khan founded the Agha Khan Development Network which has done a fair amount of good in the developing world.
Agha Khan Development Network
The Aga Khan operates a large horse racing and breeding operation at his estate Aiglemont, in the town of Gouvieux in the Picardy region of France – about 4 kilometres (2+1⁄2 miles) west of the Chantilly Racecourse. In 1977, he paid £1.3 million for the bloodstock owned by Anna Dupré and in 1978, £4.7 million for the bloodstock of Marcel Boussac.[82]
The Aga Khan is an ardent yachtsman. He co-founded the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda in Porto Cervo, Sardinia in 1967. He also commissioned a 164-foot yacht, Alamshar, named after a prized racehorse of his, with a price tag of £200 million. The cost and maintenance are partly covered by chartering. The yacht was advertised as having a top speed of 60 knots, capable of setting a new transatlantic speed record.[citation needed] It reached a speed in excess of 55 knots in its initial trials but despite the claims, it was never intended for transatlantic speed records as it does not have the range.
Forbes describes the Aga Khan as one of the world's fifteen richest royals, and the most recent estimate of his net worth is $13.3 billion.[13] He is unique among the richest royals in that he does not preside over a geographic territory.[14] He owns hundreds of racehorses, valuable stud farms, an exclusive yacht club on Sardinia,[60] Bell Island in the Bahamas,[61] two Bombardier jets, a £100 million high speed yacht Alamshar, and several estates around the world
In the 1990s, the Aga Khan had a group of US$400 a night Italian luxury hotels, called Ciga. Currently the Aga Khan, through his for-profit AKFED, is the largest shareholder in the Serena Hotels chain.[64] The Aga Khan's racing horse businesses bring in considerable income.[65] He owns and operates the largest horse racing and breeding operation in France, the French horse auction house, Arqana, Gilltown Stud near Kilcullen in Ireland, and other breeding/stud farms in Europe
He married a Thyssen, yes as in Thyssen Krupp a Nazi collaborating company focused on the war goals and used plenty of forced labour. Honestly I doubt that even what is financed via 10% of much poorer people's income than his that is done via the AKDN means he is a good guy.
AKFED is part of AKDN. He literally uses poor peoples money to build hotel chains for the rich and ultra rich and also is more interested in his own vanity and consumption than the people.
Irrelevant?
Prompt was: a billionaire who has done anything good, not, a billionaire who has never done anything not good.
A better question might be “name a billionaire that does more good than harm to the world”? Although personally I think that’s an impossibility.
Bill Gates. (Has donated money to charity and founded one himself).
Has donated money to his own charoty to aviod taxes and then did donations to manipulate world politics for his own agenda
There,
FTFY
He donated money before having founded his charity.
The dead ones
Chuck Feeney out here just existing and you having the audacity to suggest that good billionaire's don't exist. 3.7 Billion dollars donated in his lifetime.
a good billionaire cannot possiblly exist. if they did they would donate enough money to lose the title of billionaire
He did.
ok cool :) although...wouldnt this not answer the original question ?
He became a billionaire. He gave away his wealth over the course of his lifetime. He meets the criteria of a billionaire and a person who has done something good. Other billionaires are having trouble due to the scale of giving away so much money and vetting who receives it. McKenzie Bezos became a billionaire when she split with Jeff Bezos. She then came under fire not for giving away money, but for not vetting who it was being given to. People who think giving away money is easy or doesn't require some hard work don't understand the scale they're talking about I think.
Like. Imagine Elon Musk trying to give away $144Billion. To a non-corrupt individual, entity, or charity. We can't even eliminate corruption completely in regular charities that only handle millions of dollars yearly. That's the equivalent of some countries'whole GDP. But we can't eliminate corruption in just about any country in the world.
If the goal is to do something good, it requires work. That's an important part to remember.
fair
J.K. Rowling, amongst others, have given away so much money that they've lost their billionaire status.
Huh that is pretty nice... Wait did they give it away for some heinous TERF shit?
No, not that I'm aware of
The guy who ran Cuyamel back when they were bribing the Honduran government and after that the United Fruit Company supposedly spent the rest of his life drafting social welfare legal proposals for democrats. Which given just how evil the United Fruit Company was is more of an indictment of new deal legislation than anything else tbh.
Crassus invented the fire brigade and his head became a stage prop for the Parthians.
Crassus invented the fire brigade
Didn't he routinely order his brigade to do nothing until he managed to acquire the burning property (at increasingly decreased cost as the fire raged) from its owner ?
Yes, that too. He also was one of the most prominent slave traders of the time and put down the Spartacus revolt.
Trying to find the silver lining here.
That one brought a couple friends and his billionaire son down and unalived together.
Probably unintentional, but that one moment saved the planet a lot of hurt down the line I'm sure.
Kanye West made "Graduation".
That's not to excuse the gigantic list of awful things he said and did (especially recently), but finding ONE thing a bad person did isn't hard.
After realizing he never made a better album. Kind of cancels it out though...
I don't know about that, MBDTF was pretty good.
Which version the initial released one or one of the fifteenth edits he released afterwards?
For real it's better then life of pablo but that's really not saying much.
Batman
The amount of exploitation and destruction of the environment that it takes to accumulate 1 billion dollars can never be offset by any amount of “good” that is done by money. If I extract resources and a exploit a community and get a billion dollars, then turn around and give every cent back to that community, surplus value will still be lost.
Came to say essentially this but looking at the fact that one person having that much money with all the shit going on is absurd.
