My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by Nullabillity » Thu, May 08, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #190

closewith wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No billionaire will ever be a net positive to society. The wealth he accrued was literally stolen from the labour of millions of people. No token donations at the end of your life will ever remediate that situation.

>> The wealth he accrued was literally stolen from the labour of millions of people. It's such a weird take I don't even know where to begin. Are you suggesting that all people who worked at Microsoft to make Windows and IE and all their other products had their labour "stolen" from them? If yes, can you expand on that? What do you do for a living? Do you perform some kind of a job that you get compensated for? If ye…

> It's such a weird take I don't even know where to begin. Are you suggesting that all people who worked at Microsoft to make Windows and IE and all their other products had their labour "stolen" from them? If yes, can you expand on that?

We have a metric for the difference between what you charge for something and what you paid to provide it, it's called net income. Here's Microsoft's: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MSFT/microsoft/net...

Elsewhere, we tend to call that embezzlement.

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

#282

Post by _bin_ » Thu, May 08, 2025, 4:15 PM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #114

_bin_ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> I am within mine to remind everyone to please help your friend, your neighbor, your town, state, and country before you look further afield. Nah. We have memberships in families, neighborhoods, friend groups, local areas, cultural groups, nations, and the whole world. And problems at any of these levels can grow to the point where they affect us, too. And places where the needs are most acute and broad stand the gr…

You have to weigh that against the fact that you are much more able to figure out how to actually do what's needed at levels where you see things firsthand. At least, that's been my experience; it's much more realistic to start a nonprofit that can make a real difference locally, then perhaps scale with time, than it is to found something with a global mission, lacking global context on how things manifest around the world.

More importantly, I'm not a utilitarian, and do not subscribe to "effective altruism" or other utilitarian philosophies. At the end of the day it's Gates' money to do with as he wishes and it's my internet account to argue against that as I wish.

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

#283

Post by senko » Thu, May 08, 2025, 4:16 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #215

senko wrote: post #10

$108B net worth now (per chart in the article), so he will be left with paltry $1B. Still, would be beautiful to see all megarich do the same. Keep a few yachts, mansions and planes if you give back a few small countries' worth of GDP back.

Apparently billionaires in the USA hold 4.48 trillion, 756 of them or so. So if they all dumped their wealth and saved a billion (should be enough to retire on, even for the conservative portfolio!) we would have 3.72 trillion - it would cover the US deficit for two, maybe three years.

Or to spin this another way: Americans spend around $200B* annually on education (private spend, on top of federal/state/local education spend), so this would provide all-expenses-paid free tuition for everyone for 18 years, or more than 50 years if focusing on primary/secondary education. In that time, there might be a new crop of megarich to continue the cycle :)

([*] $50B for primary/secondary ed, $150B for higher - figures via Kagi Assistant, which I didn't double-check).

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

#284

Post by beyondCritics » Thu, May 08, 2025, 4:16 PM UTC

gtirloni wrote: post #51

beyondCritics wrote: post #18

[flagged]

Being the person that understands more about charity than anyone else, nobody has donated more than him in the history of charity but the radical left doesn't want you to know this. /s

I am not sure this is serious though ...

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

#285

Post by antisthenes » Thu, May 08, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

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.

> 1. Get a bunch of money by any means necessary.

This assumes the money would not have been better spent by giving it to the workers of the company that generated it in the first place.

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

#286

Post by adamc » Thu, May 08, 2025, 4:17 PM UTC

macintux wrote: post #270

nicce wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is not Bill Gates' fault because he hasn't been doing it in reality. I think the difference still matters. Only the restricted set of conspiracy theorists and their audience thinks otherwise.

That ‘restricted set’ is incredibly powerful politically at the moment.

This is true, because Trump caters to them. It isn't clear that their numbers drove this -- I think rather it is a function of their willingness to be completely loyal to him, which is what he craves.

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

#287

Post by bko » Thu, May 08, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

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.

I could understand some of the criticism for charitable work.

For instance, his foundation pushes birth control in developing nations. On the surface, it look like a just and noble cause.

But imagine how a developed nation would view an act like this on its own people from a foreign body. Imagine some wealthy Chinese national started taking out ads on American television telling Americans to have fewer children and going to poor neighborhoods in the US and handing out free contraceptives.

It's a kind of soft imperialism and social engineering that I imagine a lot of people object to. The guy can't even keep his marriage together and he's insistent on telling people half way around the world how to run their life?

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

#288

Post by xyst » Thu, May 08, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

The thought that a _few_ benevolent billionaires will save the world was a preposterous notion in the 2000s and is still an absurd notion today.

This is nothing more than a billionaire (with a rich history of his own in destroying society) trying to buy his reputation back.

Reminds me of all of the billionaire shitheads (Walmart/Walton Family, Purdue Pharma/Sacklers, …) that buy the naming rights on education facilities, dying arts academies, and even libraries. Nothing but trying to wash away the guilt.

Our shitty family contributed to the opioid addiction en masse all in the name of profit, but hey at least you get a reduced or free tuition to pristine art academy or academic institution (if you meet criteria).

Tax the rich. End subsidies given to ultra wealthy.

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

#289

Post by _bin_ » Thu, May 08, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

packetlost wrote: post #117

_bin_ wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You clearly have never actually looked at effective altruism and what it tries to be. You would otherwise know that your values are diametrically opposed to the values of that movement and said values are neither right nor wrong, they're personal.

Of course I have. I am well aware that my values are diametrically opposed to it at a first-principles level; I find utilitarianism to be an incredibly hollow worldview that fails on many grounds, not least of which are the teleological (disordered love is no virtue.)

I don't have to argue from the first principles of the EA crowd. Everyone believes in something and I believe they are wrong; your epistemic relativism makes no sense to me. Borderline absurdist.

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

#290

Post by 999900000999 » Thu, May 08, 2025, 4:18 PM UTC

Johanx64 wrote: post #226

999900000999 wrote: post #133

>The Gates Foundation’s mission remains rooted in the idea that where you are born should not determine your opportunities. Arguably he's already done so much for billions of people. Had typing on computers not became the main way businesses communicate , anyone with bad, handwriting would be stuck in menial work. When I was growing up in the 90s my hand writing was so bad it was assumed I would never amount to anyth…

Pretty much everything you named is simply first-to-the-market horror-show from design perspective. Javascript? Check. Android? Check. Windows? Again, capturing market via transitioning from DOS. They did focus on many important things like having exceptional backwards compatibility (transitioning from DOS, etc), and kernel team does a decent job usually, but none of this is necessarily attributable to Gates and it's…

>I don't know if this is genuine sentiment you're expressing or just naivety, but people that can glaze this hard this easily usually go very far in life. I'll give you that, I wish I could do this.

Ohh it's 100% genuine, I went from living on food stamps, multiple evictions to 200k at my peak. Making a bit less now , but I'm still very comfortable.

Ultimately these technologies made computing and programming extremely easy and cheap. You can make a lot of money using your Windows PC to code Android apps in JavaScript.

I'm a not tech purist, if it works it works. Yes better OSes and languages exist, but they weren't really accessible to me. I still suggest most new programmers start with JavaScript or Python so you don't get too bogged down with boilerplate and type systems.