old billy has been visited by a ghost
Why not spend a couple of those billions and put a bounty on Musks head? America is a lawless hellhole already, so some good and put your money where your mouth is.
Gates also announced that his Gates Foundation will cease operations in 2045, sooner than previously planned.
Didn’t he just get divorced? Wonder if this has something to do with that.
The only good billionaire is a dead one.
If Bill sheds all his excess wealth he can be a human being with the rest of us.
He sheds more than anyone else. He’d be much higher on the richest-people list otherwise.
So far, he’s given over 60 billion to the Gates Foundation, which has given away over 100 billion (the rest of the money comes from Warren Buffet and endowment growth).
It’s designed to spend to zero (over 200 billion dollars) by 2045 so it doesn’t become a self-sustaining wealth generator for staff like other endowments have.
The idea is that the harm caused by him amassing such excess caused more harm than any good he can do through philanthropy.
Good move by Bill Gates.
Cruelty is a feature not a bug.
is this arguing over who killed the poorest children?
I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes, alleged to be from A. Carnegie:
“The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.”
I detested the Microsoft Bill (I’m in tech) but the post-M$ Bill seems to have reformed quite a bit. I have to admire someone who gives away all their $ (whatever the route - directly or through a foundation) to try to solve some of humanity’s problems. Of course MAGA/Qanon portraying him as a villain doesn’t hurt his image either, it pretty much guarantees that there must be something good about him.
Don’t be fooled. His foundation does a lot of real charity but it is still an entity that is under his control and he uses it to launder his reputation while supporting the systems that have allowed him to leverage his wealth for political power. Because of him, the covid vaccine was used as yet another vehicle for funneling wealth into the hands of the plutocrats even though it was mostly public funds that created it.
People will say a lot of things about me when I die, but I am determined that ‘he died rich’ will not be one of them
I’ll just save time for my future self: He died complicit, supporting and enabling the system that creates inequality and blocks progress, and he directly stagnated technology by engaging in monopolistic practices.
Bill Gates quite obviously pays a lot for PR, and giving away wealth to those in need is obviously positive, but if he used his influence to call out Microsoft for using their technology/AI and infrastructure in war, called out the imperialism and destabilizing influence of the US empire, and so on; maybe I would have a more charitable forecast for his legacy.
I would be more than happy to be wrong and I hope I am.
Yeah instead of billionaires giving away their wealth to charity, I’d much rather tax them and let the government distribute that money.
The power of capital exists in the form it does because government doesn’t exist. It’s a big lie. We are in the age of modern feudalism, ruled by corporations, oligarchs, and others that concentrate wealth, power, and influence.
I wouldn’t trust the government to reliably redistribute the money or to reliably tax the very rich.
We have a system that rewards greed, parasitism, and exploitation with wild success. Until that is solved, redistributing wealth will be unsuccessful — a temporary fix, at best.
