Comment by boelboel
15 hours ago
Bill Gates was always a POS, reading about his behaviour earlier on doesn't make him seem in any way virtuous. The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.
15 hours ago
Bill Gates was always a POS, reading about his behaviour earlier on doesn't make him seem in any way virtuous. The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.
Gates was (is) definitely a huge nerd. Much more than most of the people here.
He was also the poster boy for tech nerd assholes, until the scale of tech assholery shifted wildly for the worse, and he switched to legacy building mode.
Same with Jobs, but without the charity.
Woz, maybe he actually was a nerd.
> The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.
What do you mean by "persona"? Do you mean he's not really giving money away?
Persona is very much the outward facing acts and image of a person and could be orthogonal to personality. So to parse the posters comment you need to assume that being a charitable person is more than the act of given money to people in need and can also be a personality trait (or at least constituent virtues that expressing charity indicates can be part of personality).
For instance if there was a homeless person on my street and I figured that giving them $500 would have good odds of having them OD and no longer being on my street... what looks like a charitable act very much isn't. So while it would contribute to a charitable persona it wouldn't reflect personality.
> The whole 'charity' persona he put on afterwards is just PR.
Indeed. Even in the middle ages rich people leaned heavily on charity to whitewash their legacy. I mean, the Catholic church even made this accessible to the masses through indulgence.