Mansa Musa
About the only complaint I have about him is that he still owned slaves.
Tony Khan created AEW and seems to genuinely care about his employees. He put on a private plane this week so the wrestlers could attend the funeral of Bray Wyatt and still make it to Dynamite
Wrong
As a wrestling fan, what giddy described is pretty much true. For a billionaire, Tony is "nice" (too nice, because his niceness has lead to a toxic backstage environment, though he did finally fire CM Punk so thats nice). Like sure it doesn't outweight the exploitation inherent in being a billionaire, but Tony is indeed a "nice guy" and does go out of his way to do nice things for his employees. Also gives them health insurance in an industry where thats not the standard and such.
And the question was "a billionaire who done anything good" not "a billionaire who's overally contribution to the world is good". Giddy answered the question correctly. Sorry to autism you with pedantry but like, I have to insist on some technically accurateness here.
Like honestly, did you even know who Tony was before this post or did you just respond wrong because you were going to do that to anyone who said any billionaire did something good? Are you actually knowledgeable about this subject?
I'm not saying he doesnt get the wall in a revolution or anything. But the post asked "Did anything good", and he did. he did good things for his employees.
Some of them have died already. That is good.
Bill gates and Warren Buffet have both argued for higher taxes on the wealthy and have donated millions to solve social problems.
Chuck Feeney
I don't know current ms ceo?
He still allows Windows to exploit people's data to the fullest
yea but he is better than the previous ones
Still massive, massive room for improvement. Still very much anticompetitive and uses M$' monopolistic position. Still looks for ways to squash competition. And still wants people locked in to Windows and their products. Case in point, I was hoping VS for Mac is a change of course, and will pave the way to VS for Linux, but I'm proven wrong once again.
Li Ka-shin is another good answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ka-shing who gained a bunch of money like Bill Gates and started his own foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ka_Shing_Foundation which works towards education reform, the foundation constantly builds and donates to universities to help them further the reach of impoverished students. Additionally, they support a lot of medical services and research to help impoverished areas of HK.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. Romans 3:12
You're right. There's no billionaire who has done good. But there's also no human who has done good either.
Wtf is jesus waiting for it's been 2000 years
feel like shit rn
Not yet, he died in his thirties.
How about no? Stop deepthroating billionaires, please.
Sure.
Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation will probably eradicate polio.
Before people jump on the bandwagon about how Gates is evil and problematic, that there are no virtuous billionaires, and a government or an NGO or an equivalent should have been the one to do it... I know. But the question was "name one billionaire that's done anything good," and I think it's pretty difficult to argue that eradicating polio isn't good.
On same tone, Warren Buffet.
He has also donated billions in the same charity and largely lives controversy free.
The company he’s synonymous with is very much not controversy free
Yeah, dude is asking the wrong question.
The submarine dude that got rid of a few more in one go?
That voyage killed a kid too, can't really call it a good act overall
I wish for an explanation pls.
The OceanGate sub that imploded on the way to the Titanic.
Wasn't anywhere close to being a billionaire.
Didn't one of the Koch brothers die? That was pretty cool.
I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
-quote
Yup rest in piss
It's pretty easy to come up with some things billionaires have done that are good. Bill Gates funding cures and prevention of diseases in the third world is one that comes to mind.
Now, if we're talking about finding an example of a billionaire whose life is on balance a good thing for humanity...that's pretty much impossible.
Elon Musk got me to stop using Twitter.
He also got me to stop using Reddit after hanging out with their CEO too. What a great guy 👍
Good acts do not make a good person. Plenty of billionaires have done good things, but they don't even come close to outweighing the bad.
I love a quote I read once in a thing about alignment. "If you fix twenty neighbor's roofs, you're Jimmy the Helpful Thatcher. But if you eat the neighbor's daughter, you're Jimmy the Cannibal, and no amount of additional carpentry assistance will change that."
Traditionally this joke is:
Bad Scottish Accent Engaged
I build 200 ships, do they call me Seamus the shipbuilder? Nae.
I paint 100 houses, do they call me Seamus the Housepainter? Nae.
But ye fuck one sheep...
A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.
True, and they generally get ample praise for the good. The bad has, unfortunately, rewarded them with their billions.
Give them a cookie and the wall
In what order tho?
They get to chew on the cookie as we load the guns, it's only fair
IDK if it works in this case.
The people with power over you will inevitably use that logic to demand constant praise.
The issue is that any philantropy a billionaire does comes from money "earned" through exploitation and is never enough to un-make them a billionaire. Even if they did, it's still a single person taking the resources of millions of people and controlling it themselves to put into their pet projects, in a completely undemocratic manner - so Gates gets to benefit from the looting of Africa and then turn arounf and tell Africans how he will be allocating that stolen loot. Oh, and that man controlling so much policy in various African nations thinks Africa is overpopulated, an extremely racist eugenicist myth.
The good and bad are not separste things you can judge in isolation, any "good" a billionaire does is only possible by causing disproportionate harm. It is not as though these billionaires are personally doing much of anything, they are simply seizing resources from the public to inefficiently address problems that the public could have managed themselves if they were permitted to control their own lives, if they aren't just doing what Gates does of using donations as money laundering.
Yeah, the wording of OP's question is dumb for this reason. What person on this planet has done literally only evil things? A better question would be more like "What billionaire is genuinely a good person and why?" Personally the size of my list of "overall good" billionaires is a rounding error but at least the thread would be more interesting.
