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
Yeah, dude is asking the wrong question.
deleted by creator
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?”
deleted by creator
You do know Gates left day to day operations from Microsoft for like 20 years ago and his foundation has nothing to do with Microsoft?
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=69AtkAHkKEc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Sick people receive vaccines for free or very cheap
Awesome, most vaccines last years or even decades, Covid is an outlier because it mutates so rapidly. But “sick people” makes zero sense, you usually get the vaccine before you get sick. That’s the entire point (except for rabies, where you straight up die if you don’t get the vaccine quick enough).
Sick people gets hope of survival to disease, hope which wasn’t previously available.
Also great, they get a chance, instead of lifelong suffering or death.
Sick people ask their governments to continue receiving vaccines.
Why would they be sick if they got the vaccine? Makes zero sense. The ones asking at this point would be the unvaccinated. Like a mom wanting to vaccinate her kids, so they don’t get a crippling disease later in life.
People providing vacciones now are charging a lot more to said governments.
And then the poor countries simply won’t buy them. Because they straight up can’t afford them. There is a reason they aren’t buying vaccines right now: No money. So if they try to charge a lot of money no one will buy and we’ll end up with the current state (just with thousands more who are immune against the disease, which is still an upside).
Profit (which was the whole point, and not any “humanitarian” notions.)
You can’t suck blood from a stone, there is no money, so no profit.
Every single vaccine dose that goes to poor countries is awesome. That’s it. The alternative to getting the vaccine is to catch the disease unprepared and suffer lifelong complications (or straight up die). There is no upside to not delivering vaccines.
Are you confusing vaccines with medication? For example the Polio vaccine lasts for 10+ years, “sick people” are not repeat customers for vaccines. The only time you have repeat customers is when you are still applying the vaccine (for example Polio needs 5 doses, but then you’re good).
Have any proof? Sounds very conspiratory
This is fundamentally incoherent, vaccines are less profitable than treatments / therapies
Back to r/conspiracy with you! Begone!
I thought the foundation’s shady capitalist goals were pretty well known, not sure why you’re downvoted. They are against releasing patent on the covid vaccine, for example, because their goal is for people to profit from it
Probably they believed the philanthropist act. Or they think the the US way of life is the only way.
The point of eradication is that once a disease is gone, you don’t need to vaccinate against it any more. You’ve probably never been vaccinated against smallpox, for example.
Actually, I have been. But good for you for trying to guess my age and failing, buddy.
Doesn’t really affect my point.
The submarine dude that got rid of a few more in one go?
That voyage killed a kid too, can’t really call it a good act overall
Suleman Dawood was the youngest passenger on board. He was 19 and therefore an adult capable of making his own decisions.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/23/europe/titan-submersible-victims-intl/index.htmlThat sounds an awful lot like “the boy refused to cross his powerful father, therefore he deserved to die”
There’s nothing that indicates he was coerced.
My point is that people portray a father taking a 4 year old to his death. I’m just pointing out that he wasn’t a child but an adult who chose to go on the trip.
Legally, yes, he was an adult. But compared to me he was a kid. I had not yet lived much at 19.
Kids that age get sent to die in wars but they go on a badly informed submarine trip and now it’s a tragedy?
Kids dying in wars is also a tragedy
Wasn’t anywhere close to being a billionaire.
I wish for an explanation pls.
The OceanGate sub that imploded on the way to the Titanic.
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.
Didn’t one of the Koch brothers die? That was pretty cool.
Yup rest in piss
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.
For sure! I wanted to make sure someone chimed in on this. I forwarded it to an elderly hospital roommate who was extremely appreciative.
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.
Removed by mod
Don’t treat a fellow hexbear like the lemmy liberals please. We literally have rules about that.
Disengage
Do you have anything of substance to add here or are you just going to continue replying “wrong” to everyone you disagree with as if your opinion is the absolute arbiter of truth?
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”?
Tax what though? There’s no profit to tax.
For sure
Sure but, considering they use only 5% of the money they have for all there “good” projects and invest the ither 95% in fossil fuels. The gates Foundation is really only a little good because the law forces them to use min of 5%, to stay tax exempt. So if they didn’t have to, would they still do it? I doubt that.
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.
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…
A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.
True, and they generally get ample praise for the good. The bad has, unfortunately, rewarded them with their billions.
Give them a cookie and the wall
In what order tho?
