The reason is that there just isn’t an ethical way to accrue a billion dollars. Stealing from workers labour is an inherent part of becoming a billionaire. Plus, usually some other exploitation too, like fucking others over with patents.
Doing charity with a small fraction of your obscene wealth after this isn’t any kind of moral absolution.
Hardly anyone is all good or all bad. But with any billionaire ever, the bad will always outweigh the good because of what monumental injustice was necessary to collect a billion dollars.
I don’t really agree but even if so, there still are degrees of wrong doing. Gates has helped to eradicate disease but to many in this thread that means literally nothing because of their binary thinking
The reason is that there just isn’t an ethical way to accrue a billion dollars. Stealing from workers labour is an inherent part of becoming a billionaire. Plus, usually some other exploitation too, like fucking others over with patents.
I would agree that there is no ethical way to become a billionaire, but I think that lacks context and scale.
Most billionaires make their fortunes from exploiting the labour and material wealth of the global south. Gates made his fortune by bullying the rest of silicon valley in the 90s, leading to the monopolistic tech market we know and hate today.
This is unethical in that scope, but when compared to global exploitation of other billionaires in the same tax bracket… it’s the best we could realistically hope for. Gates has essentially been unethical in the realm of wealthy 1rst world nations, all while directing a significant part of his wealth to improve material conditions in the places most billionaires extract wealth from.
Doing charity with a small fraction of your obscene wealth after this isn’t any kind of moral absolution.
I mean 50 billion dollars is not just a small fraction of his wealth, and he’s literally cured diseases that have killed millions of people over time.
Moral absolution isnt something that can be weighed and measured, it’s subject to ethical belief systems that are not uniform across people or cultures.
I’m not saying Wozniak didn’t get fucked by their dealings or that CEO to Worker pay rate is justifiable, but they’re a lot better off than most. Wozniak is working as a US treasury and defence contractor and he likes to sell uncut pages of bills to strangers for fun, man is worth at least 120 Million USD.
Ah, shit, you’re right. Yeah I’ve never even heard of a disgruntled Microsoft programmer, I guess Paul Allen? But he still got 60-40 split with Gates even after Allen left to deal with cancer. Then there is Charles Simonyi who is also quite affluent after moving on to bigger and better things.
Yeah I really fumbled on that one, Woz was with Apple not Microsoft. Can you name anybody who worked at Microsoft before 1990 who didn’t become wildly successful?
I mean, if you can name them, it’s probably because they were successful, right?
Microsoft is not a paragon of good employee treatment btw. As others pointed out, they had their asses sued to pieces for trying to maintain employees as contractors because it allowed them to save money by not paying benefits.
Lol, as if. Computing industry limitations are still dictated by Hardware, which has advanced at the same rate it would have without Windows. Plus, the vast majority of servers run Linux, anyways, so all he did was be one of three or four firms that helped bring computing into people’s homes when otherwise it would have required more technical skills than anybody had in that time period.
It’s so funny that the socialist rethoric doesn’t even crumble here when talking about big tech. Who are Microsoft’s poor exploited workers exactly? Last I checked, developers in big tech make bank. It’s the customers that get fucked.
I don’t know when the last time you checked is, but I don’t think it’s funny that as early as 1996 Microsoft was successfully sued for nearly 100m for abusing workers as “permatemps”. That isn’t counting their practices of forcing their staff to work extreme hours, avoiding to pay benefits, and just doing just about anything they could to avoid giving their employees a way of “making bank”.
“In 1996, a class action lawsuit was brought against Microsoft representing thousands of current and former employees that had been classified as temporary and freelance. The monetary value of the suit was determined by how much the misclassified employees could have made if they had been correctly classified and been able to participate in Microsoft’s employee stock purchase plan. The case was decided on the basis that the temporary employees had had their jobs defined by Microsoft, worked alongside regular employees doing the same work, and worked for long terms (years, in many cases).”
THE TERM “exploitation” often conjures up images of workers laboring in sweatshops for 12 hours or more per day, for pennies an hour, driven by a merciless overseer. This is contrasted to the ideal of a “fair wage day’s wage for a fair day’s work”–the supposedly “normal” situation under capitalism in which workers receive a decent wage, enough for a “middle class” standard of living, health insurance and security in their retirement.
Sweatshops are horrific examples of exploitation that persist to this day. But Karl Marx had a broader and more scientific definition of exploitation: the forced appropriation of the unpaid labor of workers. Under this definition, all working-class people are exploited.
