The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? And actual charity at that, not Ellison style "Larry Ellison Research Foundation for Prolonging the Life of Larry Ellison and Getting Some Tax Breaks Along the Way".
Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are also behind Common Core and basically ruined public education in the US.
The foundation is a way for Bill to keep doing what he likes without having to pay taxes on it, he's just done a better job of repairing his image than Larry.
And yeah, it's got Melinda's name on it, but let's face it, virtually all the money is from Bill/Microsoft.
Where one side provided all the money, the other side provided the direction.
Both were necessary. Weird huh?
How would you do it? Do you have a way to earn his trust, a service to offer him that he values a lot, a way to steal from him, or anything like that?
Melania apparently managed to do it with true love and kindness. Are you capable of sincerely loving Bill Gates for a period of several years, or fake it in a perfectly convincing way for several years?
Notably, she played a huge part in how Amazon was structured due to her influence on Bezos.
I do find it very interesting though the apparently common pattern here of ‘woman gives away massive fortune she got from x to make the world better/rehabilitate her image’ or something.
Meanwhile, the men all seem to go on hooker binges. See Bezos, and now Gates (vs Epstein files).
No one, including the people getting screwed at the end, are actually innocent, but some definitely are more guilty than others eh?
Melinda also, of course, did work for their joint foundation before she left. Since leaving, she shifted her philanthropic focus more to US women's health and reproductive rights.
Bill has committed to giving away nearly all his wealth (99%) over the next 19 years. Melinda is still committed to giving away over 50% of her wealth over her lifetime.
I don't see any evidence that Melinda was the primary driver for Bill's philanthropy.
Follow up question: do you buy indulgences?
Him giving her STDs and then trying to sneak antibiotics in her food without her noticing would have been grounds all by itself.
Like, actual facts.
FWIW, Bill Gates is one of the people I would have pointed to as one of the less disreputable modern billionaires, and finding out that Melinda divorced him over his Epstein connections really soured my opinion of him.
I think OP has a point, it's very difficult to accumulate vast wealth without behaving ruthlessly and being kind of an asshole when it comes to making tough profit-over-people decisions.
- https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
- https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
- https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
- https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
- https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...
- https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/
- http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/
One would have had to try very hard to avoid ever hearing about Microsoft's behavior in the '90s.
For example, the typical tax structure is to put assets into a foundation. That allows the assets to grow and earn income without being taxed. The only requirement is that 5% of the asset pool has to be used on the stated goal of the foundation. That might sound good but it also includes costs like "administration" so, say, having your family as employees. There are limits to this but it's still somewhat of a slush fund.
That charity can be used for political influence. A foundation can't donate to candidates or PACs but can instead, for example, fund a think tank from which policy is created or influenced. That think tank will employ people while their party is out of the White House and otherwise nurture people who will go into the administration when their party returns to power.
Also, a large foundation such as this wields influence just by its size, by choosing what to fund and where. It can exact generous conditions from governments. Those conditions can extend to companies the foundation's benefactors have an interest in.
All of this is about influence. Governments are accountable to their people. Outsized private foundations are accountable to no one.
I guess I'm not cut out to be a "big shot". I opened the DAF, but use the money for actually donating to charitable organizations to which I have no other connection.
These guys don’t want to be remembered for the awful behaviors they had in their personal and business life. They’re extremely conceited and concerned with their image.
It's just one more method of buying good feelings and trying to buy good will while being in control of large numbers of people.
He wants to feel like he's doing good and using money to give him that feeling.
I'd rather have better men had that money to spend and his victims both personal and business leave him penniless and alone at the end.
1. Donate 5-10% of their fortune to random unobjectionable charities.
2. Don't abuse children.
3. Stay off Twitter.
Because they don't want to be beloved, they want to turn people into dinosaurs. (to adapt the Spiderman quote)
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ ranks him at #13 wealthiest in the world with $108B net worth.
He's donated about half his fortune, and 60% of that to his own org.
Basically the post-WWII period was a golden age for all of the above because the middle class of returning soldiers was there, and it was as power and wealth consolidated in the 80s and onward that there was less and less interest and agreement about spending on stuff other the essentials (which turned out to be mostly just defense).
So really it's a two pronged thing:
* the wealthy need to pay much more, and the government needs to invest that in services that benefit the middle class (education, health care, energy & transportation infrastructure) and also which keep people from falling out of the middle class (social safety net, consumer protections).
* eventually there's a critical mass of middle class people comfortable enough to look out their windows and feel concern about pollution, the poor, etc, and then you ultimately get a combination of individual action, NGOs, and government programmes that meet the very needs that are noticed and lobbied for.