Mark Cuban is a bit of a wall street asshole, but he’s created a drug company to slash the prices of generic drugs for Americans: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/24/1075344246/mark-cuban-pharmacy#:~:text=Billionaire%20investor%20and%20Dallas%20Mavericks,of%20its%20online%20pharmacy%20Wednesday.
For sure! I wanted to make sure someone chimed in on this. I forwarded it to an elderly hospital roommate who was extremely appreciative.
A single good thing that a single billionaire has done? The Gates foundation fighting malaria. I think that's good.
Taxing them would do even more good.
Is the topic of the thread called “Should we tax billionaires” or was it “I dare you to name one good thing a billionaire has done”?
Tax what though? There's no profit to tax.
For sure
Anything good?
Then all of them. They are human beings, not black holes of pure evil.
I need a source for that.
Elon Musk:
Paul Allen funded a bunch of scientific and medical research, as well as quite a few museums and other public works around Seattle. He was the largest private donor to the fight against Ebola in Africa.
Sergey Brin is a big Wikimedia contributor, as came out a few years back when their donor list leaked.
also you should check out his card
It's even got a watermark.
TRY GETTING A RESERVATION AT DORSIA NOW!!!
This is probably a slightly misguided idea to go after them as bad people because as soon as they do do something "good" you leave the door open for people to think that perhaps on balance they're not so bad after all.
The problem of billionaires being billionaires is itself the chief complaint people should have. It doesn't matter if they're Mr Rogers and Santa Claus combined, because they can choose to be so entirely at will and can be selfish assholes too entirely at will. They can also be other things entirely, given they are actually human beings after all they can try to act on best intentions, but like all humans, with great ignorance or with flawed thinking. When you or I do that the consequences can be terrible, but mostly, we'd be unable to come close to the scale of impact these demi gods can leave in their wake, not to mention the "original sins" that allowed them to become billionaires in the first place leaving a legacy of nasty indirect consequences for society at large.
There's actually a lot of examples of billionaires philanthropy and as you likely expected to point out when people mentioned that, some of those acts hide less pure intention, but undoubtedly they probably really did do some good and that itself is enough to completely undermine your whole point that they never do anything good. The issue is that, with the sheer vast quantity of concentrated wealth and power they can wield, the society that supports them is bereft of a real voice in how it's resources are used. So much of the fruits of our labour end up closed off in private coffers and it undermines public institutions like democratic governments because while we may theoretically have a say in what they do, we legally have no say at all in how a billionaire spends his bucks (and I say his intentionally). They might say we oughtn't since it's their money and no one typically has a say in what the rest of us do with our money but as with most things, there's a point of extreme where this logic becomes perverse.
Most/all of them have done good things. A better question is are there any that have done enough good to outweigh the bad
You conveniently left out the definition of "good" so you can move the goalposts if you don't like the answers you get.
Good is never a perfectly internally consistent category, we always have to discuss it. We just don't start with the incorrect preconception that there's such things as universal definitions except as relative claims. "The only universal is the relative" or something like Hegel said.
Good is anything that Pixel of Life annoys
Elon Musk helped mastodon grow
low fucking bar mate
Google "what s funny", bruv
I Googled "what's funny" and it showed me a Mr. Beast video, so now I don't trust you.
There’s a lot. In the late 1800s it started becoming something of a tradition for billionaires to move on to philanthropy after their retirement. J.D. Rockefeller was worth several hundred billion dollars in today’s money. He gave away close to 200 billion of it.
A more modern example that people have brought up is Bill Gates.
Here's a list of them that all did one good thing in 2021
Elon musk he is slowly destroying twitter
As Hedberg said, say what you will about Hitler, he did kill Hitler.
... slowly? ...😅
He sacrificed billions for the destruction of twitter. I can respect that. Now do Facebook
...That one guy's stupid submarine provided like a week of entertainment
That one Koch brother died. The submarine guy too, he was a Standard Oil heir who took at least one other billionaire with him.
Before anyone jumps on me, billionaires suck, without exception, for reasons I don't really need to go into here, you've all heard them a million times over, and whatever good they do does not offset that in the slightest. None of them probably have been or will be a net positive influence in the world.
That said, you can probably pick out a few good things that any individual billionaire has done (and you can absolutely feel free to debate their motivations for doing those things, many of them I'm sure we're done for tax reasons, vanity, etc.)
Some of the old robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie (Carnegie was not technically a billionaire, but if you adjusted his wealth for inflation he would be the richest person today by a pretty comfortable margin) funded a lot of universities, libraries, etc.
Bill Gates has done some good work with vaccines despite his shitty business practices with Microsoft.
Musk is overall a shithead, I don't like him, I don't like his companies, I don't even like his vehicles. That said, I think it's pretty fair to say that Tesla has helped (though he is not solely responsible) to kick open the door for EVs to start gaining wider acceptance and adoption. And SpaceX is doing some exciting stuff, though again I dislike a lot of their methods, disagree with a few of their goals, don't like how they're run as a company, etc. But long-term I think we need to have our eyes to the stars, whether it's for settling on other worlds, mining asteroids, asteroid defense, or if I dare dream it, building a Dyson sphere, or just for scientific advancement for it's own sake, and unfortunately SpaceX is one of the major players in that field now.
Bezos hasn't done anything too flashy that comes to my mind, and like musk he is also a shithead that I dislike for pretty much the exact same reasons, excuse me for not repeating them, but he does have and donate to quite a few charities.
