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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

Why? He dedicates huge amounts of money to worldwide public health, and is giving away the vast majority of his fortune over the course of his life. Why shouldn't I hold such a person in high regard?

> Why? He dedicates huge amounts of money to worldwide public health, and is giving away the vast majority of his fortune over the course of his life. Why shouldn't I hold such a person in high regard?

We are talking about Bill Gates who because he was better at red in tooth and claw business than technology he held computing back by at least a decade.

In 1995 I was using stable 32-bit personal computer software complete with all the tooling I needed, the very best. My friends were bogged down in expensive, unreliable, insecure, and privacy violating crap DoS with a shell (Windows 95).

They were not fools, but they had been fooled. It was for business reasons that this happened. It was driven by Bill Gates (and the business incompetence of the technically competent of the time)

If he lives another fifty years giving away every cent to good causes - good on him. I will not forget what he did to my industry.

Okay. Hold your grudge from the 90s. No one can stop you. It's pretty weird not to care about his enormous efforts in philanthropy, though.

How much of it is even his money and not Warren Buffett's money?

From other comment > I mean, start with why his wife is divorcing him (Jeffery Epstein) and why he's no longer on the board at Microsoft(inappropriate relationships with staffers), then go into how he's screwed up public schooling in the US, then Microsoft under him. That's the easy stuff that you can see publicly.

The guy's work has directly prevented the deaths of enormous numbers of poor people worldwide. That trumps everything else in my book.

Also, don't fall for his wife's PR team. You have no idea why she's divorcing him. Claiming that the issue was Epstein is what any smart legal / publicity team would do in this circumstance.

>Claiming that the issue was Epstein is what any smart legal / publicity team would do in this circumstance.

If a PR team was going to pick a fake reason to hide a blasé real reason, why would they pick the biggest scandal possible? I thought rich people tried to keep their personal lives out of the news. Saying that they had drifted apart naturally while the real reason was Epstein is something like what a PR counsel would do, that I could believe, but you're suggesting that they're making that trade in reverse.

Another point to bear in mind is that the legal team does not care what the public thinks because the public doesn't decide anything in court. Lawyers usually tell you to keep quiet about your case, to reduce the risk of saying anything in public that the other side can bring up in court to use against you. That's another thing that usually works backwards from how you're suggesting it is in this situation.

Melinda Gates is trying to get the best possible settlement from her divorce. The Epstein issue is obvious leverage. Melinda loses nothing by Bill being embarassed in public, and she gains a lot at the negotiating table.

I haven't watched enough mobster movies to be sure, but I think you might have the order of operations inverted on the blackmailing process. The Don doesn't release the photos then start blackmailing, he shows you the photographs, then blackmails you, then maybe releases them if he has a reputation to keep and you didn't pay.

Some of the information is public. Who knows how much there is behind it?

> If a PR team was going to

I think you need a PR team if you're going to start writing replies like this...

>The guy's work has directly...

The guy's money has funded people who work to do these things.

It's not all his money here. A major chunk of it is Warren Buffet's.

That, and there is no way to know that the people who he stole it from through anti-competitive practices wouldn't have funded even better things with it.

True, we should discount all his contributions and hold him a accountable for his past actions right? Man I'm glad the rest of us never make mistakes and have all contributed so much more then him..

I'm sorry, but if the Queen can disavow her own kid for his affiliation with Jeffery Epstein, and Bill's wife can do the same, we can disavow Bill Gates. Just because he has money doesn't mean a damn thing w/r to whether we have to hold him to any regard. He's proven over decades to not be a good person. There's a reason Paul Allen ended his relationship with Bill Gates.

I didn't know about Paul Allen, but after searching it seems the top result is about how they managed to regain some friendship: https://www.geekwire.com/2019/bill-gates-patched-things-paul...

I know very little about Gates but can only find information indicating Epstein wanted to do business with him under the guise of it being a great benefit to charity, which in the end turned out to be a ruse of some sort. Perhaps it's untrue, but I don't see damning evidence. There are photos, but surely there are hundreds or thousands of photos of Epstein with people. Is there something that you know that I'm not finding?

When Paul Allen found out his cancer was terminal, Bill phoned him a number of times and Paul refused to take those calls. So much for friendship.

Do you actually believe Melinda Gates divorced him because he wanted to do business with Jeffrey Epstein in a philanthropic fashion?

I don’t believe much about situations I know only what media has enabled me to know.

If I were to assume anything, I’d first guess that a healthy marriage could endure a questionable relationship. If it did in fact end over that, it could have been due to underlying issues rather than something more scandalous.

I’d also guess that Epstein also did legitimate business, and with many people we don’t point fingers at.

Given that with the limited information available, I can’t draw a conclusion.

The difference between Prince Andrew and Bill Gates is that Andrew has been (credibly) accused of sexual abuse, whereas Gates was – as far as we know – just friends with Epstein. Maybe there's something more, but there's no evidence of it – it's not even clear how close they were, exactly.

I mean, Prince Charles and Jimmy Savile had a friendship of sorts; the queen didn't disavow Charles because that's all it was. The problem with Andrew wasn't really his relationship with Epstein *as such*, but the things Andrew did.

So are you suggesting he be completely shunned from society? Why not let him try to atone for his sins and try to do good in the world by giving away a large portion of his wealth to noble causes?

I'm suggesting not to hold him or his money in high regard. He's not worth mentioning.

