And then his mom told him he needs to start giving it away. And he said, "how can I make money if I'm giving it away". And she told him "you can give away what you already made while you make more to give away".
And then he started the foundation.
I always thought of Bill as doing the same thing in Microsoft. Nice guy generally, but business is business, no hard feelings while he steamrolls your small company to death. Then, after having a fun work day doing what he should be doing, he reverts to his nice self.
He was probably shocked to learn the world knew only his evil side.
The decisions you make for the company affects the real world (even thought it is in the role of a artificial entity, like a company) and have real consequences on people and the state of the world.
The same in not true for the decisions you make in a board game or computer game.
Of course some might say board games affect the real world but the difference in scale is so large it is negligible.
But the interrogator doesn't grasp the subject entirely as well, I too would want clarification to the question if a content provider uses IE. You could ask a helpful question, e.g. Do you mean if they develop sites specifically for IE?
But That is not how you go about a deposition, you're not there to help people build a case against you.
We think gates is humble, kind, normal because that’s the image he wants to portray.
I agree his philanthropy goes a little further than typical billionaire reputation laundering, but he still has a limit. For example, he said he’d vote for trump if the dem candidate supported a wealth tax.
Maybe... however, the narrative that people never change and that any apparent changes are but a thin veneer on an unchanging person rubs me the wrong way.
I like to think I can change - that I can iron out my personality flaws and become a better person (more patient, kind, open-minded, charitable, etc.) over the decades. So why shouldn't I extend that benefit of the doubt to other people too? I assume a lot of people have an innate desire to change and improve as well since lots of people are religious, and the core message of a lot of religions is just that - that you can repent of your past mistakes, change, and become better.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bill-gates-im-happy-to-pay...
Since Gates funds a lot of the western media, (UK Guardian, BBC etc) you never hear any criticism of the WHO (which Gates also effectively owns) or GAVI, which is a Gates Vehicle. This is not a healthy situation at all.
1: https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-awa...
Columbia Journalism Review https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-fu... A useful article
In the end it's very hard to tell if they are talking about pit bulls or puppies. Having nothing bad to say about a dog breed known for high profile attacks, dog fighting, and other negatively associated events would be extremely suspect. Having nothing bad to say about puppies in general is expected of such a benign subject. I doubt the Gates foundation is either a pit bull or a puppy, but I can't responsibly make an assumption even about what side of the spectrum they are from an article about how suspicious the absence of criticism is for an organization which is supposedly trying to do good as a charity.
This is wrong-headed but pervasive thinking. In reality, rich people are just people. Politicians are just people. Celebrities are just people. All people are corrupt to some degree, and some people are corrupt to a large degree.
It's easy for you to imagine a very wealthy person slipping into amoral hedonism, but I contend that their wealth has little to do with it. I once visited a rural Siberian village where a significant contingent of the older men wandered around town drunk. It was so commonplace that 10-year-olds in the community could tell you which of the men were angry drunks, and which ones could be led by the hand back to their homes. Those men lived on food rations from the government, and the first thing they would do when they got their ration of bread was to take it to the local convenience store and trade the bread for vodka. There are probably lots of reasons why someone would wallow in drunkenness for months at a time, but one reason is that they're just following whatever desires they have at any moment in time. Amoral hedonism isn't strictly a rich man's game.
For a lot of people (myself included) it is not mainly about the ethics of individual billionaires, its about the ethics of the existence of billionaires to begin with.
One of my good friends is a highly-paid engineer at a tech company, and he told me, "Businesses want to keep people poor, so they have cheap labor." Which is about as sensible as saying consumers want businesses to be poor, so we get cheaper products. This is actually a pervasive myth believed by many intelligent people.
Of course businesses want to pay as little as they can for labor, the same way literally anyone paying for anything wants to pay as little as possible. But other concerns obviously come into play as well, e.g. the quality of the people you hire, the affluence of the customers you can sell to, your top-level revenue numbers, etc. This should have been obvious to my friend, who works at a tech company that's happy to pay him and others $200k+.
The reality is that businesses actually prefer wealthy societies with wealthy customers who can buy more things. It's a chronic problem that poor communities are under-served by businesses, because poverty makes it harder to profit.
And yet the myth that businesses want people to be poor persists.
As does the myth that you can only make large sums of money through cheating, scamming, lying, stealing, etc.