Again, none of that is enough to offset the shitty things they do, but I'd be surprised if you could find any very rich people who haven't at least donated to a handful of charities.
Chuck Freeney. He basically invented "Duty Free" stores and became a billionaire in the process. Then decided he should die "broke" and created The Atlantic Philanthropies secretly staking it with a little over a third of his wealth. In 2020 he closed the organization because he had given away the vast majority of his net worth. Mostly as grants to universities all over the world. He also may have low-key helped fund the IRA.
He's still got enough to live comfortably, and I'm sure his family is set up nicely.
Funding one of the biggest terrorist organisations of the 20th century doesn't sound like a very good thing to do... Same goes for all the other Americans who gave them money without realising they were (are) pretty much universally hated across all Ireland - much like how most Muslims hate IS
say it again for those in the back, Lord Mountbatten!
Up the RA
Comparing the IRA to ISIS is legit disgusting.
Not at all, they're both disgusting groups of people (as were & are unionist extremists) who ruined the lives of people they claim to be liberating
Frankly they're incredibly similar organisations
You understand that there's a difference in like, motive right?
Like however you feel about the IRA's methods, their motives is still something worth fighting for. And honestly like when you REALLY fight for something like that, like actually do what's necessary, its a messy process and you're going to do things that moderate liberals look down on as going too far. We can argue about if all of their actions actually serve the cause, but what they wanted to do is something I agree with.
Versus ISIS? Really? What noble and positive goals does ISIS have?
To some people pleasing god and liberating people from sinful leadership is something worth fighting for. And when you REALLY fight for something like that it's a messy process and you're going to to things that moderate liberals look down on as going too far.
That is the exact argument you are trying to make, and if you think that it is a deranged extremist view you should take a good look in the mirror - I can see autism shining through here due to your utter inability to see others points of view and draw equivalences.
Lmao nice ableism asshole.
Don't worry, I'm autistic too, it just so happens that I don't hide behind it or use it as my whole identity and I'm self-aware enough to put in a bunch of extra effort trying to do the things which don't come naturally, like seeing things other points of views
It's fucking hard but at least I don't live in a perpetually online bubble
What the fuck are you talking about, most Irish don't dislike the IRA, what kind of brain-dead take is that? The 1916 IRA are heroes, the British were bombarding Dublin. The black and tans were gunning down civilians, and the IRA were fighting back.
Now, the PIRA was a lot more disliked by the Irish, but after Bloody Sunday feelings became mixed. A lot of folks were vehemently against the PIRA, a lot were in support, but the vast majority just wanted the bloodshed to end.
Even then, by % of civilian casualties, the PIRA had a 30% civilian casualty rate, which isn't great. But it's literally better than some of the loyalist paramilitaries which had OVER 50% CIVILIAN CASUALTY RATES.
You go to County Clare and yell Tiochfaidh ár lá on a Saturday night and see how ""universally hated"" the RA are.
And you compare them to ISIS? My god.
Tell me you're either not Irish or a teenager without telling be you're a not Irish or a teenager.
Very few people who lived through the IRA of the 70s to 00s would be saying "BuT tHeY wErE tHe GoOd GuYs 100 YeArS aGo" - to most people the Provisional IRA are the IRA because the original IRA is a thing of history books these days.
As for the loyalist paramilitaries, they were terrorists too. Just because they were doesn't mean the IRA weren't.
tell me you aren't irish without telling me you aren't irish
Posted 4:39 Irish time
Either you're perpetually online and in an echo chamber (hexbear moment) or you're very much not Irish.
Regardless, republicanism and republican slogans are rightly popular, but the (provisional) IRA is not in the slightest, again just like the Islamic symbolism which is used by Muslims but also by extremists who regular people would want no association with.
Wrong
Just spamming wrong everywhere isn't going to win you any debates nor convince anyone.
Funding the IRA is one of the one things anyone has mentioned here that I might give a pass.
Warren Buffet invented the buffet (I think) and I met my girlfriend at a buffet. She is a paramedic, I lost consciousness because I drank 4 litres of the truffle bechamel (I did the maths and this would have cost the restaurant slightly more money than the admission fee, hence hurting Warren Buffet's bottom line)
What, do you think they just sit around smoking cigars and laughing evilly all day? Its not that they dont do anything good, their evik acts just offset it.
An older example is Andrew Carnegie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie who worked hard to create...
"The Carnegie Library, Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, and the Carnegie Hero Fund"
He helped a lot with anti-imperialism and education, he's a large reason why there are public libraries in America, establishing 3,000 of them. He also helped space exploration by helping fund the 100-inch hooker telescope.
He also helped building the peace palace in the Hague, unfortunately the United States have since declared that they don't respect the jurisdiction of the International court over American citizens, therefore seriously diminishing it's credibility..
I dont know her name
Jeff bezos ex wife, who has donated a lot of money to charity
MacKenzie
where did they get that money in the first place? the dollar mines? the grand tree of bills? if the only way to get money is to work for it and dollars don't magically fall from the sky, which I think is a reasonable theory, then it's necessarily true that they stole it from us. not even being glib, that individual person didn't do the labor to get that much money - it's literally impossible, it would take millions of years of work to get billions of dollars at any reasonable wage - they had to take the surplus value of the labor of other people to obtain it.
it's akin to a thief stealing the money of a group of people and then giving a fifth of it back and demanding we bask in the light of their charity
Well, not to diss on giving to charity but two technical arguments against. One is, you are acting as an additional tax on the worker (the source of the surplus) and then redirecting that tax to charity. It's fine but the elected government has democratically selected priorities that they can rarely fund so it is better to just give it to the treasury. And 2, just don't collect this tax in the first place, allowing the worker to spend it on the local economy.
