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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

If I had known how Gates would spend his fortune, I wouldn't have spent all those years griping about Micro$haft.

I believe he has the soul of a gamer. (heck, he ran a regular poker game at Harvard).

And when he was immersed into the money-making game, he was all in, willing to do anything to win.

But when you eventually beat the game, you don't get that thrilled anymore, there's no big challenge ahead. You can play for a while to see how far can you go, but it ends up being boring after a while.

So, I think he moved on to basically a real life version of reversal Plague Inc (instead of trying to infect everyone, he tries to beat a disease). This is a harder challenge in many ways, because he needs to deal with tons of geopolitics, international affairs, research and development, human behavior, etc.

If you see it from that perspective, you can still see that he is still a hard player, but this time, he is playing a game that can be beneficial for everybody, not just himself.

> real life version of reversal Plague Inc

To be pedantic, Plague Inc is just a reversed clone of the board game Pandemic.

But overall, I think you’re spot on with his motivation.

You are assuming that the information that is publicly available is a representative sample of how Bill Gates spends his money. That may or may not be true.

It’s a fact he’s given tens of billions to charity. What evidence do you have of him spending similar amounts on other things?

I too would like to donate a few billions from my 100 billion pile of cash.

I mean why would he donate everything at once? That wouldn't really make sense.

Perhaps not all at once, but there are plenty of problems with underfunded solutions.

A few years back, I was fortunate to have a random conversation with a reknown researcher from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. He was lucid and blunt: if we had more money we could solve fusion.

A couple days later there was news of China having done the longest running fusion reactor burst (?) to date. Two-plus minutes.

I keep thinking about that conversation and his "promise."

Except most of those tens of billions haven't gone anywhere and are still held by a foundation fully controlled by bill gates. The amount of it that drips down to actual charities is a small percentage of these tens of billions each year.

They are currently giving away about $5 billion a year.

Some days I keep thinking that it shouldn't be a nice oddity, that it should actually be mandatory at some point to give back wealth to humanity. I'm not sure how and how to prevent abuses, but I feel it should be oh so much more common that if one single person gets to be able make such an impact on the world for good, they must.

I don’t understand this reasoning? Isn’t it exactly the same of approval of a centralized government dictatorship if you know that after the destruction of the contenders handouts would be made to survivors?

It sounds like you're implying that in this dictatorship people have been killed and their property distributed among people who haven't been killed.

If so, no it is very clearly not the same because Bill Gates is not a dictator nor is he responsible for killing people. To compare a wealthy monopolist to a murderous dictator lacks perspective, to say the least.

Do you need to have dead bodies to have an evil empire? Careers denied, businesses destroyed, ideals stifled are widespread in modern dictatorships.

Erdogan haven’t executed a single person and yet Turkey has become a terrible place for people with ambition, sky high brain drain is the norm, almost all public contracts are won by the same few businessmen however the government has widespread social programs so no one is actually starving or lacks access to modern medicine.

Should people be grateful? Probably not as much as the businessmen that get all the contracts and becoming the biggest in the world.

He's a good guy now, right?

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