The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? And actual charity at that, not Ellison style "Larry Ellison Research Foundation for Prolonging the Life of Larry Ellison and Getting Some Tax Breaks Along the Way".
Yeah, doing shitty things while “donating” a bunch of money to make your legacy look really good is a classic move throughout history.
These guys don’t want to be remembered for the awful behaviors they had in their personal and business life. They’re extremely conceited and concerned with their image.
You'll have to prove the "an actual charity" at that.
It's literally in his name, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and Melinda had enough of Bill that she nixed their relationship.
Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are also behind Common Core and basically ruined public education in the US.
The foundation is a way for Bill to keep doing what he likes without having to pay taxes on it, he's just done a better job of repairing his image than Larry.
This was enough for Carnegie, and the fact that they're not pursuing similar public works simply illustrates that while they may want to be loved, they don't care if they're loved or not.
Because they don't want to be beloved, they want to turn people into dinosaurs. (to adapt the Spiderman quote)
Money is a completely different concept for someone that rich.
If I give away 50% of my fortune my entire life falls apart and I am struggling. If I give away 10% it is going to hurt.
But Gates? He gives away 99% of his money and he's still a billionaire. His life isn't really going to change in any meaningful way. His money still generates tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year without him lifting a finger. He gives away 99.9% of his money and he's still worth $100m and again, his life effectively does not change, making now only millions of dollars a year doing nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I am glad he's giving his money away and this is far better than Ellison or plenty of others, but that doesn't absolve their crimes/behavior. There's definitely a hierarchy of wrongness, being a cheater is definitely better than being a pedo cheater but neither is good or an excuse. The dude was associating with a known sex trafficker. Definitely not an "ops, I didn't know", his wife definitely knew and told him...
One of Michael Shellenberger's central theses is, I think, that the government's ability to invest in "extras" like overseas aid, science, the environment, space exploration, etc is directly a function of how large and healthy the middle class is because that's where the political capital to do these things really comes from.
Basically the post-WWII period was a golden age for all of the above because the middle class of returning soldiers was there, and it was as power and wealth consolidated in the 80s and onward that there was less and less interest and agreement about spending on stuff other the essentials (which turned out to be mostly just defense).
So really it's a two pronged thing:
* the wealthy need to pay much more, and the government needs to invest that in services that benefit the middle class (education, health care, energy & transportation infrastructure) and also which keep people from falling out of the middle class (social safety net, consumer protections).
* eventually there's a critical mass of middle class people comfortable enough to look out their windows and feel concern about pollution, the poor, etc, and then you ultimately get a combination of individual action, NGOs, and government programmes that meet the very needs that are noticed and lobbied for.
But I think the issue is that many advocates want to jump directly from "more taxes on the rich" to "gov't spends directly on my pet issue", and if you miss the second step, you're never going to get the willpower to either raise the taxes or direct the money into environmental initiatives or whatever else.
That made some sense back when the government used to use the taxes to help poor children in Africa, or poor children in the US for that matter. As of 2025 it seems to just leave that sort of thing up to Bill.
Jeffrey Epstein ran a child sex slavery operation for rich people.
There is nothing at all you can do that could ever overcome the harm of helping that man, participating in his business, and calling him a friend.
I don't care if Jesus Christ himself comes down and says Bill Gates is solely responsible for the ending of all suffering.
Raping kids is Bad. Enslaving kids to rape is Bad. This is as clear as you can get in real human society to being The Bad Guy, and Bill Gates spent his precious, limited time on this earth helping him, legitimizing him, and participating in his influence peddling and child rape and slavery
The problem is how the society allowed him to build that wealth. It shouldn't be allowed, not in that way.
He took more from the society than he gave back. And when you take from society, you're not supposed to decide alone how to redistribute. That's the issue
>The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity?
So he is no longer a billionaire?
And donating to what charity, The Gates Foundation? The one that he controls?
The one that he uses to push his ideological stances and repeatedly fails to help anyone?
Just look how successful his work on improving education system in America was.
What a sacrifice it was for him...
These binary distinctions (mostly) don't work for people in the real world. It's not a book or movie where people are clearly either good or bad, in reality all people are a mix of both.
He's still doing his work on philanthropy which is IMO a good thing.
The one counterexample to my point that I'd think of is Hitler. And _technically_ he did do good things for Germany as well, the bad just overwhelmingly outshines the good in this case.
I don't think a healthy society has anything close to our level of wealth concentration, but even if he's made mistakes, he's saved many millions of lives.
Compare that to Elon Musk, who uses his Musk Foundation as a tax shelter, only spending from it for a private school for his children.
The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? And actual charity at that, not Ellison style "Larry Ellison Research Foundation for Prolonging the Life of Larry Ellison and Getting Some Tax Breaks Along the Way".
You don't get that rich in the first place without being a ruthless asshole.
You can be both good and bad. Like, it's not an impossibility.
Yeah, doing shitty things while “donating” a bunch of money to make your legacy look really good is a classic move throughout history.
These guys don’t want to be remembered for the awful behaviors they had in their personal and business life. They’re extremely conceited and concerned with their image.
You'll have to prove the "an actual charity" at that. It's literally in his name, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and Melinda had enough of Bill that she nixed their relationship.
Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are also behind Common Core and basically ruined public education in the US.
