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Comment by throwawayninja | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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 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).

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