The only good billionaire
The only good billionaire
127 comments
-
This guy really proves that there are no good billionaires thing. Being good stopped him from staying a billionaire. Anyone who hoards wealth while others suffer from impoverishment and starvation is evil.
-
Yep. Those billions are made on the backs of suppressed wages and benefits, more employee productivity with less flexibility, enshittification, etc. It’s “earned” by squeezing it out of others.
-
co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers Group, the travel retailer of luxury products based in Hong Kong
Sort of squeezing second-hand. But you have to know his primary client pool is the business elites passing through international airports and taking advantage of a legalized form of tax evasion while exploiting the working class in sweat-shops on the mainland/surrounding Pacific islands.
A bit like becoming a billionaire by selling yachts or luxury hotels or cocaine. Even if you can argue you didn't abuse your staff to make your mint (spoilers: you absolutely did), you know all your biggest customers did.
-
This is a great take
-
So basically, no good billionaires but maybe good former-billionaires?
Except at some point he would have been between the two - an active billionaire giving away his wealth - and presumably still a good person.
-
There are different ways to accumulate wealth.
In an example from my country, Sir Peter Beck, is only a billionaire because the stock value of RocketLab has rocketed up (pun intended). His total compensation for the 2023 year was just under $1M. Source
I would rather that he concentrate his efforts to making the best rocket possible; he could in theory split his time and work to reduce poverty...but I believe that the rocket building would suffer.
There are a lot of other people working to reduce poverty.
I agree with your point that in general, most billionaires are shitty people who could do a lot more. But some people are billionaires because they are doing cool shit.
Will Sir Peter become a cunt in the future, who knows. In 10 years will we look back and see the decline to Musk levels of cuntishness?
-
-
In Northern Ireland he supported "mixed" (i.e., Catholic and Protestant) child education. In 1991, he gave £8m to the Integrated Education Fund,[20] a grant-making charitable body which aims "to make integration, not separation, the norm in our education system".[21] Queens University Belfast also received grants of more than £100m,[20] for capital projects, child education and medical research.[22]
More controversially, Feeney gave substantial personal donations to Sinn Féin, a left-wing Irish nationalist party that has been historically associated with the IRA.[14] Following the IRA ceasefire in 1994, he funded the party's office in Washington D.C.[20]
Feeney supported the modernization of public-health structures in Vietnam,[18] AIDS clinics in South Africa, Operation Smile's free surgeries for children with cleft lips and palates, earthquake relief in Haiti, and the UCSF Medical Center at the University of California at San Francisco.[8]
Jim Dwyer wrote in The New York Times that none of the one thousand buildings on five continents that were built with Feeney's gifts of $2.7 billion bear his name.[1]
On September 14, 2020, Feeney closed down the Atlantic Philanthropies after the non-profit accomplished its mission of giving away all of its money by 2020.[25]
Immensely based
-
Yeah supporting IRA (sympatizers) is based /s
Surprised you are .world and not .ml Remember its not either this or that, A or B, you can be against killing without calling it based.
-
Yeah supporting IRA (sympatizers) is based /s
Supporting Sinn Fein is absolutely based, I love a good DemSoc party. As for the IRA, Republican paramilitaries were the least civilian-murder-happy of the sides in the Troubles, so while I wouldn't express support for them, I'm also not going to automatically reach for condemnation for a paramilitary group that began in legitimate oppression and ended with good-faith peace negotiations.
-
-
While I honestly believe nobody can get that kind of money ethically, the fact that he actually put his money where his mouth was on philanthropy whike still alive, and almost all anonymously, is very admirable
-
You would not know who Chuck Feeney is, but you know the business he set up: Duty Free. He made billions during the golden age of air travel. I think you could become rich ethically by setting shops in places where millions of people run across 24/7.
-
the fact that he actually put his money where his mouth was on philanthropy
Even setting aside the question of where the money came from, the theory behind philanthropy is fundamentally anti-democratic. The philanthropist establishes an untaxable trust and personally appoints a board of cronies to allocate limited resources based on an inaccessible group's whims.
I could go into the numerous failures and crimes of private non-profits - the Bill & Melinda Gates campaign to sterilize Africans in a nakedly racist effort to curb population growth, the Longtermist tech industry campaign to invest billions into generative AI in pursuit of a god-like superintelligence, the Catholic Church's enslavement and abuse of young people in their network of church run orphanages from Ireland to Guatamala to Thailand. But the bottom line is that using your economic position to play Sim City with other people's neighborhoods and livelihoods isn't charitable in any meaningful sense of the term. Its mega-maniacal. The utopian visions of the philanthropy's founder don't change that, even if your organization doesn't end up going the way of the philanthropy shaped Ponzi Scheme like Foundation for New Era Philanthropy or St. Jude Hospital's horded endowments
-
-
Every super rich person who has this mindset should rigorously advocate fair taxation of their peers that is the only chances for a non revolutionary change.
-
Yes, it is nice that billionaires give away their money, it would be nicer if the people could choose how that money was spent instead of the billionaires.
-
Not only that, but it's good for one person to donate their excessive wealth, but it'd be great if the other 2700 of them had to relinquish some of it.
-
-
To be fair if some ultra rich wanted their money be used efficiently for good they sure as hell wouldn't want them to be taxed.
