Good as far as we know until they get Cosby’d
It’s not possible. They’ve Hoover’d up money and direct where it’s used.
At any point they could give emough back to the people to become less then billionaires. But they don’t.
You might have 100k, invest, make it 1m in 10 year you’d have more to give back than 100k + 10yrs interest
I have a benefit of the doubt thing here, not that any billionaire I’ve heard of deserves it. If I suddenly had a billion dollars, would I donate to an existing charity with an administration I don’t know and trust or would I think “hmm I can better choose what happens with this money” and start my own charitable enterprise? Like a bill/Miranda Gates situation.
I know if I had a billion dollars worth of shares of a company I wouldn’t necessarily liquidate it all for philanthropy either. Do I hold onto control of these stocks while attempting to guide the company in a more ethical way? Idk. It’s an interesting thought
Being that powerful and wealthy doesn’t happen without doing horrible things. Then, once a person achieves that status, the pressures change and they just become worse.
There is always a club where you are not invited, because you aren’t rich enough.
Jay Pritzker (governor of Illinois) seems like an okay dude.
Queen Elizabeth II
Xi Jinping.
There are no good 1%ers. Doing philanthropy with your excessive fortune isn’t worthy of applause, it’s simply the easiest way to give. And more often than not they still do not. Using your influence (acquired through fortune) is hollow as hell too like why should we listen to you? Because you’re loaded?? Nah but thanks for the dono.
There are good rich people but they are rich in other resources, usually immaterial.
Also Cosby Cosby’d himself…
Being a billionaire is like staying alive long enough to be a villain. They were great at something but nothing justifies holding that much power for so long.
If you have enough money to be in the 1% and choose to keep it to remain in the 1% instead of using it to right the many many wrongs in the world, you can’t be a good person.
Just having that much money, and not using it is a moral failing.
I like Mark Cuban for the whole https://www.costplusdrugs.com/ thing he’s doing. I have no idea whether or not he’s a decent guy, but this is a decent thing to do, so I give him the benefit of the doubt.
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Mark Cuban is the closest I can think of. Most of his wealth came from stocks he received when he sold his dot com business to Yahoo. He’s invested a bunch after that. Now he does some decent things like his at cost prescriptions. He definitely seems personable and understands that he is extremely lucky.
Jeff Atwood (stack overflow and discourse cofounder) seems pretty cool for someone who made a shitton of money in tech. Everyone I know who’s met him says he’s a nice and normal human being, and he’s currently funding a UBI program as well as giving copiously to high-quality charities.
Kim Jung Un
If they were genuinely good people they wouldn’t be in the 1%.
Being 1% is not just rich, not just disgustingly rich, you needed to have exploited BILLIONS of people for DECADES and had no moral qualms about it. If you did, you would have stopped long before you reached that high.
It’s like asking if any 1st degree murderers did it by accident.
That doesn’t sound like the 1%. There are 3.6 million 1%ers in the US alone, by definition. Being in the 1% might you very comfortable but it won’t necessarily make you an evil overlord. For that I suspect you need to be in the 0.001% (meaning there’s 3600ish in the US, a more manageable group of absolute bastard. There aren’t 3.6 million disgustingly rich people in the US.
Putting some numbers (for the US) here, from a recent Forbes article
Joining the top 1% requires a net worth of $11.6 million to $13.7 million
Seems like everyone is getting the 1% confused with billionaires. The average 1%er is something like a doctor or a plumber that owns his own business, not the assholes floating around on superyachts.
Bourgeois class traitors are a rare breed, and bourgeois class traitors in powerful positions are a pipe dream. The capitalist class—which owns the means of production and gets its wealth by expropriating surplus value from the working class’ wages or by rent-seeking—are not going to save us.
Closest I can think of is GabeN and like all of us he’s certainly not perfect
Closest I can think of is post-Microsoft Bill Gates, with the humanitarian/healthcare stuff he’s been involved in. He was a total piece of shit as Microsoft’s CEO, though, what with the aggressive anti-trust practices and all. Not that the ones that came after were much better (especially Ballmer).
