Sure.
Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation will probably eradicate polio.
Before people jump on the bandwagon about how Gates is evil and problematic, that there are no virtuous billionaires, and a government or an NGO or an equivalent should have been the one to do it… I know. But the question was “name one billionaire that’s done anything good,” and I think it’s pretty difficult to argue that eradicating polio isn’t good.
On same tone, Warren Buffet.
He has also donated billions in the same charity and largely lives controversy free.
The company he’s synonymous with is very much not controversy free
Bill gates is not curing polio, it’s the doctors and scientists that are doing it.
However, one can posit that the Gates Foundation is creating a market for vaccines that aren’t of interest in the industrialized nations.
I’m not sure that subsequent doses are going to be provided as generously as the first ones.
That’s not how vaccines work. The illness is already there, it’s not like people get sick after you introduce a vaccine into the system. So the “market” has always been there and every dose administered is great.
You don’t understand my point.
- Sick people receive vaccines for free or very cheap
- Sick people gets hope of survival to disease, hope which wasn’t previously available.
- Sick people ask their governments to continue receiving vaccines.
- People providing vacciones now are charging a lot more to said governments.
- Profit (which was the whole point, and not any “humanitarian” notions.)
And the market wasn’t there, because unless there’s some way to create high demand and guaranteed payment in poor countries, there’s no profit in said vaccines (or any medication, for that matter; do you see any multinational farmaceutical companies giving much thought to the creation of medicine to cure Chagas disease? And it’s endemic in many areas of South America. But those are poor areas, so the is no profit there).
The problem with your argument is that the Gates foundation is a non-profit. They aren’t trying to make a profit, they’ve burned through tens of billions of dollars in the past 20 years.
Are you arguing that countries should just let people die from polio rather than accept humanitarian aid or am I missing something?
Some More News went into detail on why the “non-profit” label, especially for billionaires’ charity funds, is bullshit: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=69AtkAHkKEc
Bill gates, also the guy who spent loads of time on epsteins island banging children. I guess it evens out /s
Source on that?
Pretty easy to find the connections on google. Try it. Start with his divorce and work backward. Just because you love him doesn’t mean he didn’t do bad things.
Ah, the classic ‘Do your own research’
Ahh the classic dismissive “source?”
Mark Cuban is a bit of a wall street asshole, but he’s created a drug company to slash the prices of generic drugs for Americans: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/24/1075344246/mark-cuban-pharmacy#:~:text=Billionaire investor and Dallas Mavericks,of its online pharmacy Wednesday.
Wrong
OK I’m sorry maybe I’m letting the autism overflow my brain but seeing you just say “wrong” to technically correct statements that answer the question presented here is just so fucking annoying. Ooooo you got so many upbears from fellow Hexbears who dont want to think but just dunk. Getting very frusterated with this community right now.
Anything good?
Then all of them. They are human beings, not black holes of pure evil.
Elon Musk got me to stop using Twitter.
He also got me to stop using Reddit after hanging out with their CEO too. What a great guy 👍
Good acts do not make a good person. Plenty of billionaires have done good things, but they don’t even come close to outweighing the bad.
A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.
Give them a cookie and the wall
In what order tho?
I love a quote I read once in a thing about alignment. “If you fix twenty neighbor’s roofs, you’re Jimmy the Helpful Thatcher. But if you eat the neighbor’s daughter, you’re Jimmy the Cannibal, and no amount of additional carpentry assistance will change that.”
Traditionally this joke is:
Bad Scottish Accent Engaged
I build 200 ships, do they call me Seamus the shipbuilder? Nae.
I paint 100 houses, do they call me Seamus the Housepainter? Nae.
But ye fuck one sheep…
There’s a lot. In the late 1800s it started becoming something of a tradition for billionaires to move on to philanthropy after their retirement. J.D. Rockefeller was worth several hundred billion dollars in today’s money. He gave away close to 200 billion of it.
A more modern example that people have brought up is Bill Gates.
It’s pretty easy to come up with some things billionaires have done that are good. Bill Gates funding cures and prevention of diseases in the third world is one that comes to mind.
Now, if we’re talking about finding an example of a billionaire whose life is on balance a good thing for humanity…that’s pretty much impossible.
A single good thing that a single billionaire has done? The Gates foundation fighting malaria. I think that’s good.
Taxing them would do even more good.
Is the topic of the thread called “Should we tax billionaires” or was it “I dare you to name one good thing a billionaire has done”?
The submarine dude that got rid of a few more in one go?
Warren Buffet invented the buffet (I think) and I met my girlfriend at a buffet. She is a paramedic, I lost consciousness because I drank 4 litres of the truffle bechamel (I did the maths and this would have cost the restaurant slightly more money than the admission fee, hence hurting Warren Buffet’s bottom line)
Gabe Newell is the least shitty billionaire I can think of, I’m not sure what he does for philanthropy though but at least it doesn’t seem like he tries to influence the country for his benefit.
