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Paul Allen commits majority of his wealth to philanthropy

seattletimes.nwsource.com

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Re: Paul Allen commits majority of his wealth to philanthropy

#21

Post by rbanffy »

byrneseyeview wrote: post #18
rbanffy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erm... Did Carnegie state his goal was to give away money before he acquired massive amounts of it or was it after being labeled a robber-baron? It's easy to say that being a nice guy was your goal all along after you get caught. Not that Paul Allen is not a nice guy. There seems to be no evidence on the contrary.

Carnegie considered retiring at 35, when he was rich enough not to need to work more. But he kept working for the next few decades, and ended up making about 200X as much. He wrote himself a memorandum, in which he totaled up his net worth and income, and decided it was enough. Apparently it wasn't, but that's a couple thousand libraries, organs, etc. that he otherwise wouldn't have purchased. Oddly enough, Warren Bu…

I agree that Carnegie, in the end, made a lot of good things possible. Still, it bothers me that we are so eager to consider that ends justify the means if the ends favor us.

Carnegie ruined lots of people. Along with his good deeds, you must consider the good all these other people never were able to do thanks to him. What makes his good deeds more worthy than the good deeds he prevented?

Re: Paul Allen commits majority of his wealth to philanthropy

#22

Post by yumraj »

Even at the expense of sounding like a troll, it always amazes me, really it does, that Bill Gates and Paul Allen the two founders of the so called "evil" MS have given so much money to charity while we haven't seen any such moves from Jobs and Woz the founders of "think-different" Apple.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it.

Re: Paul Allen commits majority of his wealth to philanthropy

#23

Post by gscott »

yumraj wrote: post #22

Even at the expense of sounding like a troll, it always amazes me, really it does, that Bill Gates and Paul Allen the two founders of the so called "evil" MS have given so much money to charity while we haven't seen any such moves from Jobs and Woz the founders of "think-different" Apple. Makes you wonder, doesn't it.

Giving money away seems to be a full time job, so Jobs he is still working at Apple and doesn't have time yet. Woz, he cashed in a lot of his stock when it was $24 a share (much of it to give away). I am not sure how much he has left but I don't believe he truly has enough to just give any more away.

Re: Paul Allen commits majority of his wealth to philanthropy

#24

Post by [deleted] »

yumraj wrote: post #22

Even at the expense of sounding like a troll, it always amazes me, really it does, that Bill Gates and Paul Allen the two founders of the so called "evil" MS have given so much money to charity while we haven't seen any such moves from Jobs and Woz the founders of "think-different" Apple. Makes you wonder, doesn't it.

[deleted]

Re: Paul Allen commits majority of his wealth to philanthropy

#25

Post by burriko »

yumraj wrote: post #22

Even at the expense of sounding like a troll, it always amazes me, really it does, that Bill Gates and Paul Allen the two founders of the so called "evil" MS have given so much money to charity while we haven't seen any such moves from Jobs and Woz the founders of "think-different" Apple. Makes you wonder, doesn't it.

Woz is fairly well known as a philanthropist, and has been since the early 80s. I'd guess that he just hasn't drawn the same level of press attention that the Microsoft billionaires have. I'm also quite sure that he has nowhere near as much cash as them, despite how well Apple are doing now, they've had much harder times than MS.

I've no idea about Jobs though. His personal life has always been very secretive, and I would imagine any involvement with charity would be just as secretive.

Re: Paul Allen commits majority of his wealth to philanthropy

#26

Post by colinplamondon »

rbanffy wrote: post #21
byrneseyeview wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carnegie considered retiring at 35, when he was rich enough not to need to work more. But he kept working for the next few decades, and ended up making about 200X as much. He wrote himself a memorandum, in which he totaled up his net worth and income, and decided it was enough. Apparently it wasn't, but that's a couple thousand libraries, organs, etc. that he otherwise wouldn't have purchased. Oddly enough, Warren Bu…

I agree that Carnegie, in the end, made a lot of good things possible. Still, it bothers me that we are so eager to consider that ends justify the means if the ends favor us. Carnegie ruined lots of people. Along with his good deeds, you must consider the good all these other people never were able to do thanks to him. What makes his good deeds more worthy than the good deeds he prevented?

How did he ruin people? His company was incredibly progressive for its time.

Re: Paul Allen commits majority of his wealth to philanthropy

#28

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

lionhearted wrote: post #20
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #17

Man, he may even give away enough that he's no longer one of the 250 richest people on the planet. Don't get me wrong, it's a great gesture but let's put it in perspective. He is and will remain obscenely rich and this will make absolutely no difference to him in terms of how he lives his life. In terms of disposable income and day to day impact on what he can and can't do, it's probably less significant than someone…

> He is and will remain obscenely rich and this will make absolutely no difference to him in terms of how he lives his life. It will make a difference in lives of millions of others - absolute good is better than relative good. > ... day to day impact on what he can and can't do, it's probably less significant than someone on this board giving away $10,000. It's much better for the world for billions to go into produ…

I'm not talking about suffering, I'm talking about not even slightly restraining the most astronomical privilege.

The man is worth $13bn. He could give away 99% of his wealth and still live out his days in a level of luxury which will never be experienced by 99% of Western world's population, let alone the world's.

Re: Paul Allen commits majority of his wealth to philanthropy

#29

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

hugh3 wrote: post #10
kylelibra wrote: post #4

"The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him." -Voltaire

Apparently he's unmarried and has no children, so there's not really many good options for his estate apart from charity. I suppose he could disperse it among nieces and nephews, or build himself a pyramid for a tomb, but charity seems like the obvious route.

No, I say build the pyramid!

Re: Paul Allen commits majority of his wealth to philanthropy

#30

Post by rbanffy »

colinplamondon wrote: post #26
rbanffy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Carnegie, in the end, made a lot of good things possible. Still, it bothers me that we are so eager to consider that ends justify the means if the ends favor us. Carnegie ruined lots of people. Along with his good deeds, you must consider the good all these other people never were able to do thanks to him. What makes his good deeds more worthy than the good deeds he prevented?

How did he ruin people? His company was incredibly progressive for its time.

Ruthless competition, mostly. The example that illustrates his character is not related to this kind of behaviour, but to how he treated his workforce.

The Homestead strike was caused by a broken promise to tie salaries to profits which, made in a downturn, reduced payments. When profits returned, he broke the promise, refused to keep salaries tied to profits, locked out the union workers who protested and used violence to end them. In the end, he hired immigrant workers in place of the previous employees, working for less in harsher conditions.

Not exactly role model.

http://bit.ly/8XRSwN

This quote is, IIRC (lost track of the book and had to resort to Google) from Theodore Roosevelt.

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