Aren't the causes that he is championing worth mentioning tho? Why is there a need to purge him from current public discourse when he did something bad in the past? I don't think we should disprove of bad people doing good things. Just because he did something bad doesn't mean he can no longer make commendable contributions to society.

The causes yes, Bill, not so much.

Wow, it's like you're suggesting statutes of limitation on bad reputation? That's like depending on a populace have the memory of a goldfish for that to work. Oh, wait. Damnn, you're genius /s

Even ignoring that, his fortune came from anti-competitive business practices in the 80s and 90s, without which, personal computing would have been in a much better place today.

Without which, you think personal computing would be in a much better place today. You have no way to verify that belief one way or another.

Technically correct, which, as we all know, is the best kind of correct.

Explain better? So easy said. It sounds a bit silly when you say that.

Whats with public schooling? I havent found anything that looks relevant

They're responsible for common core, which basically makes teachers teach to the test to keep their jobs.

Worth mentioning though is that they didn't invent Common Core Standards; they support it. Common Core was also preceded by No Child Left Behind, which shifted emphasis in education in a similar war.

All that is to say that the issue didn't originate with the Gates Foundation. It goes much deeper and is arguably a broad societal issue. No one agrees on how teaching should be done, there's insufficient coordination, people doing the work lack resources and incentive, and kids suffer a lot as a result.

Pretty sure that was a part of No Child Left Behind, years before Common Core. I'm also not sure how development of a set of tests and standards would be related to teacher employment - I would have expected that to be up to the states and how they implement them.

Just because he as a prick doesn't mean the investment into fusion energy is therefore prick-ish...

It doesn't, also doesn't mean that I can't call him a prick whenever he's mentioned in a light that's slightly glowing.

I don’t give a fuck about all that. He can have consensual relationships with whomever he likes.

If I complete my life with as big a positive impact and the worst thing that happens is I have a divorce and sleep consensually with a few women who reported to me I will count it as a huge win.

Honestly I find Bill Gates a pretty OK dude, all things considered. If you live life without making any mistakes/enemies that means you really didn't live at all.

Bill Gates is my poster child for "Do the ends justify the means?" I know people who were absolutely robbed by MCSFT and their business practices in the 90's. I'm glad he's using his wealth for good, but that doesn't change how he got the money.

It's kind of like Pilot washing his hands though, yeah? Who do you have to ask to find out how much of your money must be given away before you're atoned? Does he also have to say a bunch of hail mary's and our father's? Wouldn't it be better to set aside a huge chunk of money to have people re-write history on your behalf after you're gone?

Anyone who visited Jeffery Epstein's island and has also been removed from the board of directors of the company they started for inappropriate relationship isn't an OK dude.

There's also the whole bit with Paul Allen where they tried to take all of his shares when he had cancer.

Quick note that simply associating with Epstein _may_ not imply badness of the kind you suggest. There's some suspicion that Epstein was some sort of intelligence operative and therefore may have engaged in all kinds of measures to attempt to befriend, influence and compromise powerful individuals. If that's the case, he would have used the approach we hear about vs underage girls etc if he thought that would be successful, but other approaches if that didn't seem likely to work. So it may be possible that an individual had contact with Epstein in a way totally unrelated to human trafficking. e.g. he said "come on my plane and you can meet <very interesting person>" or "come to my island and I'll invest in your company". Basically, he was a person focused on compromising and influencing people, using a wide gamut of techniques, not simply a person focused on being an abuser/trafficker.

I read Paul Allen’s biography. There it seemed Gates could be (quite) a bit of a jerk. However, this thing about shares isn’t mentioned.

And was Gates removed from the board of Microsoft? Where did you get that information?

Seriously?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/30/microsoft...

He "left" the board, which is the equivalent of "You can't fire me, I quit". He was removed.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/17/bill-gates-m...

Okay, you are right! I didn’t recall that bit of the shares and the news from the second article completely went by me.

I guess it is not a big deal at the end of the day, but it is quite shocking to me on a certain level that this is being said here. But I guess it is just another reminder that HN is much more about the business of computers and software, and not so much about computers and software themselves, even if that can be a very blurry distinction most of the time. But here... the distinction/priority is quite clear!

Nobody is saying that you need to be a perfect moral paragon. But having a documented close relationship with the most famous and powerful pedophile isn’t something you can gloss over. His departure from the MS over inappropriate conduct seems to paint a pattern: this is a powerful guy who abused his power over women repeatedly and it’s worth calling that out.

(Please no whataboutism; yes there are probably worst billionaires than him; yes all of them should be held to account for their actions).

Turns out people can do both bad and good things and are hard to reduce to a single number on a linear scale from bad to good.

He's pretty into the future of clean energy. If one looks at it just from that perspective and not a moralistic one, I think it means something for him to invest.

Despite his flaws as a human being and damage done by Microsoft in the 90's, overall his contributions to humanity greatly exceed his shortcomings. What are your contributions to humankind? Have you done anything to make the world a better place?

The answer is, probably not, or at least not as much as Bill. So be wary of passing judgement to others so easily lest you be judged yourself.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30272413.

(No, we're not trying to defend lizard people, great resets, population control, 5G, or whatever else comes up in this context. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck. Repeating the same flamewar topics over and over again sucks, and this one is especially completely off topic in this thread.)

Saying Bill Gates isn't a good person is flamebait?

Sorry then, it wasn't my intention.

Sure. It's just a classic flamewar topic, and completely a generic tangent (unless the story had been about BG).

I totally get that it wasn't your intention!

You’re going to have to be more specific.

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