Didn’t one of the Koch brothers die? That was pretty cool.
Elon Musk. I know you guys hate him somehow but. HE DID build reusable rockets. HE DID build electric cars. HE DID restore Free Speech even though you guys somehow don’t agree with that because people now can say anything they want and you can’t live in your own little bubble without any criticism anymore (on twitter). And that’s not what left wingers want lol.
His EMPLOYEES build reusable rockets. His EMPLOYEES built electric cars. Even if he participated in this process he would be on a supporting role. Similar to a janitor on spacex, a guy that maybe enables the real pros to do good stuff. (the janitor may actually be more important than musk tbh)
He did NOT restore free speech on twitter. Many activists a still being silenced every day. He gives their data to authoritarian goverments who have journalists executed. Free speech is about freedom from goverment retaliation and he actively aids goverments in suppressing free speech.
The rockets were really reusable without huge work anyway
This is probably a slightly misguided idea to go after them as bad people because as soon as they do do something “good” you leave the door open for people to think that perhaps on balance they’re not so bad after all.
The problem of billionaires being billionaires is itself the chief complaint people should have. It doesn’t matter if they’re Mr Rogers and Santa Claus combined, because they can choose to be so entirely at will and can be selfish assholes too entirely at will. They can also be other things entirely, given they are actually human beings after all they can try to act on best intentions, but like all humans, with great ignorance or with flawed thinking. When you or I do that the consequences can be terrible, but mostly, we’d be unable to come close to the scale of impact these demi gods can leave in their wake, not to mention the “original sins” that allowed them to become billionaires in the first place leaving a legacy of nasty indirect consequences for society at large.
There’s actually a lot of examples of billionaires philanthropy and as you likely expected to point out when people mentioned that, some of those acts hide less pure intention, but undoubtedly they probably really did do some good and that itself is enough to completely undermine your whole point that they never do anything good. The issue is that, with the sheer vast quantity of concentrated wealth and power they can wield, the society that supports them is bereft of a real voice in how it’s resources are used. So much of the fruits of our labour end up closed off in private coffers and it undermines public institutions like democratic governments because while we may theoretically have a say in what they do, we legally have no say at all in how a billionaire spends his bucks (and I say his intentionally). They might say we oughtn’t since it’s their money and no one typically has a say in what the rest of us do with our money but as with most things, there’s a point of extreme where this logic becomes perverse.
Can we as a society organize and innovate without billionaires? Even China changed their economy to make them possible.
Right now, writers are on strike. Hollywood workers could invest their time, make movies, and get paid afterwards. But instead, it takes people with money to do the funding.
How should big sums of money be managed? Bureaucrats work to a certain extend but hardly innovate. Which structure could ask a million people to invest a thousand dollars each and offer ethical profits?
Billionaires don’t innovate, it’s the engineers/scientists/workers in their payroll.
Engineers, scientists and workers need an environment that allows them to innovate. How can we create such an environment without billionaires? Somebody mentioned kickstarter. What is missing that small investors make billionaires irrelevant?
What you are looking for is a “manager”, which doesn’t need to be a billionaire and, in fact, usually is not.
Who selects and controls the managers? Who motivates people to invest their income to pay the managers?
A million people have to pool $1000 each to create the equivalent of a billionaire. It could be possible yet it doesn’t happen.
The trick is that billionaires cannot consume their entire wealth. Thus the economy has free money that looks for opportunities.
I hate stumbling upon libertarians.
Taxes. Next question.
The trick is that billionaires cannot consume their entire wealth. Thus the economy has free money that looks for opportunities.
This is hopelessly naive. Most of what they do with all that extra money is incestuous money laundering and regulatory capture. There’s no reason to give unaccountable individuals such an absurd level of societal power when it’s not like they “innovated” their wealth from thin air. Take it from the people they otherwise would take it from via, for example, a tax system and you can produce something accountable that can be changed freely by society and won’t buy twitter to force us to read its tweets.
Society already pays many taxes and changing the spending doesn’t happen freely by society.
Politics have their own disadvantages and billionaires are a complementary way to allocate resources.
That society can be locked into Twitter shows that taxes shouldn’t be the only source of capital. Every democracy could have created a Twitter clone many years ago as basic infrastructure.
Like Norway’s wealth fund, many countries could have invested in companies to generate profits and reduce taxes. Instead there are deficits. Politicians rely on society for sustainability whereas billionaires have to identify and improve sustainable forms of income.
If neither politicians nor billionaires should invest, what would be a good way to identify the people who should?
Bill Gates. (Has donated money to charity and founded one himself).
Has donated money to his own charoty to aviod taxes and then did donations to manipulate world politics for his own agenda
There, FTFY
