Comment by warkdarrior

17 hours ago

Gates is worth about $100B, Elon Musk about $850B. Let's call it $1T altogether. That would be at most about $115 per human on Earth (~8.5B humans). Not sure that is sufficient to "end hunger and homelessness."

Your calculation only makes sense if every one of those 8.5B humans is suffering from hunger and homelessness. Somewhere around 1 in 1000 people are homeless (https://worldmetrics.org/global-homelessness-statistics/), and 1 in 12 or so has experienced "hunger" some time in the past year (https://www.fao.org/hunger/en/). Obviously the numbers depend on how you define "homelessness" and "hunger", but in any case this multiplies the $ that could be used to help individuals by those factors. Between $1000 (hunger) and $115,000 (homelessness) may not sound like a lot, but when your yearly income is around $1000, it can mean a lot.

Those numbers are all funny money numbers. Neither could liquidate that and not fuck the rest of the world altogether.

let's set aside for a second the fact that this is not how things work, but you are off by an order of magnitude

EDIT: parent comment was edited: it used to say $15

It’s not like giving that money to people is the only option. you can spend it in projects that produce food, build low cost houses, etc.