The foundation is a way for Bill to keep doing what he likes without having to pay taxes on it, he's just done a better job of repairing his image than Larry.
Listen, billionaires just have to do three things to be beloved:
It's not a high bar, we don't need to give a silver medal to those that fall short.
This was enough for Carnegie, and the fact that they're not pursuing similar public works simply illustrates that while they may want to be loved, they don't care if they're loved or not.
Because they don't want to be beloved, they want to turn people into dinosaurs. (to adapt the Spiderman quote)
Money is a completely different concept for someone that rich.
If I give away 50% of my fortune my entire life falls apart and I am struggling. If I give away 10% it is going to hurt.
But Gates? He gives away 99% of his money and he's still a billionaire. His life isn't really going to change in any meaningful way. His money still generates tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year without him lifting a finger. He gives away 99.9% of his money and he's still worth $100m and again, his life effectively does not change, making now only millions of dollars a year doing nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I am glad he's giving his money away and this is far better than Ellison or plenty of others, but that doesn't absolve their crimes/behavior. There's definitely a hierarchy of wrongness, being a cheater is definitely better than being a pedo cheater but neither is good or an excuse. The dude was associating with a known sex trafficker. Definitely not an "ops, I didn't know", his wife definitely knew and told him...
> The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity?
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ ranks him at #13 wealthiest in the world with $108B net worth.
He's donated about half his fortune, and 60% of that to his own org.
I'd prefer if rich simply paid their taxes and contributions instead of spending money on fighting poor children in Africa.
One of Michael Shellenberger's central theses is, I think, that the government's ability to invest in "extras" like overseas aid, science, the environment, space exploration, etc is directly a function of how large and healthy the middle class is because that's where the political capital to do these things really comes from.
Basically the post-WWII period was a golden age for all of the above because the middle class of returning soldiers was there, and it was as power and wealth consolidated in the 80s and onward that there was less and less interest and agreement about spending on stuff other the essentials (which turned out to be mostly just defense).
So really it's a two pronged thing:
* the wealthy need to pay much more, and the government needs to invest that in services that benefit the middle class (education, health care, energy & transportation infrastructure) and also which keep people from falling out of the middle class (social safety net, consumer protections).
* eventually there's a critical mass of middle class people comfortable enough to look out their windows and feel concern about pollution, the poor, etc, and then you ultimately get a combination of individual action, NGOs, and government programmes that meet the very needs that are noticed and lobbied for.
But I think the issue is that many advocates want to jump directly from "more taxes on the rich" to "gov't spends directly on my pet issue", and if you miss the second step, you're never going to get the willpower to either raise the taxes or direct the money into environmental initiatives or whatever else.
7 replies →
That made some sense back when the government used to use the taxes to help poor children in Africa, or poor children in the US for that matter. As of 2025 it seems to just leave that sort of thing up to Bill.
1 reply →
Jeffrey Epstein ran a child sex slavery operation for rich people.
There is nothing at all you can do that could ever overcome the harm of helping that man, participating in his business, and calling him a friend.
I don't care if Jesus Christ himself comes down and says Bill Gates is solely responsible for the ending of all suffering.
Raping kids is Bad. Enslaving kids to rape is Bad. This is as clear as you can get in real human society to being The Bad Guy, and Bill Gates spent his precious, limited time on this earth helping him, legitimizing him, and participating in his influence peddling and child rape and slavery
Bill Gates is a piece of shit.
Okay, a complete piece of shit with an undigested kernel of sweet corn stuck in it.
The problem is how the society allowed him to build that wealth. It shouldn't be allowed, not in that way.
He took more from the society than he gave back. And when you take from society, you're not supposed to decide alone how to redistribute. That's the issue
>The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity?
So he is no longer a billionaire? And donating to what charity, The Gates Foundation? The one that he controls? The one that he uses to push his ideological stances and repeatedly fails to help anyone? Just look how successful his work on improving education system in America was. What a sacrifice it was for him...
They've admitted the US education work was a mistake. They are hardly alone in making that mistake, improving education in the US is hard.
Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.
1 reply →
These binary distinctions (mostly) don't work for people in the real world. It's not a book or movie where people are clearly either good or bad, in reality all people are a mix of both.
He's still doing his work on philanthropy which is IMO a good thing.
The one counterexample to my point that I'd think of is Hitler. And _technically_ he did do good things for Germany as well, the bad just overwhelmingly outshines the good in this case.
He uses philanthropy to force his ideology on everyone and his ideology doesn't work. His philanthropy makes things worse not better.
At some point it stops being a philanthropy when it makes lives of people he tries to "help" worse. Like his actions have a ulterior motives...
Interesting. Honestly I don't know as much about his philanthropy, which ideology does he push? How did it make lives worse?
1 reply →
You mean his philanthropy work that influences where public money goes, into companies like Monsanto and Cargill which his foundation profits from?
They work in healthcare, education, gender equality initiatives, green energy..
I’m not a fan of MSFT but there are worse uses of the money he made from the company.
I think it’s a bit unfair to categorize all of his contributions to charity as “not charitable”.
1 reply →
I don't think a healthy society has anything close to our level of wealth concentration, but even if he's made mistakes, he's saved many millions of lives.
Compare that to Elon Musk, who uses his Musk Foundation as a tax shelter, only spending from it for a private school for his children.
1 reply →