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Comment by syndicatedjelly | Hacker News Reader

What the hell was that whole character assassination over Bhargava's "lack" of philanthropy?

From his Wikipedia:

    Bhargava is a member of the Giving Pledge campaign.[22] In 2015, he pledged to give 99% of his wealth to philanthropic causes.[20] His foundations include the Hans Foundation[1][23] and Rural India Supporting Trust.[24] In 2016, Bhargava told National Geographic that he planned to distribute 10,000 of his stationary, power-generating bikes to rural homes and villages in India.[14]

Also from Wikipedia:

    In 2013, Forbes reported Bhargava's net worth to be $1.5 billion, but he was dropped from its list of billionaires in 2014.[8]

Forbes really hates Bhargava, for no apparent reason.

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>Forbes really hates Bhargava, for no apparent reason.

It's not Forbes, it's just a random contributor writing clickbaity articles for the $.

Forbes is trash and is closer to Medium in the way it is structured than to a typical news media site. It's generally just random contributors. You can see from the URL (forbes.com/sites/[contributer-name]). There are thousands of contributors with various incentives.

Forbes’ staff of journalists could produce great work, sure. But there were only so many of them, and they cost a lot of money. Why not open the doors to Forbes.com to a swarm of outside “contributors” — barely vetted, unedited, expected to produce at quantity, and only occasionally paid? (Some contributors received a monthly flat fee — a few hundred bucks — if they wrote a minimum number of pieces per month, with money above that possible for exceeding traffic targets. Others received nothing but the glory.)

As of 2019, almost 3,000 people were “contributors” — or as they told people at parties, “I’m a columnist for Forbes.”

https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/02/an-incomplete-history-of-f...

Is there any evidence of him actually following up on any of those pledges? The example from the article about his "billion dollar" donation (of which only $4MM seemed to have actually been spent) makes me skeptical.

Edit: It appears the Hans Foundation is doing some things, at least if their annual report [1] is to be believed. Looking at the graphs at the end, their total budget was somewhere around $45MM USD for FY2022-2023 (but there are two graphs which seem to have different numbers, among other problems).

[1] https://thehansfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/THF...

Article written in 2012. Those happened after?

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