Comment by colesantiago

1. he's not a billionaire in large part due to giving away large amounts of wealth

2. would you rather allow a small number of people 10x more wealthy than Mitchell dictate our laws and culture, or would you prefer a more democratic approach?

It's because you only hear about the loud ones. There are lots doing good work.

In particular Lauren Bezos and Laurene Powell Jobs.

Warren Buffet is essentially bequeathed the majority of his wealth to good causes.

A lot of the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is phenomenal (despite the recent and disturbing Epstein news).

George Soros has funded a lot of good causes, depending on how far you want to believe the conspiracy theories.

Harris Rosen funded free daycares and university tuition to benefit an impoverished Orlando community.

Dolly Parton's philanthropy is legendary.

A lot of the Robber barons (Andrew Carnegie, Rockefeller's) bequeathed to causes that Americans are still benefiting from today.

Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia, pretty much gave the company away for environmental causes.

Chuck Feeney pretty much gave away 99% of his wealth.

I’m not going to personally donate a little under 0.1% of my net worth, and I may seem a hypocrite, but at some point you have to acknowledge that it’s a maddening, life changing amount of money that in no way would have a noticeable effect on his life. On the other hand, it could hurt most people’s ability to pay rent to give away that money.

Survival is mostly a fixed cost that is unmet by many people, while other people donate those who are less off’s life earnings to their fancies they vibe with. It’s gross. Unfortunately humans are not brave or imaginative enough to realise another system (99% tax on billionaires would be a start), but most people also hate the idea that someone in need would get something for free or at a low cost.

Billionaires have an extraordinary economic footprint and level of influence. They employ teams of people managing their affairs through their family offices [0].

I do not think they should be thought of or spoken of as individuals, they are brand entities. Their true intentions are as unknowable from scale and complexity and opacity as, I don't know, Macy's.

Commenting on if any specific billionaire is a uniformly good or bad person distracts from the more important conversation on what the optimal number of billionaires should be and what the tradeoffs are in recalibrating the system.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_office

Giving away less than 0.1% of your worth over 6 years doesn't prove anything about anything. It's cool for the Zig project though.

There are billionaires who gave over 99% of their wealth away by the time they died who make for much more debates with much more interesting exchanges.

I am sure there are some bad billionaires. That moniker is used to demonize them for the most part.

I guess it depends on exactly what you're talking about, but my impression is that the primary "billionaires are bad" argument is simply that a system that allows billionaires to exist is inherently broken. A system that rewards people based on their actual contributions would not allow billionaires to exist.

The fact that some billionaires use their money to do good does not contradict that argument.

It is very likely that most billionaires are very bad.

That does not mean that there are no good billionaires. There are even billionaires who have become billionaires by being bad, but who nonetheless have attempted after that to do only good things, perhaps to atone for their past sins.

Mitchell Hashimoto appears to really be one of the good ones.

I have recently discovered the ghostty open-source terminal emulator, written by him in recent years, which appears to have some advantages that I value, over its competitors, and I have switched to it, after using a very large number of other terminal emulators in the past, and switching between them whenever I encountered a better one.

Therefore I am grateful to him for his good programming work, shared with the world.

Most of ghostty is written in Zig, so there is little doubt that he likes the language, thus there is no surprise that he is choosing it for a donation.