What silicon valley millionaire is advocating against taxing the rich? The only one I know of that has an opinion is Gates, and it's exactly the opposite of what you're implying.
We have Tom Perkins complaining that the desire to have the rich contribute fairly is a 'Progressive Kristallnacht', tech nutjob Tim Draper advocating a scheme to basically wall off Silicon Valley from the poors in the rest of the state, and various SF tech firms monopolizing public resources (like bus stops, for example) without paying anything resembling a fair market rate.
Less directly, we have people like Peter Shih and Greg Gopman spouting antisocial rants about how their lives are inconvenienced by the poor and disadvantaged, and how the world would be a better place without all these poor people (rephrased, obviously).
There are certainly level-headed silicon valley millionaires out there who just want to buy a quiet house somewhere and live a happy family life. As long as they pay their taxes and don't lobby to make the planet worse, I have no problem with those people.
The issue is that you can easily come up with as many bad examples as good ones, when it comes to these 'new money' types.
The money in SV obviously does not go directly to the most deserving; some people just get lucky, other people get their money through deceit and outright theft, and other people have the vast majority of their money siphoned off by outside forces like patent trolls. It would be unusual if all these millionaires WERE good people.
Bill Gates is one of the few who really seems to want to give back, so we read about him a lot. It's a better news story than "Shocking! Another Rich Guy Turns Out to be Greedy" or "Wealthy Person Still Not Giving a Lot of Money".
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-...
Quote: "My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice."
Buffett, Gates and many other super-rich people have decided to give most of their fortunes to charity, not to their children.
Only if burning money in your yard counts as a tax dodge. Setting up a foundation doesn't allow the money to be redirected to the donor in any way, and the donor doesn't even get to specify how the money is spent, except in a broad philosophical sense (i.e. "The goal of my foundation is to help education", things like that).
> I don't know if he represents the average or if he's actually a positive outlier.
Even among well-known philanthropists, Gates is an outlier. His willingness to tackle polio, and his project to redesign condoms to make them more effective, are both wise and daring projects.
Unlike smallpox, polio only exhibits symptoms in a small minority of those infected, so it is very difficult to identify, control and eradicate. It's going to be much harder to eradicate polio than it was to eliminate smallpox, the first dramatic pathogen extinction that was based on simple human effort.
This may appear to be true at first glance, but compare using capital to set up a foundation versus using the same capital to grow one's fortune in equities and other investments. The latter choice is better overall when a combination of growth and tax issues are taken into account.
This means that people who set up foundations do it because they want to change the world, not because they want to avoid taxes.