But I think the issue is that many advocates want to jump directly from "more taxes on the rich" to "gov't spends directly on my pet issue", and if you miss the second step, you're never going to get the willpower to either raise the taxes or direct the money into environmental initiatives or whatever else.
I think some of it is the psychology that government is incompetent and will just waste the money anyway ("let Bill keep his money and build toilets in Africa himself, at least he'll get it done"), and the best way to fight that is probably what Carney is trying to do right now: kick off a bunch of ambitious programmes to build new things like pipelines, rail, airport expansions, etc on an accelerated timeline. Perhaps if people see visible progress they'll be more open to saying yeah okay, I'm all right with paying more to live in a country where we get stuff done.
I'm sure the government will accept donations. Just pay extra as you think they are worth it.
Yes, I don't love that he puts out hits like that on solar and wind in his effort to promote nuclear as a sole solution, but I still find his larger arguments around the dynamics of environmentalism as a movement persuasive.
There is nothing at all you can do that could ever overcome the harm of helping that man, participating in his business, and calling him a friend.
I don't care if Jesus Christ himself comes down and says Bill Gates is solely responsible for the ending of all suffering.
Raping kids is Bad. Enslaving kids to rape is Bad. This is as clear as you can get in real human society to being The Bad Guy, and Bill Gates spent his precious, limited time on this earth helping him, legitimizing him, and participating in his influence peddling and child rape and slavery
Bill Gates is a piece of shit.
At the time they met in 2011, Epstein had been convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008.
How did he help him and call him a friend?
Gates has always been a piece of shit. For example, when Paul Allen got diagnosed with cancer, Gates and Ballmer tried to screw him out of Microsoft stock that he owned (this was roughly 1982-ish?).
You're a shit person if you try to screw over your "friend" like this. You're a shit person squared if you do it when they just got diagnosed with cancer.
> basically his entire fortune
If I give away 50% of my fortune my entire life falls apart and I am struggling. If I give away 10% it is going to hurt.
But Gates? He gives away 99% of his money and he's still a billionaire. His life isn't really going to change in any meaningful way. His money still generates tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year without him lifting a finger. He gives away 99.9% of his money and he's still worth $100m and again, his life effectively does not change, making now only millions of dollars a year doing nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I am glad he's giving his money away and this is far better than Ellison or plenty of others, but that doesn't absolve their crimes/behavior. There's definitely a hierarchy of wrongness, being a cheater is definitely better than being a pedo cheater but neither is good or an excuse. The dude was associating with a known sex trafficker. Definitely not an "ops, I didn't know", his wife definitely knew and told him...
Put a dollar figure on your daughter, sister, mother.
Now you get it.
I’ll give you the creation of the country but modern democracy was not born in the USA. Your overall point is still valid though.
So he is no longer a billionaire? And donating to what charity, The Gates Foundation? The one that he controls? The one that he uses to push his ideological stances and repeatedly fails to help anyone? Just look how successful his work on improving education system in America was. What a sacrifice it was for him...
Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.
It's only hard if you don't want to help anyone and your only goal is to push charter schools(by any other name) by any means necessary.
>Their work to clean water and cure diseases has saved millions of lives. They know what they are good at and they've decided to double down on that.
They helped so many people by not allowing them getting covid vaccine or by fighting generics? Also their "good" deeds weren't without negative consequences that could be avoided if someone actually listened to people they were "helping".
Why are charter schools bad? What is the ostensible easy way to improve US education that you know for sure will work?
I am a big supporter of public schools, but I also understand that only allowing rich parents to opt out of public schools can lead to some very bad outcomes as schools don't have to respond directly to public pressure.
Recently the Seattle public schools reverted some very bad decisions because so many parents in Seattle pulled their kids out of public schools to go to private, at such a high numbers it started to cause budget issues.
That was only possible because the so many parents here can afford to do that.
Another example is with how many schools stopped using phonics for reading and an entire generation of kids ended up with poor reading skills. No marketplace of ideas means even if parents wanted to have their kid learn phonics, only rich parents could afford to switch to private schools. Even today Seattle schools is just slowly switching back to phonics (my local school is a pilot for returning to phonics! Year later!)
Same goes for 1:1 laptop usage. Evidence now shows that every school that moves to one to one laptops (a dedicated laptop for every kid in every classroom) has educational outcomes plummet. It will take years of concerted effort by parents to get those laptops out of public schools (to be fair, took years of effort to get them into the schools....) and break the contracts to school district has with technology providers.
Having all the kids in the city go to a single School district has many huge benefits that lift everybody up, and a well-funded public school system is essential to democracy.
But there are also issues with putting all your eggs in one basket.
I don't think anyone has a good solution to these problems.
He took more from the society than he gave back. And when you take from society, you're not supposed to decide alone how to redistribute. That's the issue