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.
A single good thing that a single billionaire has done? The Gates foundation fighting malaria. I think that’s good.
Sure but, considering they use only 5% of the money they have for all there “good” projects and invest the ither 95% in fossil fuels. The gates Foundation is really only a little good because the law forces them to use min of 5%, to stay tax exempt. So if they didn’t have to, would they still do it? I doubt that.
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
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.
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.
Elon musk he is slowly destroying twitter
As Hedberg said, say what you will about Hitler, he did kill Hitler.
… slowly? …😅
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.
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?
Kickstarter
Bill gates and Warren Buffet have both argued for higher taxes on the wealthy and have donated millions to solve social problems.
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.
I dont know her name
Jeff bezos ex wife, who has donated a lot of money to charity
MacKenzie
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?
The question was about whether a billionaire had done anything good.
Thank you
Paywall, login popup shite. I hate websites like this.
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.
Philanthropy is just a tax break and PR move.
