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.
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.
The current problem is rather that relatively many rich people are trying to do good things. The vast amount of private donations and privately funded NGOs, etc., have a strong influence within traditional, often national, political and governmental processes. This has had good and bad consequences and has been done with good and not so good intentions. Even if all consequences were good, the question remains to what extent we object to the fact that the choices of where to put money have been made by individuals and not arrived at through democratic processes, which can also lead to good or bad consequences.
It is unfortunate that “effective altruism” has become the trendy moral framework for many wealthy individuals, especially within Silicon Valley, to make decisions about where they put their money and how. Effective altruism is a questionable moral theory because it is primarily about the question of “how” to act and less about why. The theory suggests no underlying value system. As a result, it remains a values-free form of consequentialism, unlike, say, utilitarianism, a form of consequentialism that does propose an underlying value, namely happiness - and thus happiness maximization as a goal. Moreover, “effective” is a vague term, which also remains relatively free to fill in.
The free-fillability of effective altruism combined with the inherently individual choices of, well, individuals, currently creates friction between wealthy individuals and democratically elected bodies.
This is imho the current issue we need to think about, regardless of any “goodness” of consequences. Where do the responsibilities, rights, duties, freedoms and liabilities of wealthy individuals start, lie and end with respect to those of democratically elected governments, other representatives of the people, and, of course, ‘regular’ citizens.
I believe all billionaires have done something good. I don’t think that makes them good people due to the staggering amount of wealth they withhold from the population.
Doing good things, doesn’t make you a good person. Donating millions is nothing when you have billions.
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
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.
I love Valve, but I really don’t understand why gamers give Steam so much praise. It is a closed platform filled with DRM on which you don’t truely own a copy of the game (unlike gog), and on top of that they take a 30% cut of every sales and transactions which is enormous for small guys. Support is poor and the algo/front page distribution of traffic and promotions is a black box.
Don’t get me wrong, Gabe seems like a sensible human, and Steam is successful because it offered such a great service to players. But it’s been almost 20years now since Steam, and I have not seen Valve slow down the greed. They don’t need the money as this point. They don’t need 30% of every game sale on PC. This is just as greedy as the other company people hate.
Add comment