Maybe, but that’s clearly not his intention as he has showed many times.
Take for example case covid
In April 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gates was criticized for suggesting that pharmaceutical companies should hold onto patents for COVID-19 vaccines. The criticism came due to the possibility of this preventing poorer nations from obtaining adequate vaccines. Tara Van Ho of the University of Essex stated, “Gates speaks as if all the lives being lost in India are inevitable but eventually the West will help when in reality the US & UK are holding their feet on the neck of developing states by refusing to break [intellectual property rights] protections. It’s disgusting.”
Gates is opposed to the TRIPS waiver. Bloomberg News reported him as saying he argued that Oxford University should not give away the rights to its COVID-19 information, as it had announced, but instead sell it to a single industry partner, as it did. His views on the value of legal monopolies in medicine have been linked to his views on legal monopolies in software
Yeah obviously. I’m not saying an evil person cannot do good things, Hitler was responsible for VW Beetle - objectively one of the most beautiful cars in human history. We just can’t call Hitler a good person because of that one thing
No, it’s pretty black and white with Billionaires. None of them have changed the world NEARLY as much as literally any figure from history. At all.
No billionaire has earned their billions for the simple fact that a person cannot produce that much wealth on their own. They MUST steal from others to get that rich. It literally HAS to be the case, because there is no physical way they generated that wealth themselves.
Still probably a net positive, though. Hell, he could kill 110 Million people added to every sars-cov-2 death combined and still be net positive. Good person? Debatably no. Best billionaire? Yeah.
Covid19 has killed less than 8 Million people total, and you can argue in good faith that Bill Gates would be responsible for some of those deaths by advocating for full commercialization of the vaccine.
Yeah, it’s a lot, but compared to a random estimate from The Guardian of 122 Million lives saved by the Gates Foundation… yeah.
Now, I realize some people would say saving any number of lives wouldn’t justify murder, but anybody who says Bill Gates is anything other than a net positive impact on the world is out of their fucking head.
I would pay 130 billion to save 122 Million lives. That’s only 1066 USD per life saved. You must be greedy af if you think that’s a bad deal.
That’s not how stocks work. He hasn’t taken 130 Bn USD. Most of his 129.2 Bn net worth is unrealized gains in the form of shares of companies such as Microsoft, meaning when or if it ever becomes income he will likely donate that as well, in fact he has promised to do so on many occasions. To date, Bill has donated 59 Bn USD to charities, the vast majority of his income.
Okay I take that as you did not read the article, but only the misleading title, if you claim that Bill and Melinda saved 122m infants…
The article says that infant deaths (0-5yo) have halved from 1990 to 2015. From 1990 to 2000 the number already gone from 12 million down to around 9.5 million yearly. This is when Bill and Melinda Foundation was founded and they started pouring money on vaccinations which is good of course.
So yes, they’ve certainly done a part in reducing infant death rates, but they’re only a small part of it. And most of the money invested wasn’t even theirs, but donation from Warren Buffet who actually donated away most of his wealth.
Who gives a shit about whether “Bill Gates can set himself apart as a billionaire?” That’s a moot point because he shouldn’t have become a billionaire to begin with.
Of course you’ll claim I’m sucking off billionaires when the reality is all I’m saying is a very simple and undeniable truth. You can’t think clearly when you have to categorize everything as good or evil.
It literally doesn’t matter to you that bill gates has saved thousands of lives because he’s also been shitty. That’s fucked up.
No, he can be taxed to millionaire status. Then we can democratically decide who the money is used to help. He no doubt got to where he is because he benefitted from the help of the US.
His company has also doomed some billions of people to using Excel, but on the other hand some number of millions of people get the pleasure of using Excel
Who gives a fuck whether some other rich sociopath would’ve done better?
What you should be asking is why important shit like this should be left to the whims of a single private citizen with too much power instead of handled by government. The notion that Bill fucking Gates is some kind of savior übermensch who somehow knows better than the entire voting public how to spend the money is fucking ludicrous.
Lives have been saved through his funding . Can you see elon or zuck doing that ? Ever ? So in comparison i do consider him good but i could be wrong.
The reason is that there just isn’t an ethical way to accrue a billion dollars. Stealing from workers labour is an inherent part of becoming a billionaire. Plus, usually some other exploitation too, like fucking others over with patents.
Doing charity with a small fraction of your obscene wealth after this isn’t any kind of moral absolution.
No one said it was absolution. As was obviously stated, it means he’s better than others.