Whats with Bill Gates?
No he is alright of cours , he spends Milllons on Media to obscure why he keeps the patents .....
if you dont think Bill ates is good and awsome , those millions would have been wasted , so please inthe name of the most influencal Patent holder for third World Country illnesses ...
he is good , No really! Have you read the papers he pays...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/business/bill-melinda-gates-divorce-epstein.html
The question was about whether a billionaire had done anything good.
Agreed - he is somewhere between a shitty husband or a monster, but he definitely has helped rid the world of some bad diseases, and his charities continue to do quite a bit of good around the world.
In the old days, you could just pay the church for absolution; now, you have to rid the world of diseases. SMH
Inflation is everywhere nowadays. In my day you could get absolution for a nickel.
Thank you
Paywall, login popup shite. I hate websites like this.
That article is much ado about nothing. He knew Epstein and met him occasionally. So did every other billionaire and politician. Unlike some other of Epstein's associates, there's nothing to suggest Gates indulged or was even aware of Epstein's excesses.
the Titan that shipwrecked on the way to the Titanic shipwreck was pretty neat.
Still waiting for bezos to launch himself into the sun tho
Nah, his rockets aren't good enough to do that. He's going to get stuck in orbit and asphyxiate, and we can all watch his rocket burn up on re-entry and point and laugh.
Chuck Feeney. He gave away everything to charities.
Edit: it was around 8bn.
So only good billionaire is someone who is not a billionaire.
In a sense, voluntarily choosing to not be a billionaire is the goodest thing a billionaire could do.
If they do it right before they die though, that makes it pretty dubious.
In spirit I agree with you, but I can imagine a scenario in which someone ended up with a group of people who aren't explicitly evil but do exploit employees and end up helping their "friend" who doesn't exploit people to become a billionaire, either to ease their own conscience or for any number of selfish reasons. The person ends up as a billionaire and doesn't get rid of it in their life for whatever reasons (people usually like to appease people they know personally)
It's mostly just a thought experiment, the existence of a good billionaire, but it's technically possible for sure, even if not actually possible.
It's interesting as a thought experiment because there's no real world example of this. Which I guess is the gotcha OP was going for, but kinda fumbled.
Arguably hoarding the wealth for yourself (and even your immediate family), never mind how you accumulated it, is still not "good". It's indirectly oppressive to collect a bunch of money, while many suffer, and say "noone else is touching this, it's mine".
Yeah I still find it hard to digest that someone with a conscience actually made that much money in the first place. I'd love to see how he arrived at this decision, and if he could convince others too.
I have billions of Zimbabwe dollars and I picked up litter for 2 hours a few weeks ago. So there's at least one!
I would imagine all the billionaires have done something good at least once.
And a hundred bad things because .
That wasn't the question.
Elon Must did pretty much destroy Twitter?
Hitler was a billionaire and in the end he did kill Hitler.
Fuck Bill Gates apologists in particular
Your source is pro-russia, pro-china, and other authoritarian regimes.
It's a well-sourced article, get over yourself
They spin those facts in their own bias, in which is authoritarian bullshit.
Burden of proof is on your for that one, bud
Tangentially, "lying is authritarian" doesn't give me much hope for the rest of your critique you may offer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grayzone
Wikipedia isn't a valid source. Didn't your teachers tell you that in 9th grade?
Wikipedia has citations on every one of those points.
A combination of citations that are either useless for demonstrating anything (see reference 25) or hinge on the western pop-politics conspiracy that there is a genocide of the people of Xinjiang (21, 26, 30), looking in the intro.
K
I don't mean to tell you your job, but this seems awfully flippant for "combating authoritarianism" or whatever neoliberal bullshit you characterize yourself with.
I'm undeniably pro-gulag so thanks for letting me know this source is for me!
I believe all billionaires have done something good. I don't think that makes them good people due to the staggering amount of wealth they withhold from the population.
Doing good things, doesn't make you a good person. Donating millions is nothing when you have billions.
If I had to choose a specific, I'd say Bill Gates. I've never fact checked it but I've heard he set up multiple charities and donates for helping children, seems like a great thing to do.
Gabe Newell is the least shitty billionaire I can think of, I'm not sure what he does for philanthropy though but at least it doesn't seem like he tries to influence the country for his benefit.
Oh wow I've never really considered Gabe's wealth, he would be exceedingly wealthy, wouldn't he?
Google said he's worth just shy of 4 billion.
I love Valve, but I really don't understand why gamers give Steam so much praise. It is a closed platform filled with DRM on which you don't truely own a copy of the game (unlike gog), and on top of that they take a 30% cut of every sales and transactions which is enormous for small studios to pay. Support is poor and the algo/front page distribution of traffic and promotions is a black box.
Don't get me wrong, Gabe seems like a sensible human, and Steam is successful because it offered such a great service to players. But it's been almost 20years now since Steam, and I have not seen Valve slow down the greed. They don't need the money as this point. They don't need 30% of every game sale on PC. This is just as greedy as the other company people hate.
For all his shortcomings, Forrest Gump put a lot of the money he made from his Apple stocks back into his community.
Brian Acton is the only billionaire I can think of that hasn't been a net negative.
Co-founded WhatsApp, which became popular with few employees. Sold the service at a reasonable rate.