What Gates is doing right now is a massive publicity stunt to make people believe he’s actually a “good person”. He is not. He is still a disgusting billionaire that contradicts everything he preaches.
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He is constantly buying farmland, to the point where he’s the biggest land owner in the whole US. This is seriously harming small farmers.
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He preaches about climate change and using cardboard straws while in his massive ($650M!) mega yacht
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The “humanitarian/healthcare” stuff he did, while helpful, was only done because he could use it as a tax writeoff. He wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t the case.
He is constantly buying farmland, to the point where he’s the biggest land owner in the whole US. This is seriously harming small farmers.
The “buying farmland” part is just a product of him being a billionaire tbf, it’s what he does with it that could be concerning.
Also introduced voucher schools because he didn’t want teachers telling him laptops won’t solve education
• That’s good for climate change?
• He has unimaginable influence. Doesn’t the change he makes outweight his mega yacht? (Yes I now how ridiculously expensive these monster ships are) I doubt he is only committing to netto his yacht.
• Oh you know him well, could you make a meeting happen? I have an idea
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How is that good for climate change?
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Nobody listens to this guy. Have you been recycling just cuz Gates told you to? Also these kinds of yachts pollute so much with a single trip that it outweighs any good that he could have done by convincing millions to save electricity or water.
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I don’t need to know him well. It’s not rocket science.
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When people say “climbing the corporate ladder” the only image that comes to mind is a ladder shape made of coworkers and whoever is capable of stepping on more heads is declared the winner
Bill Gates’ PR machine strikes again.
- The Nation: Why Bill Gates’s Philanthropy Is a Problem
- Jacobin: Bill Gates’s Philanthropic Giving Is a Racket
- Adam Ruins Everything: Why Billionaire Philanthropy is Not So Selfless
- Citations Needed podcast:
- Episode 45: The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire: Bill Gates and Western Media
- Episode 46: The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire, Part II - Bill Gates in Africa
- News Brief: Big Pharma, Bill Gates Spin Against Generic Vaccines for Global South as Biden a No Show
- News Brief: #VaxLive is a PR Scam So Those Causing Vaccine Inequity Can Pose as Saviors of Global Poor
- Episode 146: Bill Gates, Bono and the Limits of World Bank and IMF-Approved Celebrity ‘Activism’
Billionaire philanthropy doesn’t have to be selfless, my donations to relief aids are tax deductible too.
The Gates foundation explicitly lobbied against Oxford’s initial plan to open source their covid vaccine. Gates’ worship of intellectual propery law is responsible for the patent on the astrazeneca vaccine. The project was initially started under the hope that the third world being able to manufacture their own vaccines without owing royalties would be important in limiting the spread of covid.
I remember reading about that at the time but couldn’t find a reliable source to back that claim. Fascists and anti-vaxxers love to scapegoat Gates along with George Soros (and jews in general) so I kind of dismissed it as far-right misinfo. Sucks if actually true, though.
A lot of us were genuinely cheering on the announcement that the Oxford vaccine would be opensourced, it was the reason people were actually following updates on that vaccine specifically. It waa a big point of discussion here on lemmy at that time and when the decision was reversed the focal point of every criticism was that it would very obviously limit vaccine accessibility at a time when we desperately needed the population vaccinated as quickly as possible. People were angry over his justifications because even if we assumed the best-case scenario where he was somehow correct and it wouldn’t restrict vaccine access at all, it still would not be an improvement over not having a patent at all. The absolute best case scenario for that reversal would have been vaccination rates being just as high as if it stayed open-source.
I don’t doubt some morons found those headlines after-the-fact and did their own spin without reading, but the idea that antivaccine sentiments and blind Gates-hatred were the motivators for people being upset with him when that happened is wrong.
