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Comment by elevaet | Hacker News Reader

Well, Gates is absolutely terrible at PR and doesn't tick any of the boxes of being chic, unless it's some kind of so uncool that he's cool kind of thing.

Despite this and more importantly despite his reputation in business and the often laughable products MS produced, his tremendous philanthropy really changed my perspective on him.

In a world where there are mega-billionaires, he's my least unfavourite. He's doing good things with his money like eradicating malaria and funding bleeding edge climate tech. He's pretty outstanding wrt how he spends his money.

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Strong disagree. I started software dev in the late 90's and among everyone I knew in tech MS was uniformly hated, even the DOJ sued them. They did everything they could to stomp out open internet standards. Untold amounts of money, business, etc. were lost by all of us fighting this scourge. The fact that anyone alive thinks anything remotely positive of him could only be due to PR. IMO even if he gave away every cent, I'd just consider that restitution for all of the damage he's done to the world. Then he'd still owe us.

I didn't work in the industry at that time but I did hear the stories. I might have a different perspective if I was on the ground.

We have a pretty open internet today, or at least MS is no longer the biggest threat to it so maybe this was just another MS-bungled project lol.

Jokes aside, utmost respect to the people who have fought for an open internet over the years.

Eh, I would say he puts a lot of effort intro creating image of benevolent nerd philantropist. Point in case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hnZJIRd6Qw There must have been a team of people dedicated to carefully crafting this video, creating props, there's even a dozen or so actors there (each in the background for just a few seconds). It looks like someone put a lot of effort into this and it surely consumed thousands of dollars (my uneducated guess is somewhere in 10-100k$ range). To what end other than working on his personal brand?

Speaking of malaria, after googling for 3 minutes it seems he spent around 2B$ on it. Does it really matter? Yes and no. Maybe it had impact on people's lives, but given Gates' net value is 100B$+, giving away a billion or two does not matter. It will not affect his quality of life in any significant way. He could give away a few dozen billions more and still will spend rest of his life living in luxury that I could only dream off. Sure, better to fight malaria than buy another yacht, but still, it's easy decision to make when you have that much money.

Can't fault him on hiring a crew to craft his videos. He has better things to do with his time. Wouldn't you outsource that if you were in his position?

My 2 mins of googling came up with more like 3.6B$ on malaria, but even 2B$ is a shit-ton of money. I certainly haven't donated 2% of my net value to malaria (and it's only on the order of 1/10000 of his!).

Malaria rates are down around 30% since 2010, thanks in part to Gates. He's likely saved thousands to hundreds of thousands of lives.

Malaria is just one part of his philanthropy. I'd love to see the numbers for Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. It would be great to all billionaires follow suit with this kind of "easy decision".

2, 3 or 5 billion don't matter if you still have tens of billions left.

I'm not saying he shouldn't outsource his videos. What I'm saying is that this looks more like a professionally made commercial (advertising his personal brand). I'm pretty sure it cost O(hours) of his time (consider even getting to the set - you can see this is a professional set, so probably in some studio; I also doubt this was done in one take given how there are other actors around including the skating Santa Clauses). All in all, it really feels artificial and dishonest. What kind of person would even come up with idea of creating such a video in the first place?

What does it matter how much he has left?

There are somewhat diminishing returns spending money on philanthropic causes: if he were to spend 30 rather than 3 billion the result wouldn't be ten times better. I'm happy he's trying to make the world a better place while still keeping an eye on the money being used efficiently.

Why does the 100k matter if the 3 billion don't?

> Maybe it had impact on people's lives, but given Gates' net value is 100B$+, giving away a billion or two does not matter.

Is it not enough for you that he went out of his way to improve other people's lives? Would it only satisfy you if his lifestyle suffered?

> it's easy decision to make when you have that much money

How do you know? Have you ever been in that position?

> Is it not enough for you that he went out of his way to improve other people's lives?

How did he went out of his way?

> How do you know? Have you ever been in that position?

I don't think snark is necessary here; probably there are no 100B$+ users on HN.

But it's not hard to extrapolate from where am I. I have comfortable tech job, I could easily give away few thousands bucks to some charitable cause just to show off (and my quality of life wouldn't change). Would that automatically make me a good and trustworthy person? I think the answer here is no. I also guess if for some reason my net worth went up a few orders of magnitude, I could also give few orders of magnitude more. Would then I be a good and trustworthy person?

> How did he went out of his way?

He spent a considerable amount of his free time.

> I have comfortable tech job, I could easily give away few thousands bucks to some charitable cause just to show off (and my quality of life wouldn't change).

Yes, you could. Do you?

> Would that automatically make me a good and trustworthy person? I think the answer here is no.

It wouldn't. But also because there are no good and bad people. There are good and bad actions. I use Linux and absolutely hate what Bill Gates was doing wrt the whole free software ecosystem. I still commend him for his charity work.

> I also guess if for some reason my net worth went up a few orders of magnitude, I could also give few orders of magnitude more.

Yes, you could. Would you though?

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