Comment by godelski
9 hours ago
> basically his entire fortune
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...
Warren Buffet wrote about this years ago. If you want to judge how "good" someone is you need to look at what they sacrifice. Gates sacrifices nothing. In fact, the entire thing is just marketing and basically worked for a long time. I was shocked to see people talking about Gates like he was a saint a few years ago. Glad to see that's changing.