Sold the business for a stupid large sum of money, and generously compensated employees as part of the buyout.
Left the buying company, Facebook, rather than do actions he considered unethical, at great personal expense ($800M).
Proceeded to cofound signal, which is an open, and privacy focused messaging system which he has basically bankrolled while it finds financial stability.
He also has been steadily giving away most of his money to charitable causes.
Billionaires are bad because they get that way by exploiting some combination of workers, customers or society.
In the extremely unlikely circumstance where a handful of people make something fairly priced that nearly everybody wants, and then uses the wealth for good, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with being that person.
Selling messaging to a few billion people for $1 a lifetime is a way to do that.
Makes sense that suddenly becoming billionaire with every intention to not remain one by turning into a force of good is arguably one way to be a decent human. In other words, the only good billionaires are those not trying to be, or remain billionaires.
There is also a point where you have to be smart and patient with how you distribute your money, or else you simply risk some other greedy asshole to pocket it.
Hell, I'll take someone who wants to be a billionaire, as long as they do it without exploitation. It's just that that's nearly impossible to do, since very few people actually individually create a billion dollars worth of value.
ITT: people who can't understand the difference between doing something good and being good.
Of course there are plenty of billionaires who have done good things, and pointing out all the ways they are still a shit person doesn't change that. Shitty people occasionally do good things, even if for shitty reasons.
Bill gates and Warren Buffet have both argued for higher taxes on the wealthy and have donated millions to solve social problems.
Have they donated to progressive politicians or made their donations to democrats contingent on changing tax policy? Words are wind.
Bill Gates is the obvious answer. He's done a ton of good things through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_%26_Melinda_Gates_Foundation
This query is counterproductively reductive. Every human alive, even the worst of them, has done at least one good thing. Many even do their bad things because they were misled to believe they were doing an overall good.
The point should be that it doesn't matter what good they've done, because the state of being a billionaire necessarily requires one to have done more net bad to the world than good. You could save a million lives by your own hand, but if you're a billionaire, it is a given that you have destroyed far more lives than that. No billionaire's heart was ever weighed by Anubis and judged worthy of the Field of Reeds.
All of them, without exception, end up as greasy streaks on the gleaming teeth of Ammit.
Not a modern "billionaire", but you can make an argument that Andrew Carnegie spent a lot of his fortune on things that weren't awful.
Carnegie is probably the "best" billionaire in modern history. You can't go to a town in America without seeing some park or public building that was built with his money. I wish more 1% actually followed the Gospel of Wealth.
Not just America - my home town in New Zealand had a Carnegie library. I live in Scotland now, where his birthplace is a museum. https://www.carnegiebirthplace.com/ His money is still funding various trusts in the UK.
Some posts mention people giving away billions in their later life. That sounds great.
However, you need to ask yourself how much of their obscene wealth was created by screwing someone else over? Essentially nobody can get so rich without taking money out of the pockets of other people. You can't just generate money out of thin air.
is this a psyop? surely its a psyop
youd probably have a hard time naming one billionaire that hasnt done anything good
theyre still a shit thing to have, practically never got the money they have by being a good person and shouldnt exist in the same world as homeless people, starvation or massively underfunded public projects
You haven't looked beyond the surface of Gates philanthropy. His involvement diverts focus away from critically acclaimedneeded work in these regions for his pet projects - the science doesn't dictate the focus, the whims of the billionaires do.
Philanthropy is just a tax break and PR move.
And a way of manipulating world politics.
Osama bin laden did 9 11
Wasn't a billionaire.
I tougth he was. Then i guess there arent any good ones after all.
It is easy to think that, but it was mostly his father who controlled the wealth. Osama himself had dozens of siblings:
David Koch died, which is a very good thing he did for humanity.
Bit of a gimme, though, isn't it?
Jeffrey Epstein, when he killed himself, probably.
Pretty sure he didn’t kill himself any more than Prince Andrew doesn’t sweat.
Tfw you're hanging out in a cell getting ready to testify against a bunch of super-powerful people, in a prison that's prevented every attempted suicide in decades, after having made repeated statements that you have absolutely no intention of killing yourself, and then suddenly both the guards leave to go take a nap, and at that exact time, you notice that the multiple cameras watching your cell all randomly glitch off at the same time, so at that moment you decide to kill yourself using a method that's indistinguishable from being murdered
To be fair, both guards were tired from doing a bunch fo online shopping suddenly for no obvious reason
Thus ensuring Trump's compromat would not get revealed. Suuuure he killed himself...
MacKenzie Scott, Bezos's ex. She's given more than $14 billion to charity.
Trick question.
The billionaires who do good don’t want their names attached to their deeds because that defeats the purpose. The point of altruism is you don’t want credit.
(Seriously there aren’t many, though, because if you’re hoarding money, you’re a horrible person.)
Jack Dorsey bought me lunch once.
What? They're greedy humans who are doing things that have terrible consequences out of selfishness, not mustache twirling cartoon villains out to destroy the world for destruction's sake. I'm sure every single billionaire in the world has done something good at some point. That doesn't justify the kind of wealth disparity that makes their existence possible though.
Wrong
How is what they said wrong lmao. They literally acknowledge that doing individual good things doesn't justify the wealth disparity. Every word of what they said is 100% accurate. The worst humans do individually good things sometimes and the title of the thread is NOT about the net good or bad the person did. I don't think you read the title of the thread. I think you're just dunk/upbear thirsty. I hate this element of hexbear sometimes.