They get to chew on the cookie as we load the guns, it’s only fair
IDK if it works in this case.
The people with power over you will inevitably use that logic to demand constant praise.
The issue is that any philantropy a billionaire does comes from money “earned” through exploitation and is never enough to un-make them a billionaire. Even if they did, it’s still a single person taking the resources of millions of people and controlling it themselves to put into their pet projects, in a completely undemocratic manner - so Gates gets to benefit from the looting of Africa and then turn arounf and tell Africans how he will be allocating that stolen loot. Oh, and that man controlling so much policy in various African nations thinks Africa is overpopulated, an extremely racist eugenicist myth.
The good and bad are not separste things you can judge in isolation, any “good” a billionaire does is only possible by causing disproportionate harm. It is not as though these billionaires are personally doing much of anything, they are simply seizing resources from the public to inefficiently address problems that the public could have managed themselves if they were permitted to control their own lives, if they aren’t just doing what Gates does of using donations as money laundering.
Yeah, the wording of OP’s question is dumb for this reason. What person on this planet has done literally only evil things? A better question would be more like “What billionaire is genuinely a good person and why?” Personally the size of my list of “overall good” billionaires is a rounding error but at least the thread would be more interesting.
Elon Musk:
Destroyed Twitter
Currently engaged in a protracted war to kill all Tesla owners
Destroyed the myth of meritocracy
Grifting the Pentagon for all the money he can and then just not doing what he’s paid to
Anything good?
Then all of them. They are human beings, not black holes of pure evil.
I need a source for that.
Paul Allen funded a bunch of scientific and medical research, as well as quite a few museums and other public works around Seattle. He was the largest private donor to the fight against Ebola in Africa.
Sergey Brin is a big Wikimedia contributor, as came out a few years back when their donor list leaked.
also you should check out his card
It’s even got a watermark.
TRY GETTING A RESERVATION AT DORSIA NOW!!!
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?
China needed them because they wanted money from the west. If they hadn’t we would have done a cold war to them long ago and they might not have been strong enough to handle it. Because they had some billionairs we took it easy on them for a while and now they are strong enough to resist our coup attempts. So it wasn’t that the oligarchs class is good for anything. They just needed to be part of our system for self defence.
Maybe, but they’ve used their power to set the system up that way, and heavily propagandized against socialized alternatives
If you had free counter-propaganda resources, how would you structure a socialist alternative and what would you tell the population?
Kickstarter
how should big sums of money be managed
By giving them to me.
Let’s imagine that this is not a joke. What do you need to get going besides the money?
Let’s not.
Most/all of them have done good things. A better question is are there any that have done enough good to outweigh the bad
Before anyone jumps on me, billionaires suck, without exception, for reasons I don’t really need to go into here, you’ve all heard them a million times over, and whatever good they do does not offset that in the slightest. None of them probably have been or will be a net positive influence in the world.
That said, you can probably pick out a few good things that any individual billionaire has done (and you can absolutely feel free to debate their motivations for doing those things, many of them I’m sure we’re done for tax reasons, vanity, etc.)
Some of the old robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie (Carnegie was not technically a billionaire, but if you adjusted his wealth for inflation he would be the richest person today by a pretty comfortable margin) funded a lot of universities, libraries, etc.
Bill Gates has done some good work with vaccines despite his shitty business practices with Microsoft.
Musk is overall a shithead, I don’t like him, I don’t like his companies, I don’t even like his vehicles. That said, I think it’s pretty fair to say that Tesla has helped (though he is not solely responsible) to kick open the door for EVs to start gaining wider acceptance and adoption. And SpaceX is doing some exciting stuff, though again I dislike a lot of their methods, disagree with a few of their goals, don’t like how they’re run as a company, etc. But long-term I think we need to have our eyes to the stars, whether it’s for settling on other worlds, mining asteroids, asteroid defense, or if I dare dream it, building a Dyson sphere, or just for scientific advancement for it’s own sake, and unfortunately SpaceX is one of the major players in that field now.
Bezos hasn’t done anything too flashy that comes to my mind, and like musk he is also a shithead that I dislike for pretty much the exact same reasons, excuse me for not repeating them, but he does have and donate to quite a few charities.
Again, none of that is enough to offset the shitty things they do, but I’d be surprised if you could find any very rich people who haven’t at least donated to a handful of charities.
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.