But sure binary thinking is the best. either he is good or bad, either his charity is meaningless or completely erases any bad he ever did.
Hardly anyone is all good or all bad. But with any billionaire ever, the bad will always outweigh the good because of what monumental injustice was necessary to collect a billion dollars.
I don’t really agree but even if so, there still are degrees of wrong doing. Gates has helped to eradicate disease but to many in this thread that means literally nothing because of their binary thinking
I would agree that there is no ethical way to become a billionaire, but I think that lacks context and scale.
Most billionaires make their fortunes from exploiting the labour and material wealth of the global south. Gates made his fortune by bullying the rest of silicon valley in the 90s, leading to the monopolistic tech market we know and hate today.
This is unethical in that scope, but when compared to global exploitation of other billionaires in the same tax bracket… it’s the best we could realistically hope for. Gates has essentially been unethical in the realm of wealthy 1rst world nations, all while directing a significant part of his wealth to improve material conditions in the places most billionaires extract wealth from.
I mean 50 billion dollars is not just a small fraction of his wealth, and he’s literally cured diseases that have killed millions of people over time.
Moral absolution isnt something that can be weighed and measured, it’s subject to ethical belief systems that are not uniform across people or cultures.
Aside from anticompetitive actions, I don’t see much harm having been done by selling an operating system.
Did he code it all by himself? Or give the profits to the programmers in direct proportion to how much they worked on it?
I’m not saying Wozniak didn’t get fucked by their dealings or that CEO to Worker pay rate is justifiable, but they’re a lot better off than most. Wozniak is working as a US treasury and defence contractor and he likes to sell uncut pages of bills to strangers for fun, man is worth at least 120 Million USD.
Woz was at Apple, not Microsoft.
Ah, shit, you’re right. Yeah I’ve never even heard of a disgruntled Microsoft programmer, I guess Paul Allen? But he still got 60-40 split with Gates even after Allen left to deal with cancer. Then there is Charles Simonyi who is also quite affluent after moving on to bigger and better things.
Lol shows how much you know
Yeah I really fumbled on that one, Woz was with Apple not Microsoft. Can you name anybody who worked at Microsoft before 1990 who didn’t become wildly successful?
I mean, if you can name them, it’s probably because they were successful, right?
Microsoft is not a paragon of good employee treatment btw. As others pointed out, they had their asses sued to pieces for trying to maintain employees as contractors because it allowed them to save money by not paying benefits.
“Aside from 95% of the shit he did, I don’t see much harm from the other 5%.”
Bill Gates’ anticompetitive behavior probably set the entire computing industry back a decade or more.
Lol, as if. Computing industry limitations are still dictated by Hardware, which has advanced at the same rate it would have without Windows. Plus, the vast majority of servers run Linux, anyways, so all he did was be one of three or four firms that helped bring computing into people’s homes when otherwise it would have required more technical skills than anybody had in that time period.
It’s so funny that the socialist rethoric doesn’t even crumble here when talking about big tech. Who are Microsoft’s poor exploited workers exactly? Last I checked, developers in big tech make bank. It’s the customers that get fucked.
I don’t know when the last time you checked is, but I don’t think it’s funny that as early as 1996 Microsoft was successfully sued for nearly 100m for abusing workers as “permatemps”. That isn’t counting their practices of forcing their staff to work extreme hours, avoiding to pay benefits, and just doing just about anything they could to avoid giving their employees a way of “making bank”.
“In 1996, a class action lawsuit was brought against Microsoft representing thousands of current and former employees that had been classified as temporary and freelance. The monetary value of the suit was determined by how much the misclassified employees could have made if they had been correctly classified and been able to participate in Microsoft’s employee stock purchase plan. The case was decided on the basis that the temporary employees had had their jobs defined by Microsoft, worked alongside regular employees doing the same work, and worked for long terms (years, in many cases).”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp#Vizcaino_v._Microsoft
You can’t be that naive.
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-slammed-over-child-labor-accusations-2010-4
Also, it’s very funny, you talking about “socialist rhetoric”, because I don’t think you even know what socialism means by “exploited worker”.
Have a look.
https://socialistworker.org/2011/09/28/what-do-we-mean-exploitation
Maybe, but that’s clearly not his intention as he has showed many times.
Take for example case covid
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates
Hmm you do make a compelling argument
It’s easier to just assume all billionaires are evil. The chances of it being wrong is about the same as for any good person to become a billionaire
That is true maybe there were some exploits done by them here and there but everything is gray there are no black and white.