Do you mean net good (more good than bad) or is a good thing like "established public libraries" acceptable even if he also oppressed workers and stifled unions and bought government officials and stuff?
How many libraries is enough libraries to offset it though? That's the question. 5 libraries? Probably not. 10000 libraries? ...🤷
10 billion libraries? Now you're oppressing people in a whole new way. That's more than one library per person. Surely not scalable.
Well that's why I asked OP if this is "net" calculation (good - bad) or if just the good counts.
By my evaluation I don't think any billionaire (or equivalent using PPP calculations) has ever or could ever do enough "good" to overwrite the "bad" they have to do to accumulate that much wealth, unless they literally spend it all on improving people's lives including getting down in the trenches themselves.
Markus Persson made a pretty cool game you may have heard of.
He also started to go crazy after selling Mojang.
Sometimes I wonder if that came from the Money or if it would've happened anyways.
I suppose money sort of liberates you from social pressure.
You can shitpost and be multiple kinds of terrible from a different plane of existence with that amount of fuck you money.
In these comments: People who think someone can accumulate obscene personal wealth and then give a small percentage away makes them good. But if someone dares suggest taxing that obscene wealth they are a monster.
Not to defend billionaires, but this post sets an incredibly low bar. I imagine that all people, billionaires included, have done something good in their lives.
Very true.
I was just trying to draw attention to some of the comments that are defending them. You'd think from some in here that a little smidge of philanthropy in retirement makes it all okay that one person can hoarde enough personal wealth to feed millions.
Are we really seeing people say we shouldn't tax billionaires? I wouldn't say that. But this post is basically rage baiting. Like. Yeah. There definitely have been Billionaires who have given all their money away. Or at least the majority of it. They exist. I get why people think Billionaires shouldn't exist. I'm all for taxing them. I'm all for changing regulations to disallow such a large accumulation of wealth and then hoard it so it can't circulate and do what it's meant to do. But are we really suggesting that the majority of people don't think we should tax Billionaires?
Yes. Well, some saying we shouldn't tax billionaires more and others saying that the money is better off with one private individual setting up companies and charities, rather than leaving that to governmental entities.
To me, someone paying only ~25% tax when earning millions per year is obscene.
Reread the title. The question has nothing to do with billionaires being good people.
Reread my comment. I'm commenting on the content of the comments.
Give me a billion dollars and I'll donate some to the ravioli foundation.
Any of the billionaires that have already died did one thing good by nature of having died.
They've all done at least one good thing that's a insanely low bar that's very subjective. Name one that isn't more good than harm in the world? They don't exist.
Mike Cannon-Brookes (co-founded Atlassian) has set up a 1.5b green fund to invest in green energy projects
The problem isn't a billionaire that's done anything good, the problem is a billionaire who has done more good things than bad.
Those don't exist.
There's no amount of good you can do to make up for the amount of exploitation you had to do in order to get to be a billionaire.
It doesn't mean that a billionaire can't do anything good. It just means the world would still be better off without them.
What if you make an app or a game and sell it for 2 Billions dollars?
What if you take a shit, turn around, and find 2 billion dollars in the toilet?
Millburn Pennybags or Uncle Pennybags gave you $200 every time you passed go.
He owed society much more than that, do no.
Bruce Wayne.
Notch made Minecraft.
He's been a little shit since then, but at least Minecraft is pretty cool.
I think his actions as a billionaire are more telling.
Minecraft is just a knock off of Infiniminer anyway and Zachtronics are much more deserving of the billions. Love all their games. What else has Notch done?
MacKenzie Scott
She enabled Jeff's rise for far too long.
Michael Kelly caused Blockbuster to go out of business.
Double dog dare me?
My two cents:
The current problem is rather that relatively many rich people are trying to do good things. The vast amount of private donations and privately funded NGOs, etc., have a strong influence within traditional, often national, political and governmental processes. This has had good and bad consequences and has been done with good and not so good intentions. Even if all consequences were good, the question remains to what extent we object to the fact that the choices of where to put money have been made by individuals and not arrived at through democratic processes, which can also lead to good or bad consequences.
It is unfortunate that "effective altruism" has become the trendy moral framework for many wealthy individuals, especially within Silicon Valley, to make decisions about where they put their money and how. Effective altruism is a questionable moral theory because it is primarily about the question of "how" to act and less about why. The theory suggests no underlying value system. As a result, it remains a values-free form of consequentialism, unlike, say, utilitarianism, a form of consequentialism that does propose an underlying value, namely happiness - and thus happiness maximization as a goal. Moreover, "effective" is a vague term, which also remains relatively free to fill in.
The free-fillability of effective altruism combined with the inherently individual choices of, well, individuals, currently creates friction between wealthy individuals and democratically elected bodies.
This is imho the current issue we need to think about, regardless of any "goodness" of consequences. Where do the responsibilities, rights, duties, freedoms and liabilities of wealthy individuals start, lie and end with respect to those of democratically elected governments, other representatives of the people, and, of course, 'regular' citizens.
Anything? That seems like an easy goal to score on. Maybe you mean "done good overall"?
Current Agha Khan founded the Agha Khan Development Network which has done a fair amount of good in the developing world.
He married a Thyssen, yes as in Thyssen Krupp a Nazi collaborating company focused on the war goals and used plenty of forced labour. Honestly I doubt that even what is financed via 10% of much poorer people's income than his that is done via the AKDN means he is a good guy.
AKFED is part of AKDN. He literally uses poor peoples money to build hotel chains for the rich and ultra rich and also is more interested in his own vanity and consumption than the people.
