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Comment by probablybetter | Hacker News Reader

WHAT??? Jonas Salk GAVE the IP for the Polio Vaccine TO THE WORLD FOR FREE!

how dare you say that Billionaires gave us these things. you are telling lies.

Bill Gates also gave billions of dollars to the world for free, it's just a question of which one is more praiseworthy. I could be convinced Gates was not more impactful than Salk, but he's definitely in the running for top 100 best overall human beings in terms of positive impact on the world, in stark contrast to the claim that tech billionaire have contributed nothing

Where did Bill Gates get these billions that he 'gave to the world' ?

Did he generate them purely from his genius and benevolence?

Why is "gave" in scare quotes? Did he not give the money away?

And yes, mostly genius and not benevolence.

'gave to the world' implies the world didn't have this money before gates came along. Which is obviously not true and quite literally impossible.

In fact the world didn't have this money before. Maybe this is the first time you've encountered the idea that the economy is "positive sum" so think of it like this:

Is the value of everything in the world higher or lower than it was 1000 years ago? If it's higher, how did it go up?

Maybe you need to do a quick Google on monetary policy 101 and how money is created. You seem to not understand the basics here.

While you're at it, consider what portion of MS success is directly attributable to Bill Gates and not the many thousands of other people involved in the company and code it literally copied from open source projects. Not to mention the extreme anti-competitveness of MS and their aggressiveness in suing and shutting down other companies, and other negative externalities they generated.

Ok let's compare the year 1000 with the year 1500. Do you believe the value of everything in the world increased in those 500 years? There was no monetary policy yet so that isn't the explanation

The explanation is the entire human race working diligently to produce, create and grow. Not because king Bobbert the 7th gave some artist some money, and not because king Jeffrey got rich by enslaving/conquering/exploring someone else.

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