Yeah obviously. I’m not saying an evil person cannot do good things, Hitler was responsible for VW Beetle - objectively one of the most beautiful cars in human history. We just can’t call Hitler a good person because of that one thing
Making a good car isn’t doing a good thing . What are you on about ?
No, it’s pretty black and white with Billionaires. None of them have changed the world NEARLY as much as literally any figure from history. At all.
No billionaire has earned their billions for the simple fact that a person cannot produce that much wealth on their own. They MUST steal from others to get that rich. It literally HAS to be the case, because there is no physical way they generated that wealth themselves.
Still probably a net positive, though. Hell, he could kill 110 Million people added to every sars-cov-2 death combined and still be net positive. Good person? Debatably no. Best billionaire? Yeah.
That’s one stupid argument backed with made up numbers there
Covid19 has killed less than 8 Million people total, and you can argue in good faith that Bill Gates would be responsible for some of those deaths by advocating for full commercialization of the vaccine.
Yeah, it’s a lot, but compared to a random estimate from The Guardian of 122 Million lives saved by the Gates Foundation… yeah.
Now, I realize some people would say saving any number of lives wouldn’t justify murder, but anybody who says Bill Gates is anything other than a net positive impact on the world is out of their fucking head.
Some people would say that he has given negative 130 billion, or whatever his net worth is right now
I wouldn’t go that extreme, but still think he has had net negative effect in the world
I would pay 130 billion to save 122 Million lives. That’s only 1066 USD per life saved. You must be greedy af if you think that’s a bad deal.
That’s not how stocks work. He hasn’t taken 130 Bn USD. Most of his 129.2 Bn net worth is unrealized gains in the form of shares of companies such as Microsoft, meaning when or if it ever becomes income he will likely donate that as well, in fact he has promised to do so on many occasions. To date, Bill has donated 59 Bn USD to charities, the vast majority of his income.
Okay I take that as you did not read the article, but only the misleading title, if you claim that Bill and Melinda saved 122m infants…
The article says that infant deaths (0-5yo) have halved from 1990 to 2015. From 1990 to 2000 the number already gone from 12 million down to around 9.5 million yearly. This is when Bill and Melinda Foundation was founded and they started pouring money on vaccinations which is good of course.
So yes, they’ve certainly done a part in reducing infant death rates, but they’re only a small part of it. And most of the money invested wasn’t even theirs, but donation from Warren Buffet who actually donated away most of his wealth.
Charity is the oligarchy picking the winners.
So the only way bill gates can set himself apart as a billionaire is by destroying capitalism singlehandedly?
Humanity is fucked by these idiotic binary ways of thinking.
Who gives a shit about whether “Bill Gates can set himself apart as a billionaire?” That’s a moot point because he shouldn’t have become a billionaire to begin with.
I care that moronic ways of thinking discount the good done with billionaire money.
It doesn’t matter that you ignore it, it does happen occasionally. It makes no sense to evaluate the world only as it should be, and ignore how it is
I’m just saying, the Native Americans didn’t have highways before the settlers, so even though there was a lot of bad, there was also some good.
Of course you’ll claim I’m sucking off billionaires when the reality is all I’m saying is a very simple and undeniable truth. You can’t think clearly when you have to categorize everything as good or evil.
It literally doesn’t matter to you that bill gates has saved thousands of lives because he’s also been shitty. That’s fucked up.
No, he can be taxed to millionaire status. Then we can democratically decide who the money is used to help. He no doubt got to where he is because he benefitted from the help of the US.
His company has also doomed some billions of people to using Excel, but on the other hand some number of millions of people get the pleasure of using Excel
Who gives a fuck whether some other rich sociopath would’ve done better?
What you should be asking is why important shit like this should be left to the whims of a single private citizen with too much power instead of handled by government. The notion that Bill fucking Gates is some kind of savior übermensch who somehow knows better than the entire voting public how to spend the money is fucking ludicrous.
Black or white. Gray doesn’t exist. Like at all. I get angry when people say it does.
You’re not wrong. Compared to his peers, he’s a saint.
Everyone is compared to his peers
We can say Bill Gates is the best billionaire without accepting that there are any good billionaires.
He doesn’t realise best of shit is still shit. Like talking about “the best rapist”, haiyaaaaa
He’s not even better than Taylor Swift IMO
He’s pretty terrible. I don’t know whether or not all of the other billionaires are worse.
He’s not even better than his ex-wife
I don’t think we can say that.