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Comment by gary_0 | Hacker News Reader

And AFAIK Brin & Page and Zuckerberg still maintain majority voting control over their companies. They could enforce any policy they wanted from on high, and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit. Brin & Page could give the order to make Search work again or you're all fired, and Zuck could mandate no censorship of minorities or else, but they don't. There's nobody to shift blame to; this is just what billions of dollars does to "free-spirited hackers".

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Re-reading the Google IPO founders letter to prospective shareholders every once in a while is a sobering experience.

https://www.thestreet.com/opinion/text-of-googles-letter-to-...

The anecdote I love to give is that I didn't know that Brin went to my high school until after I'd graduated. It's a high-performing public school due to its proximity to several research institutions, but it was never exactly loaded, and certainly could have benefited from outside investment (say, to replace the 20ish "temporary" trailers with a new wing). Even just having him show up to give a talk to students would have been amazing. Not a peep from this man, though, let alone the pocket change to help out his alma mater.

This is the flip side of the "self-made man" narrative.

It allows one to disavow any sense of social reciprocity after becoming obscenely rich.

I was curious, so I looked through his Wikipedia page -- it says he donated $1m to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in 2009 (which helped his family move to USA when he was a child). Even the NYT article notes that "The gift is small, given Mr. Brin’s estimated $16 billion in personal wealth" :D

(this is like you making $1m annually and donating $62.50)

Why would your school get money from him and not just education in general?

If someone becomes successful, it's common to pay it back by helping out the steps that might have led to that success.

Brin didn't go to every high school: he went to the one he did.

And maybe he had a terrible experience and thought it contributed nothing to his success... but that's kind of a dick perspective at a certain level of wealth, especially if a school has needs (and they always do).

You're describing what a well designed tax system should be doing. Philanthropy is just the rich convincing us that things are fine, and we shouldn't worry that billionaires exist.

A tax system takes the amount required to fund society to the equality level desired.

In anything less than a fully-equalizing society, philanthropy still has a place.

(Said as someone who thinks higher wealth brackets, including my own, should be taxed more heavily)

I guess the Nordic societies have to really equal then, because I can't remember ever even hearing of anyone donating anything to a single school. Like.. there's nothing in the system for a school to even be prepared to even own a donation. A school over there doesn't manage a financial fund, it runs on an annual municipal budget. It's all tax money.

The parent commenter put it well, philanthropy is just the rich convincing [America] that things are fine.

"and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit."

That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.

And chances are they have been buying quite a bit of lifestyle by borrowing against that number. Because selling would strip them of that voting control you pointed out. Then they can't really afford the number to go down, because the borrowing is effectively a cascade, so in reality they aren't anywhere close to free in their decisions.

(but I'd imagine that they are quite capable of deluding themselves into believing that the decisions they have to take to keep the number up are what they actually want)

While I'm sure their finances are a bit more complicated than "they have infinite money", I find it hard to believe that people who can buy and sell small countries and ruin millions of lives with a few keystrokes are as powerless as you might be implying. "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."

These people have all set up financial constructions that will see them and their children safely into old age with the very best of medical care, pocket money to the tune of being able to just buy off the whole evening of their favourite fancy restaurant for the night for just the two of you on a whim, and owning one or two private fucking islands in perpetuity, whatever happens to their megacorps.

They can indeed do with their toys whatever they want. They just don't want to put up with the bother of other investors trying to get rid of them, or the orange guy not sending them a Christmas card, or having a little less than infinite money.

What they don't have is financial constructions that would leave them in nominal control when they go down that path. And they absolutely do want to stay in control, or else they would have sold a long time ago.

Even if that control is only nominal, of it comes at the price of anticipating every wish institutional investors might have and obediently following them to the (unwritten) letter.

We have extremely old words for this kind of behavior: greed, avarice. Traditionally they have not been considered good things.

> That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.

Why shouldn't this be classified as a mental illness? Imagine a monkey hoarding more food than they could possibly eat, to the point that it lies next to them rotting away, while members of their tribe are dying from starvation. We'd immediately say that there is something wrong with that money, but why do we feel it is normal that some humans hoard an insane amount of money?

Having a billionaire who believes they aren't rich enough and need to make more money is like an anorexia patient believing they aren't skinny enough and need to lose more weight.

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