Spend enough money, and a wealthy person can buy back their public image. I wonder if they think money can also buy back their souls.
So, pretty much no change in the way things work. While they might not have been billionaires in the past, they were rich. Heck, you don't even need to be a billionaire today. Simply rich enough will do.
And it isn't like "The media" has a long history of truthfullness: This has really been a development of the last century. Papers in the 1800s printed falsehoods for sales. The "Spanish Flu" being call 'spanish' is really a result of wartime censorship. War often brings censorship itself. Right now, a lot of media is owned by a few companies. The bright side is that it is easier for everyday citizens to report on things around them (thanks, internet) but everyday folks don't have access to folks like Gates.
I'm not sure where you got that he was a covid expert, though. The main reason the media would interview him is because of his foundation's past 'experience' with communicable disease. Doesn't make him an expert, just possibly a smarter ask than, say, asking me about it.
https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-fu...
Have you seen this creepy leading to gangster interview?
"We'll, he's dead now so ... be careful."
You can thank conspiracy theorists for that. Mainstream media just followed along.
I actually believe steve jobs when he says microsoft held back computer development by decades potentially.
Yet now he is some sort of god/genius for the elite. It's very nice that he's eliminating disease and helping with vaccines, but I just can't believe how much everyone's forgotten about his past.
And then there's the whole Epstein thing on top of that. I mean come on...
It is definitely not by accident. I'm sure someone was payed very handsomely to fix his reputation.
Elon Musk is an asshole, but great at developing and marketing products.
Bill Gates is an asshole, but a great business man and his charity seems to be doing useful work.
At some point, you just leave out the "he's an asshole" part, as it's sort of implied.
Most assholes aren't great people, either.
"It's nice to be important, but it's important to be nice."
He bought Tesla. He didn't actually create that company.
A lot of what is attributed to Elon Musk is pure BS.
He is great at marketing, but not the "genius inventor" that many seem to think that he is.
These people are really good entrepreneurs who had a lot of luck on their side, but they are also severely overhyped.
Are you saying all you need to do is create a company and that equals success and a good product?
Because damn some people in silicon valley want a word, you know something they don't.
Credit where credit is due.
I'm sure that Hitler had a redeeming quality or two.
Nobody is purely evil or purely good, although Hitler can gain the "almost purely evil" tag.
Where Gates stands on that spectrum, I have no idea. He's done vast amounts of good and he's done vast amounts of evil. Balancing them depends on how you weight each action, and that's a very personal opinion.
I didn't downvote that comment though.
You can look at Apple's behavior in spaces where they dominate to see that. Or are we expecting that they will open the floodgates tomorrow and allow additional app stores on the iPhone? And the only reason they haven't locked down their desktop operating system as tightly as their mobile operating system is users have expectations of how open a desktop should be to running what software they choose... Expectations largely established by the Microsoft ecosystem and the alternative it would offer if Apple tried to seal things up.
For some reason, when Apple does it, people think it's pro-consumer, and when Microsoft does it, it's anti-competitive. The legendary reality distortion field effect of Apple's CEO seems to have outlived him.
For a start, apple builds products that every single consumer made a choice to buy. And over 50% of them still choose android.
Bill gates went above almost all consumer's heads and sold windows to governments and big corporations, and then bundled their own software with it. It's part of the reason why the UX of windows was always so bad, because the end user wasn't making purchase decisions.
So no, I don't agree. Jobs hasn't been leading Apple for a long time. You don't know what he would have done, other than that he likes closed garden products. That's a long way from the anticompetitive behaviour that microsoft did over the years.
And again, window was like 95% of the market at it's peak. Apple is nowhere near that.
The story of Apple versus Microsoft has always been a story of a vertical monopoly pointing to a horizontal monopoly and saying how evil they are.
This doesn't seem plausible to me. Decades is a lot even when accounting for compounding growth and some of their more questionable practices. They've also surely fueled a lot of resources into development, and I'm not sure if a different company would have definitely acquired as much money to be able to use in the first place. I also don't really see Apple as a beacon of light in comparison.
But then again, I also think that modern Gates is a huge force for good in the world, and a good role model for other rich people. As for Melinda, she also seems great but from what I'm seeing she focuses on less effective causes and I suspect her money will overall help the world a bit less (which is her right of course) than if they were in his hands.
I think Apple coming out on top would have been worse for computer software and development.
Are you kidding? He didn't wrestle anything. People chose to buy the iphone, and developers chose to develop for it. You can develop only for android if you want. Good luck developing for only linux in 1990.
As aggressive as Jobs could be, he did not force anything anywhere. The iphone is about as close you can come to a voluntarily purchased high end purchase as you get. It's a free choice. And it's a free choice to develop for iphone.
Don't pretend you are a retard, if you are a government or business that provides a website or mobile app you HAVE no REAL choice then to also target iOS.
If the local factory poisons the air you should move if you don't like it right? IF society(probably in EU and Asia) decides that Apple damages the "environment" they will be free to force Apple to do better or Apple will be free to exit.
That’s not to so say it’s right, the internet is meant to democratise society and remove these middle men. Apples cut should be significantly lower.