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?”
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
He donated money before having founded his charity.
This query is counterproductively reductive. Every human alive, even the worst of them, has done at least one good thing. Many even do their bad things because they were misled to believe they were doing an overall good.
The point should be that it doesn’t matter what good they’ve done, because the state of being a billionaire necessarily requires one to have done more net bad to the world than good. You could save a million lives by your own hand, but if you’re a billionaire, it is a given that you have destroyed far more lives than that. No billionaire’s heart was ever weighed by Anubis and judged worthy of the Field of Reeds.
All of them, without exception, end up as greasy streaks on the gleaming teeth of Ammit.
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 👍
Anything good?
Then all of them. They are human beings, not black holes of pure evil.
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.
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?
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…
Brian Acton is the only billionaire I can think of that hasn’t been a net negative.
Co-founded WhatsApp, which became popular with few employees. Sold the service at a reasonable rate.
Sold the business for a stupid large sum of money, and generously compensated employees as part of the buyout.
Left the buying company, Facebook, rather than do actions he considered unethical, at great personal expense ($800M).Proceeded to cofound signal, which is an open, and privacy focused messaging system which he has basically bankrolled while it finds financial stability.
He also has been steadily giving away most of his money to charitable causes.
Billionaires are bad because they get that way by exploiting some combination of workers, customers or society.
In the extremely unlikely circumstance where a handful of people make something fairly priced that nearly everybody wants, and then uses the wealth for good, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being that person.
Selling messaging to a few billion people for $1 a lifetime is a way to do that.Makes sense that suddenly becoming billionaire with every intention to not remain one by turning into a force of good is arguably one way to be a decent human. In other words, the only good billionaires are those not trying to be, or remain billionaires.
There is also a point where you have to be smart and patient with how you distribute your money, or else you simply risk some other greedy asshole to pocket it.
Hell, I’ll take someone who wants to be a billionaire, as long as they do it without exploitation. It’s just that that’s nearly impossible to do, since very few people actually individually create a billion dollars worth of value.
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.
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.
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.
Oh wow I’ve never really considered Gabe’s wealth, he would be exceedingly wealthy, wouldn’t he?
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
David Koch died, which is a very good thing he did for humanity.
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”?
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.
is this a psyop? surely its a psyop
youd probably have a hard time naming one billionaire that hasnt done anything good
theyre still a shit thing to have, practically never got the money they have by being a good person and shouldnt exist in the same world as homeless people, starvation or massively underfunded public projects
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.
