Comment by epolanski
3 months ago
He's donated, already, the equivalent of 200+ billions USD (give or take 420M class B shares).
Say what you want, but the list of billionaires who have donated such large amounts of money while still alive (or dead) is small.
Cherry picking events like layoffs, without truly knowing how much was he involved (Berkshire directors notoriously enjoy lots of autonomy) or if the layoffs made sense, etc, seems a stretch when we're drowned with sociopath world-ruling-ambitious CEOs, from Musk to Altman, through Thiele.
If somebody focuses on something negative, it's cherry-picking, but if you focus on something positive it isn't?
How much money has he saved dodging taxes over the years[1]?
[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
You really fighting on the wrong side of the hill, Buffett has advocated for higher taxes for ages. He's neve made it a secret and he's always said that he pays a lower effective tax rate than his secretary.
In any case, what am I looking at here? There's no tax dodging. He gets paid 100Mish per year and pays taxes on those amounts.
You don't get taxes on your stock appreciation until you sell.
Benchmarking against a single person doesn't make sense. Consider how philanthropic someone is vs. how philanthropic they could be with their means. This list helps give perspective.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/2025/02/03/ame...
It is logically consistent to play the game by the rules that exist, and simultaneously advocate for changing the rules. There is no reason to fall on the sword alone.
You lose by not playing the game, it doesn't mean you "like" it.
To whom? To "charities" owned by other billionaires such as Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and those owned by his children.
I don't want billionaires to donate anything, I don't want them to use their money to shape the world to their liking. I want them to pay their fair share of taxes and a functional government that properly allocates those extra funds instead of funding the bare minimum.
We shouldn't tax production but what people take, like land, or polluting our environment, or monopoly privileges granted by government.
Which all coincidentally tax billionaires a lot to the point there might not be billionaire, but it's not the 'fair share' that people thought of. It's not asking the rich people to pay more because they make more, but because they owned non-reproducible privileges or because they imposed a cost on our shared environment such as CO2 emission.
Don't tax what people produce, but what they took.
The tax revenue collected would be then be invested by government to boost the economy or else return to the people via the Citizen's Dividend.
Billionaires are simply people who play the money game best.
I’m not the best basketball player, but I can admire the game of the best players without being jealous of them.
> Billionaires are simply people who play the money game best.
False in the general case - with inherited wealth, someone who starts with a lot but grows more slowly will beat a fast grower who started with nothing, at least on short time scales.
In other words, you can build a better OS than Windows today, and have better business sense than Bill Gates, but it'll still take you years to catch up to him wealth wise if you're starting at zero.
> I’m not the best basketball player, but I can admire the game of the best players without being jealous of them.
I agree with that - with any art/practice (business, programming, music, sports, etc), it's always inspiring to see the best play.
However, I'd argue that in our current business culture, many players will
1) do things I'm not comfortable doing morally - the sports equivalent of Maradonna's Mano de Dios [0] - so I'm not really comfortable using them as role models (I just tell myself I can do better by playing fair). Examples include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, so-called libertarians with entire business that consist of "use your friends in government to get juicy government contracts and grow rich off that sweet, sweet taxpayer money" (SpaceX, Palantir), Jobs, Zuckerberg and Gates ripping off their friends and co-founders, products that are intentionally addictive (cigarette companies), etc.
2) not actually be that good but just be in a good position - many rich people are honestly just lucky. Yes, you have the serial entrepreneurs that make _several_ billion dollar fortunes like Jim Clark, you have the wise investors like Warren Buffet, but you also have people like Adam Neumann [1]or any New York real estate tycoon who got started with a small million-dollar loan from their millionaire parents/Saudi oil princes who just got lucky.
In particular, I firmly believe I've got more money-making talent than a random Saudi oil prince, even if my bank account doesn't reflect that.
Or to use the sports metaphor, I believe I'm a better player than a lot of people currently in the big leagues, even if it's taking a while for the rest of the world to realize that :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_hand_of_God
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Neumann
5 replies →
Your government is pretty dysfunctional the way it is. I'm not surprised billionaires don't want to waste their taxes on that crap.
Who do you think is responsible for such a dysfunctional government? Is it your average working class person earning about $65k/year or is it billionaires that can throw unfathomable amounts of money at any topic of their interest without it even making a dent in their pocket?
To take a recent example, the median income in New York City is about $79k/year (before taxes), while Bill Ackman alone essentially threw away 21.5x that in his failed attempt to influence the mayoral election.
4 replies →
Not surprised, but the best solution is not to let billionaires control, tax free, major parts of society instead. The best solution is building a more functional democracy which is in charge of redistribution.
2 replies →
No matter where you are on the political spectrum, you almost certainly believe that at least some billionaires carry a disproportionate responsibility for that dysfunction. Whatever they are, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, George Soros or indeed Warren Buffett aren't just passive observers of government.
1 reply →
The government already has way more money every year to spend. It wastes a lot of it. A world where all surpluses are distributed by a committee of politicians and their buddies would a be a terrible one.
> To "charities" owned by other billionaires such as Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Which are responsible among other things for the quasi-total eradication of polio from this planet, provided vaccines for billions (literally) people across the globe in poor countries and have been major contributors in malaria and hiv treatment, prevention and research.
Also, they provided funds to millions of small rural farmers in third world countries to improve productivity and yields.
When I traveled Madagascar, plenty of villages had water and waste infrastructure built with the aid of that foundation too.
By the way, their balance sheets are public, and audited every year.
I'm baffled by the low-level conspirationism encountered on HN, it feels more and more like reading boomer's facebook everyday.
We are saying different things.
You're saying that WB was not shy to give away money. I'm saying that he was not shy to make it.