-
-
It still would have been better if workers got the money in the first place. There are no good billionaires.
-
-
-
Your real thoughts are leaking there. "No, don't give the money to the starving and homeless that need it most! You are supposed to give it to us!"
-
-
The good billionaire... eventually? How many people never become billionaires in the first place because accumulating all that wealth in the first place is bad. Unless you have a billion in inheritance in one go or something.
-
If you’re wealth is in stock that have voting rights and you founded the company, getting rid of the stock is risky as it reduces your control over the company. In that case, if you sell you stock to lower your wealth, a bad faith actor could come in and depose you. If you’re a “good millionaire” then this could then have the effect of lowering your charitable giving potential.
Stocks are essentially people putting bets on you and your company. Most billionaires don’t just become billionaires by themselves…the public anoints them.
And I think the public should be able to rescind that if the person does more public harm than good.
-
Yeah, great points.
-
-
-
-
From the his Wikipedia:
More controversially, Feeney gave substantial personal donations to Sinn Féin, a left-wing Irish nationalist party that has been historically associated with the IRA.
He was a basically an Irish-American George Soros.
And it's down Along the Falls Road, that's where I long to be, Lying in the dark with a Provo company, A comrade on my left and another on me right And a clip of ammunition for my little Armalite.
-
George Soros is not a good billionaire. The right wing delusion of him is such a convenient smokescreen for all of the actually horrible global conditions he's helped give birth to and gotten rich from, that I wonder if he doesn't perpetuate it himself. He's basically the final boss of neocolonialism, but because noone will teach you what neocolonialism is and how capitalism violently extracts cheap hyper-exploited labor and natural resources from the third world which amount to super profits for the billionaire class, most people don't see how bad he is.
-
True but I drew that comparison since they both donated to left wing parties in countries outside their native homeland. Soros is a prick but not for the reasons that the neo-Nazis would have you believe.
-
-
-
-
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates created The Giving Pledge, a legally binding agreement to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropy by death or through last will and testament. It currently has over 240 signatures from over 30 countries.
-
-
This video explains the scam that Billionaires use:
Why There's No Such Thing as a Good Billionaire
-
-
-
4 - High-end philanthropy is subsidized by regular taxpayers.
I feel like this is really under-appreciated. Like, Rich Dude decides he wants to donate $100M to...whatever - early childhood education. In the US, he avoids up to $37M taxes, which you can either look at as other taxpayers making $37M matching donation or $37M taken from other society objectives.
To the extent that government is a (marginally) publicly accountable system for funding a society's competing goals - education, health, defense, research - charity allows the very wealthy not just to bypass the social structure for prioritizing goals, but to force other taxpayers to adopt their personal priorities. Maybe the goal is good, maybe it's not - the point is that they're completely unaccountable.
-
-
"Can we have some of your billions?"
"Over my dead body"
- The Giving Pledge
-
-
There's a big difference between giving away 99.975% of your wealth, leaving your self with what 1 person can OPTIMISTICALLY make in a lifetime for retirement, and allowing people to scarp half of whatever is left after your life of destruction.
Not only does that mean Gate's grand children have a grandpa with unimaginable wealth and power, but half of that is still in the family and all of them and their children's children are all set for an absolute decadent life even if they all decide to never move another muscle ever again. All while the world continues to burn rapidly, waiting for the dragon to bleed.
This is the bare minimum, and they only do it to gain sympathy and trick us into believing they aren't evil.
-
-
RIP
-
With $5 million, many of us could comfortably live off the interest alone. This allows the freedom to focus on work that aligns with personal passions and priorities rather than pursuing excess. Unfortunately, many people prioritize accumulating as much as possible, often without consideration for their neighbors or community. It's important to strike a balance between personal success and contributing to the greater good.
The individual of the future is less susceptible to the influence of the seven deadly sins, embodying discipline and virtue. There is nothing preventing you from adopting these qualities and becoming a person of the future today!
-
But if everyone had the same amount of money, the interest is suddenly 0 because interest is made off the backs of debt holders. You can't be a debt holder if you are wealthy enough to live on interest. Interest money always comes from somewhere. It's inherently the transfer of wealth from one person to another. The idea that you might live stress free solely off of the interest of your wealth is capitalism. Meaning capitalism requires people to be in debt and it requires people to struggle while the wealthy do.... passion projects? Sounds like an ideal society...
-
The current financial system, where money is printed without sufficient backing, raises important questions about wealth distribution. Many individuals do not require billions to live comfortably; a modest sum would suffice, allowing us to maintain a productive and fulfilling life. In fact, with financial security, we would likely become even more productive, as we could focus on careers that align with our passions and interests. Automation and AI technologies should be leveraged for tasks like cleaning and food service, rather than allowing greedy corporate interests to exploit workers. Ultimately, most people would be content pursuing meaningful work, rather than being driven solely by financial necessity.
-
-
Universal Basic Income, is the term you're looking for. Interest is a loan you make to someone, someone unfortunate enough to need a load as opposed to have enough to lend themselves. UBI works in any system with surplus, AKA any society that isn't literally starving.
-
-
If I had that money it would all go towards awakening working class conscious and hopefully destroy the system that allowed such hording. But then again noone freely relinquishes power.
127 comments