Zuckerberg is creating a new criminal justice reform group backed with $350M

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8760199/gates-foundation-criti...

> "The Gates Foundation has played an extremely negative role in efforts to develop replacements for strong patent rights and high drug prices," James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International and a critic of the foundation, writes on his blog. Or as McGoey put it: "There’s immense concern surrounding the Gates Foundation’s position on intellectual property rights, and whether this major global health player is cognizant enough to ensure property rights are fair for citizens in wealthy and poor nations."

[2] https://theintercept.com/2016/11/04/koch-senate-hawks/

[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisroberts/2021/01/12/the-las...

Yes, a lot of people like to do good.

On the other hand, we've seen from Zuckerberg specifically - not a generic random person - these power moves for as long as he's been on the radar. If you believe Zuckerberg is motivated by wanting to do good, you haven't been paying attention.

If Zuckerberg cared about doing good instead of accumulating money and power he would have made a few different decision in the past.

Further to the point, the personalities and temperaments of people is only weakly correlated with their moral quality, which is what you’re talking about when you talk about “doing good”. For example, many well meaning people who “like to do good” nonetheless participate in factory farming, which is a moral atrocity that subjects tens of billions of animals to suffering and death per year. If you don’t like the animal rights example, take the example of all the “like to do-gooders” who supported Jim Crow.

Some like to be told they are doing good.

Subtle difference with big ramifications.

Democratic states aren't perfect, but at least there are fail safes against the wrong people having power at the wrong time. The people supposedly all collectively own the wealth and direction of a state, so a single person can never be that powerful. Authoritarianism or dictatorships will always feel appealing in the face of dysfunctional governments, because there is always someone who is actually good at they do, and effects real change (if you disregard all the usual xenophobia/populism/oppression). In this case, you can see people saying "government is not doing anything about this, so why shouldn't these people fix it". Power eventually corrupts, if not the person then its descendants, at some point it goes terribly wrong and itends up tearing a society apart. This has happened pretty much everywhere.

Also the level of wealth some people are accumulating right now is absolutely unheard of in history. You can now "easily" have a business that reaches billions of people from your basement. If this exponential accumulation of wealth continues, government as we know it will become obsolete, and democracy will stop functioning because some people just have too much lobbying power.

Because Zuck's version of 'good' includes building a platform optimized exactly for fomenting discord and hatred in order to create ad revenue and bring in eye balls and clicks. It's a part of the survielence economy and has been weaponized in countless ways, Zuck may not be the one building it any more, he has many of you do that for him.

But it stands to reason that of those 3 you listed you have a very clear 'orge' in the bunch.

What good has he done for Society over all exactly?

Even with unfathomable wealth all he seems to be responsible for is creating a greater divide and discord amongst people and that help promote absurd conspiracies and crate time-wasting habits especially so in developing countries as his platform is what most associate with what the 'internet' as they cannot afford to browse anything else once they have access to it via FB enabled smart phones.

I'm glad SpaceX had his satellite blow up on the launch pad!

God only knows what horrible things would be possible had it actually made it into orbit.

As for Mark Cuban, I'm on the fence but his talk and backing of Andrew Yang makes me think he isn't an ogre, but Zuckerburg certainly is, willing or not at this point.

Trump and his supporters probably believed what he did was for the good, and many of us quite strongly disagrees.

Actual democracy would be a nice start.

Those things probably could still exist if there was a cap on earnings, would there really be none of those things if you couldn't earn more than 100 million.

Obviously I am talking about net assets and money, not just "salary".

Says who? To me it seems far more likely that if Zuckerberg's Facebook never struck it big, that Myspace Tom or some other social media company owner would be worth a similar amount instead.

These things indeed don't spontaneously materialize themselves out of thin air. They materialize themselves because of the work of millions of people. The researchers and laborers that build the foundations (internet, roads) that made the innovation possible in the first place. The researchers and other companies that build the phones, social networks, electric cars, etc that these people iterated upon. The hundreds of thousands of people that work for these companies, that actually build the phones and the cars, etc.

These people created a good iteration on an existing idea and got lucky by doing it at the right place and at the right time. Surely they worked hard, and they had some positive contribution, but they did not fundamentally change the world or create billions by themselves. If Bezos hadn't build Amazon, we would have other online shops. If Zuckerberg hadn't build Facebook, we would have other social networks. If Apple hadn't made the iPhone, we would be using other smartphones.

None of these were particularly innovative - they were all iterations on existing technology that happened to capture the market mostly by luck. Society would likely not have been significantly different if any of these had not been created, we would just be using something slightly different but very similar. Why reward individuals with such tremendous power for (essentially) winning the lottery?

Why not? And more to the point: they also wouldn't have materialised without the workers who get paid less in 30 years than the CEO makes in a day. Why aren't they fairly compensated? And even more extensively: they wouldn't have materialised without the broader society, a simple word to hide "everyone that is alive or has lived before you". Amazon makes that money because it has roads to drive its deliveries on, a police to prevent theft, courts to settle disputes, and of course the power of the state is what lets them keep their private property, ultimately society provides them with relatively safe and well-fed people with money in their pockets to spend on their stuff. Without that they would have nothing.

In other words, no person is "self-made", and everyone who has achieved financial success owes a debt to society. This is not even getting into Georgist ideas that people also owe a debt to society for using "commons" such as land or natural resources or polluting.

I recall some years ago, there was a movement to encourage large donors and philanthropists to make themselves more visible, rather than donating anonymously, in the believe that this would encourage other wealthy people to contribute as well, a kind of peer pressure or leading by example.

Part of me wonders if why these billionaires have their names on these projects is to try to buy goodwill? Rather than people just hating the rich in general, if they know that Bill Gates is donating all this money and attempting to help the less fortunate, he's slightly less of a greedy wealthy bastard? I don't see a Jeff Bezos foundation, for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Teton_National_Park#Esta...