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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

> Interesting opportunity to rethink the model of "make billions and THEN do good by giving it back"

Well if you want to give back, you need to have something first. As heirs, Scott got money without really (deserving|working for) it. It is not really comparable to Gates and Buttet.

> To me it's not good enough to make billions and then do good

Everyone is different, some people choose to do that. It is still better than giving nothing

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I believe you're being downvoted because of the "heirs" mistake. MacKenzie Scott earned her half.

Commenting on the "have something first". If you're 20 years old you have 60 years you can give. Gates is a poor man comparatively.

I was comparing Scott to heirs. People who got money without being responsible for it. Of course she was the wife of Bezos but how much is she responsible for the success of Amazon compared to another wife ?

I don't get how you could do more good with 40years of life with 0 on a bank account vs 1 day of life and 60bn on bank account

I don't think in this particular case its reasonable to compare her impact on Amazons success to an heir. Jeff Bezos thought quite publicly how superior she was to other potential wives in terms of her resourcefulness which was applied both directly to Amazon in early days and later to Bezos personally. The unfairness of her unearned wealth is not that different from the cofounder or early investor who steps back and retains equity but is not involved in the day to day.

How did Scott earn her half?

Marriages are team efforts. She was also an early laborer at Amazon.

By getting Bezos to sign the dotted line.

The same way any ex-wife "earns" their alimony.

She earned her half only in a narrow legal sense. No one would seriously assign more than \epsilon "real" credit for her contributions.

According to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)#History) she actually played not such a small role in founding the company.

Making money is not about deserving the money, it's about being good at getting money.

To be fair most self made billionaires don't "deserve" that amount of money as well. Yes, they have done something great amassing that fortune and worked hard. But others also work hard everyday not getting a millionth of that in return.

I applaud her, Gates, etc. for trying to do good with their fortune. But that also leaves the choice of what to do to the very few, instead of the society deciding (if the fortunes were collected as tax instead)

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