Irrelevant?
Prompt was: a billionaire who has done anything good, not, a billionaire who has never done anything not good.
A better question might be “name a billionaire that does more good than harm to the world”? Although personally I think that’s an impossibility.
Bill Gates. (Has donated money to charity and founded one himself).
Has donated money to his own charoty to aviod taxes and then did donations to manipulate world politics for his own agenda
There, FTFY
He donated money before having founded his charity.
The dead ones
Chuck Feeney out here just existing and you having the audacity to suggest that good billionaire's don't exist. 3.7 Billion dollars donated in his lifetime.
a good billionaire cannot possiblly exist. if they did they would donate enough money to lose the title of billionaire
He did.
ok cool :) although...wouldnt this not answer the original question ?
He became a billionaire. He gave away his wealth over the course of his lifetime. He meets the criteria of a billionaire and a person who has done something good. Other billionaires are having trouble due to the scale of giving away so much money and vetting who receives it. McKenzie Bezos became a billionaire when she split with Jeff Bezos. She then came under fire not for giving away money, but for not vetting who it was being given to. People who think giving away money is easy or doesn't require some hard work don't understand the scale they're talking about I think.
Like. Imagine Elon Musk trying to give away $144Billion. To a non-corrupt individual, entity, or charity. We can't even eliminate corruption completely in regular charities that only handle millions of dollars yearly. That's the equivalent of some countries'whole GDP. But we can't eliminate corruption in just about any country in the world.
If the goal is to do something good, it requires work. That's an important part to remember.
fair
J.K. Rowling, amongst others, have given away so much money that they've lost their billionaire status.
Huh that is pretty nice... Wait did they give it away for some heinous TERF shit?
No, not that I'm aware of
The guy who ran Cuyamel back when they were bribing the Honduran government and after that the United Fruit Company supposedly spent the rest of his life drafting social welfare legal proposals for democrats. Which given just how evil the United Fruit Company was is more of an indictment of new deal legislation than anything else tbh.
Crassus invented the fire brigade and his head became a stage prop for the Parthians.
Didn't he routinely order his brigade to do nothing until he managed to acquire the burning property (at increasingly decreased cost as the fire raged) from its owner ?
Yes, that too. He also was one of the most prominent slave traders of the time and put down the Spartacus revolt.
Trying to find the silver lining here.
That one brought a couple friends and his billionaire son down and unalived together.
Probably unintentional, but that one moment saved the planet a lot of hurt down the line I'm sure.
Kanye West made "Graduation".
That's not to excuse the gigantic list of awful things he said and did (especially recently), but finding ONE thing a bad person did isn't hard.
After realizing he never made a better album. Kind of cancels it out though...
I don't know about that, MBDTF was pretty good.
Which version the initial released one or one of the fifteenth edits he released afterwards?
For real it's better then life of pablo but that's really not saying much.
Batman
The amount of exploitation and destruction of the environment that it takes to accumulate 1 billion dollars can never be offset by any amount of “good” that is done by money. If I extract resources and a exploit a community and get a billion dollars, then turn around and give every cent back to that community, surplus value will still be lost.
Came to say essentially this but looking at the fact that one person having that much money with all the shit going on is absurd.
Mansa Musa
About the only complaint I have about him is that he still owned slaves.
Tony Khan created AEW and seems to genuinely care about his employees. He put on a private plane this week so the wrestlers could attend the funeral of Bray Wyatt and still make it to Dynamite
Wrong
As a wrestling fan, what giddy described is pretty much true. For a billionaire, Tony is "nice" (too nice, because his niceness has lead to a toxic backstage environment, though he did finally fire CM Punk so thats nice). Like sure it doesn't outweight the exploitation inherent in being a billionaire, but Tony is indeed a "nice guy" and does go out of his way to do nice things for his employees. Also gives them health insurance in an industry where thats not the standard and such.
And the question was "a billionaire who done anything good" not "a billionaire who's overally contribution to the world is good". Giddy answered the question correctly. Sorry to autism you with pedantry but like, I have to insist on some technically accurateness here.
Like honestly, did you even know who Tony was before this post or did you just respond wrong because you were going to do that to anyone who said any billionaire did something good? Are you actually knowledgeable about this subject?
I'm not saying he doesnt get the wall in a revolution or anything. But the post asked "Did anything good", and he did. he did good things for his employees.
Some of them have died already. That is good.
Bill gates and Warren Buffet have both argued for higher taxes on the wealthy and have donated millions to solve social problems.
Chuck Feeney
I don't know current ms ceo?
He still allows Windows to exploit people's data to the fullest
yea but he is better than the previous ones
Still massive, massive room for improvement. Still very much anticompetitive and uses M$' monopolistic position. Still looks for ways to squash competition. And still wants people locked in to Windows and their products. Case in point, I was hoping VS for Mac is a change of course, and will pave the way to VS for Linux, but I'm proven wrong once again.
Li Ka-shin is another good answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ka-shing who gained a bunch of money like Bill Gates and started his own foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ka_Shing_Foundation which works towards education reform, the foundation constantly builds and donates to universities to help them further the reach of impoverished students. Additionally, they support a lot of medical services and research to help impoverished areas of HK.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. Romans 3:12
You're right. There's no billionaire who has done good. But there's also no human who has done good either.
Wtf is jesus waiting for it's been 2000 years
feel like shit rn
Not yet, he died in his thirties.
How about no? Stop deepthroating billionaires, please.