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.
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I was looking for irl billionaires, but this is such a great comment.
Canonically he does contribute to a lot of charities and organizations and such in addition to being Batman. There’s got to be a bit of a 2-pronged approach, if he contributes everything to charities, there wouldn’t be anything leftover to be Batman, and while building a better Gotham for tomorrow is the greater goal, they also need someone who can stop the joker today.
And in a city where crime and corruption is as deep-rooted as it is in Gotham, you need to be careful about where your money is going, because if you start throwing money at random charities there’s a good chance that somewhere down the line a lot of it might end up getting funneled into Carmine Falcone’s (or some other gangster) pockets. And even if the charity is totally on the up-and-up, if the crooks get wind of how much money is moving through there, they’re going to try to worm their way in and get a slice of the pie. So unless you want to go all Ra’s Al Ghul and burn Gotham to the ground and start again, Bruce would have to be very mindful of how much money he was giving where.
Or he just inherited billions and spent it trying to get revenge for the death of his parents while using some of his wealth to hide his selfish acts of useless vengeance. Batman kinda sucks in my opinion.
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.
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.
Chuck Feeney
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.
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.
…That one guy’s stupid submarine provided like a week of entertainment
Anything good?
Then all of them. They are human beings, not black holes of pure evil.
I need a source for that.
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.
invest
Wrong
I dont know her name
Jeff bezos ex wife, who has donated a lot of money to charity
MacKenzie
Wrong
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Can we as a society organize and innovate without billionaires? Even China changed their economy to make them possible.
Right now, writers are on strike. Hollywood workers could invest their time, make movies, and get paid afterwards. But instead, it takes people with money to do the funding.
How should big sums of money be managed? Bureaucrats work to a certain extend but hardly innovate. Which structure could ask a million people to invest a thousand dollars each and offer ethical profits?
Maybe, but they’ve used their power to set the system up that way, and heavily propagandized against socialized alternatives
If you had free counter-propaganda resources, how would you structure a socialist alternative and what would you tell the population?
Let’s imagine that this is not a joke. What do you need to get going besides the money?
Kickstarter
China needed them because they wanted money from the west. If they hadn’t we would have done a cold war to them long ago and they might not have been strong enough to handle it. Because they had some billionairs we took it easy on them for a while and now they are strong enough to resist our coup attempts. So it wasn’t that the oligarchs class is good for anything. They just needed to be part of our system for self defence.
Engineers, scientists and workers need an environment that allows them to innovate. How can we create such an environment without billionaires? Somebody mentioned kickstarter. What is missing that small investors make billionaires irrelevant?
Does it have to be exclusive? Society right now can own means of production. Cooperatives, joined-stock cooperations or foundations could be used to hold ownership and the fruits of labor could be shared.
If the majority is not willing to organize labor right now, who could take over the role of billionaires without abusing their position of power?
who could take over the role of billionaires without abusing their position of power?
The billionaires abuse their power. The problem of an abusive manager being totally solved is an irrational height to set the bar at.
Why are billionaires not acceptable if abusive managers are acceptable?
What you are looking for is a “manager”, which doesn’t need to be a billionaire and, in fact, usually is not.
Who selects and controls the managers? Who motivates people to invest their income to pay the managers?
A million people have to pool $1000 each to create the equivalent of a billionaire. It could be possible yet it doesn’t happen.
The trick is that billionaires cannot consume their entire wealth. Thus the economy has free money that looks for opportunities.
I hate stumbling upon libertarians.
Taxes. Next question.
The trick is that billionaires cannot consume their entire wealth. Thus the economy has free money that looks for opportunities.
This is hopelessly naive. Most of what they do with all that extra money is incestuous money laundering and regulatory capture. There’s no reason to give unaccountable individuals such an absurd level of societal power when it’s not like they “innovated” their wealth from thin air. Take it from the people they otherwise would take it from via, for example, a tax system and you can produce something accountable that can be changed freely by society and won’t buy twitter to force us to read its tweets.
Society already pays many taxes and changing the spending doesn’t happen freely by society.
Politics have their own disadvantages and billionaires are a complementary way to allocate resources.
That society can be locked into Twitter shows that taxes shouldn’t be the only source of capital. Every democracy could have created a Twitter clone many years ago as basic infrastructure.
Like Norway’s wealth fund, many countries could have invested in companies to generate profits and reduce taxes. Instead there are deficits. Politicians rely on society for sustainability whereas billionaires have to identify and improve sustainable forms of income.
If neither politicians nor billionaires should invest, what would be a good way to identify the people who should?
