Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfuhrman | Hacker News Reader

He also gave at least $100 million to Ebola, $500 million to charity, and funded several health science and general science initiatives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen#Paul_G._Allen_Family...

>Paul Allen has given more than $1.8 billion towards the advancement of science, technology, education, wildlife conservation, the arts and community services in his lifetime.[28] In 2010, Allen became a signatory of The Giving Pledge, promising to give at least half of his fortune to philanthropic causes.[29] In December 2014, Inside Philanthropy named Allen as their "Philanthropist of the Year;"[27] Allen's direct giving in 2013 totaled $206 million.[30]

People are not one dimensional creatures.

View on HN

Not that I want to dismiss his contribution, but sometimes there are huge tax implications behind these donations, and I know of at least one occurrence where a half-billionaire SAVED money by donating some to charity.

Can you explain the way this works? I hear stuff like this all the time, but my (admittedly limited) tax knowledge says this is not possible. Donations to charity allow you to reduce the gross income you are taxed on (in the US at least). However, you are not saving any money this way. The top tax bracket is basically 40%, so if you donate 1 million to charity, you reduce your gross income by 1 million, saving you at most 400K in taxes, but you donated 1 million, which means you lost an extra 600K vs just paying your taxes.

I don't know whether that story is true, but if so, it would be done by putting the money into a 'charitable' entity that returns the money in a less- or non-taxable way. This is not really something that could be done in the United States outside of fraudulent activity.

>I know of at least one occurrence where a half-billionaire SAVED money by donating some to charity.

Link?

Why not he release Microsoft products for free! Instead of doing like US govt (Killing people on one side and doing charity on another side), he could do something best he could do in his field.

What does that even mean? Like, Paul Allen should just pay for all the expenses Microsoft incurs to develop its products and then Microsoft can give them all away for free instead? That will work out great. Paul Allen can pay for everything for a few months and then he can run out of money and Microsoft can shut down and lay off 110K employees, 200K with contractors factored in.

Just like GNU/Linux he could release the whole thing is a community developed software

Sure, he could do that if he had any kind of legal right to do so, which he does not. If all of Paul Allen's net worth were in Microsoft stock (and it certainly is not), he'd own less than 5% of the company at this point. Paul Allen couldn't release all of Microsoft's code any more than I could.

And of course, even if it were possible, Microsoft would need to come up with a new way to generate the 87 billion dollars in revenue it just lost, or else lay off 200 thousand people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com