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My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

gatesnotes.com

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Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#241

Post by akomtu »

What would you do with so much money?

At his level, he doesn't just spend or give away a pile of money, he is somewhat like a force of nature: he controls and directs a significant portion of the money stream in the world. Think of what the Gulfstream does for air, but for money.

His story started with computers: he was among the few who built the foundation of the technocratic civilization. Computers and machinery have created a good deal of prosperity, but there is a grave problem with it: computers and machinery have been completely isolated from ethics. Research in AI is no longer guided by what's good for humanity, but by what's possible. Today this manifests in such relatively innocent crimes as disregarding copyright and data privacy when training AI. But that's a sign of a deeper disease: the isolation from ethics. If it's allowed to continue like that, in a few decades this anti-ethical AI will kill at first humanity within humans and then the civilization itself.

IMO, the biggest difference he can make now is finishing the story that he started long ago, by bringing the AI beast under the umbrella of ethical control. It won't stop it, but will significantly reduce the fall out.

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#242

Post by toast0 »

9rx wrote: post #100
Ozzie_osman wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For you (or other folks) working in tech and giving to charity, apart from corporate match, another couple pieces of advice are to consider a Donor Advised Fund. They are really easy to set up, and then you get some benefits, like the ability to "bunch" your donations (can help with tax deductions) or donate appreciated investments (like RSUs) without paying capital gains tax.

> without paying capital gains tax. It's a funny day when you're feeling charitable, but go out of your way to avoid helping the entity that should be the ideal charitable recipient.

The state goes out of their way to encourage it.

Let's say you just won the startup lottery and you've got a significant amount of now tradable stock. Some of which was early exercised and the cost basis is effectively zero. Some of which was RSUs or non-qualified options and you owe ordinary income. And that you're way over into the top tax brackets.

If your zero cost basis stock is Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS), there's a very nice discount on federal capital gains, so you might not need to do the rest of the stuff.

Otherwise, if you donate your apprechiated zero basis stock, you get to save federal capital gains of 20% + 3.8% net investment income. Plus it offsets against your ordinary income that's 37%. So that's a 60.8% discount on being charitable for the feds. If you live in California, capital gains are regular income, so you're saving 13.3% because the capital gains go away and offsetting 13.3% on your ordinary income, so your total discount is 87.4%. In other words, your difference in cash after taxes for selling $1M of zero basis stock or donating $1M of zero basis stock is $126k.

When the government is telling you it only costs $126k to give a charity $1M, it's pretty compelling. The math used to be different, when you'd get credit for state taxes on the federal return, but that was many years ago now.

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#243

Post by otikik »

_bin_ wrote: post #88
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #39

His foundation really does seem to do a good job with 'effective altruism'. There's a reason they're marked as secondary beneficiaries on all my accounts. Also, as a recommendation, you guys should look into whether your employer matches charitable donations to 501Cs in any amount. I find giving a solid chunk of my discretionary budget to charity every year lends a sense of purpose to a job that wouldn't otherwise ha…

[flagged]

> help your friend, your neighbor, your town, state, and country before you look further afield

Many of my friends and family don't live on my neighborhood, town, state or country. They live in the world. Consider broadening up your social circle a little bit. Our lives don't have to be limited to where a horse can travel to any more.

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#244

Post by Rebelgecko »

vinceguidry wrote: post #214
cjustin wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often see this sentiment whenever a billionaire is in conversation, but I don't understand. Can you elaborate on how his wealth was "stolen" from people? The way I see it, he's wealthy because he founded a wildly successful technology company by first creating something of value (MS-DOS). Microsoft has since grown to be one of the largest companies in the world, which hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily wor…

Billionaires become billionaires because of preferential treatment by governments, not out of any kind of merit. There are lots of better things the world could have had, Linux and the software commons would be much much much better if Microsoft hadn't hired all the best software engineers to make proprietary software and if the federal government hadn't coddled it and overlooked its monopolistic practices. The Inter…

Why did Bill Gates get preferential treatment for his operating system over others like Steve Jobs or Vinod Khosla? Government connections?

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#245

Post by njdas »

9rx wrote: post #172
vasco wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The state is never going to be as agile as private people engaging on topics they are passionate about on their private time.

A group of people engaging in topics they are passionate about in their private time is what a state is. Perhaps what you are trying to say is that you only want to help out your friends?

I'm trying to reconcile how https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM is 'helping out your friends.' See, we can all create straw-men. It's not very useful for discourse. The vast majority of us want what is best for humanity, but we have different views on how to deliver it.

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#246

Post by oulipo »

jarbus wrote: post #16

Say what you want, but I respect this a lot. Sure as hell beats giving it all to your kids.

Sure, but only capitalism concentrates so much wealth in such few hands

An alternative would be that company like Microsoft couldn't gain so much wealth, simply because their revenue would be capped / taxed high enough that the extra money they make goes back directly to people and governments

In this case, *everyone* gets to vote and choose for what philanthropies the amount gets used, rather than having just "one guy" deciding for himself how to spend all this money, which is prone to errors

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#247

Post by ryandrake »

vasco wrote: post #124
9rx wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without paying capital gains tax. It's a funny day when you're feeling charitable, but go out of your way to avoid helping the entity that should be the ideal charitable recipient.

The state is never going to be as agile as private people engaging on topics they are passionate about on their private time.

When it comes to funding various "public good" efforts, we don't need agility. We need fairness and at least some kind of public influence over what gets funded.

The problem with leaving everything to private charity is that only the wealthy people and churches doing the donating dictate what counts as "public good" without you and I having any say over it. We luck out when the donor has good intentions and chooses to donate to an organization doing good, and we have no say when the donor has evil intentions and chooses to donate elsewhere. Allowing a small handful of rich donors to decide what counts as a good cause is not ideal.

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#248

Post by Nullabillity »

vinceguidry wrote: post #196
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that entity used my tax dollars wisely (looking at nordic countries), yes I agree paying taxes is superior. I have no interest in contributing more towards our 1T/yr defense budget or subsidizing oil and gas.

The sovereign wealth funds of the Nordic countries weren't built with tax dollars, but rather with oil revenue. We could do the same thing here if there were political appetite for holding energy companies responsible and the wealth they produce as belonging to the people living on the land the resources are coming out of. We're doing better now than we were 50 years ago, but the Nords are light years ahead.

The oil fund isn't a Nordic Thing™, it's norwegian. We in the rest of the nordics don't even have (significant amounts of) oil.

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#249

Post by [deleted] »

ascagnel_ wrote: post #69
yoyohello13 wrote: post #50

Gates seems like a real embodiment of "Effective Altruism". 1. Get a bunch of money by any means necessary. 2. Donate/invest in altruistic causes. Unfortunately, most people that use effective altruism to justify themselves hoarding wealth seem to forget the second part.

I was talking about this with a friend recently -- Romans flaunted their wealth by improving shared social infrastructure (open market spaces, parks, etc), and the robber barons of the 19th century flaunted their wealth by building cultural institutions (eg Carnegie libraries). It seems like most "effective altruists" want to do things that help "humanity" but don't help "people" -- so developing technology to explor…

[deleted]

Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth

#250

Post by mithametacs »

amelius wrote: post #162
skandium wrote: post #48

One of the great tragedies of the world is that while he is arguably the philanthropist with the highest positive impact in human history, a significant part of the population seems to still think he is the literal Antichrist.

> still think he is the literal Antichrist. And then I suppose that Steve Jobs is the Christ in this story. You only have to look at the research output of Microsoft Research to know that it is the other way around. Kind of weird how even smart people get things mixed up.

What research?
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