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Comment by reinitctxoffset | Hacker News Reader

Speaking for myself, just knowing there is someone in the billionaire class who is still an incandescent beacon of humanity, humility, and hope has in some nontrivial way increased the quality of my years since she started on this path.

She is an existence proof that a now-inevitable extreme inequality regime is not by construction maximally cynical and extractive.

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> She is an existence proof that a now-inevitable extreme inequality regime is not by construction maximally cynical and extractive.

MacKenzie Scott's philanthropy is great, and I'm both glad she exists and glad that her existence apparently upsets the Garry Tans and the Elon Musks of the world, but I don't think this conclusion is the take away at all.

She's an anomaly in the system, not proof that the system isn't horrendously harmful.

the worlds GDP is like $120,000,000,000,000. Her work is worthless in comparison. the only possible benefit of concentrated wealth is taking concentrated bets on a new research or technology or social organization. But to give to generic charities is a waste of time and reveals a profound lack of creativity on her part.

Would you agree that buying / getting a mega yacht build is even less creative and definitely countless times less impactful ?

Amazon has generated hundreds of billions in value. She has no interest in generating anything useful. Her charity is lazy unoriginal and self aggrandizing

Someone else would have won the everything store / market if bezos had never been born...

Most definitely would not have been someone of her caliber though!

Not sure I understand what you mean... Anyway have a pleasant evening/day

Right, but she is not pathologically like the other billionaires. She married a man who became one. Same with Melinda Gates. So I guess our hope is that more billionaires will lust after young Russians or hot newscasters and get divorced, so their normal wives can do what normal people do with more money than they’d even need and help others.

Hard to square these guys antics with the whole meritocracy of wealth business. Losing half your empire falling for a uh, socialite, on a business trip to LA? Tagged in a log book on the way to an island of ill repute? Getting high out of your mind and picking a fight with your boss who is the President?

These are depressingly average ways to screw up. Been there done that, but I don't claim to be John Galt either.

Precisely, it takes a special kind of psychopathy to have 100 million dollars and decide that you need to "keep going".

She is an outlier in the sense that she is both “new money” and also “old money” (she did the equivalent of inheriting money in her settlement with Bezos).

She was, at one time, a normal person, with normal friends and normal parents. However unlike most other “new money” billionaires she acquired her wealth without the corrupting influence of being a master of the universe business person where everyone in your circle is falling over themselves to gas up your ego.

She wasn’t a passive housewife who inherited money in a divorce. She was an early Amazon investor and helped build the first stage of the company. She’d be a billionaire even without the divorce.

I’m not trying to dismiss the investments she made (both time and money), but more point out that she was not driven by the same corrupting motivations you get with typical billionaires. If she was, she’d have taken her wealth and done more capitalism with it.

Would she have made money from Amazon had she not married Bezos? Or even from any dotcom?

Would Bezos have made Amazon if he hadn’t married Scott? The answer seems to be no. She was an instrumental early contributor, and she supported him while he lost enormous amounts of money for many years before Amazon became profitable.

Fair enough. I think the most likely scenario is probably neither of them would have become wealthy, or at least nearly as wealthy. So much of success in tech up til the early through even sorta late-90s ('97-'99) was timing and what could pass as luck. And people weren't nearly as vicious. So few people, relatively, were in a position to start online companies back then. I am sure many of us have moments we look back at and just cringe at opportunities we didn't follow through on.

I do wonder who would have been Bezo's alternate (someone would have built something like Amazon). I wonder less who would have been Scott's, at least up until 2003/2005 when she started being known more as a name of her own.

Given she was also on the fast track at D.E. Shaw in the mid nineties she was going to be a lot fucking richer than you no matter who she married.

I'm not seeing any evidence that she was an early Amazon investor. Where is that claim from? Of course she was an investor through her marriage, but you claim she'd be a billionaire without the divorce, so presumably you're referring to investment other than through her husband.

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