Bullshit. He's not donating. He's investing.
It would be more effective to use his wealth to put a president that is not a war criminal and stop making US the bully of the world. That would be a blessing for humanity
My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
331–340 of 704 posts
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's an incredibly simplistic and naive view of why large public projects gobble up colossal sums of money and don't have much to show for it.
It's not as naive as you're painting it to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Money_(book)
I'm sure a similar book could be written where the political stripes are all changed. Instead of Koch, we have Soros. Instead of Musk, it would be Gates. Instead of whoever owns Sinclair Media, its Carlos Slim or Lauren Powell Jobs.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#333One 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.
You'd be saying the same thing about Epstein if he hadn't been caught.
What I don't understand is the comradeship I see in people competing to effusively praise oligarchs. Bill Gates fought against technological progress, fought against free and open source software, fought against antitrust, even bribed officials to push out competitors. Why would people pat each other on the back for admiring him?
Even afterwards, when he bought his redemption by showering money upon dubious nonprofits, and by creating other, even more dubious nonprofits - simply paying everyone who could possibly have a problem with him, including dozens of journalistic organizations and hundreds of individual journalists - all of his charitable efforts are still obviously ways to play with various social theories that he has, not to help people.
It takes a real psychopath to accumulate that much power, with so few principles, and then to use it to play games with people's lives. His entertainment and the entertainment of his class is endangering the world.
And I still listen to Michael Jackson, so whatever, but we know that his relationship with Epstein was pretty extensive, and what was said during his divorce (in relation to that) was alarming, as well as the fact that he immediately crumbled and gave her the farm. There's your conspiracy theory; I'm not going to be caught praising a guy for mosquito nets whom I pretty much knew hung out with Epstein for a time as intensely as anyone else did. Epstein was giving away money for elite approval, too.
What's money for if not for patronage? You can't take it with you.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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As someone who grew up in a Christian faith tradition that said Jesus Christ died for the sins of all of us and that we are all made in God's image, I find this position so bizarre. If we are all children of God, why should I prioritize the well being of a single stranger in Ohio over twenty strangers in Kenya? I can understand an argument for prioritizing one's family, especially if you are a parent, or even one's i…
This is a pretty common question that's raised: how can we square this with loving our fellow man?
The short answer is Christianity isn't a utilitarian belief system. While God loves everyone equally, he puts some of us closer together in love: family, friends, neighbors, countrymen. This incurs a greater obligation, plus we ought to love more those who are closer to us.
Sadly, a lot of Christian faiths teach dogma before the underlying reasoning or take a Bible-only approach which I find to be incredibly incomplete. In case your upbringing didn't include much theological reading, I would strongly recommend Civitas Dei and Summa Theologiae; the latter is less explicitly relevant to its definition but probably a better book overall.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#335Earlier 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.
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 t…
Yeah but it's not either or. And people are always want to contribute to their pet causes. Go tell someone who's sibling died of cancer or whatever that they shouldn't donate to cancer research because the state should do it. Like yes it should but however much they do you may have personal reasons to want to do more. So private charity is always going to be a thing in parallel to public works.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure you can. You have an equitable society, and when someone inevitably tries to take more than their share (because there will always be sociopaths), you make them stop.
That works only if majority agrees that we put such system in place and enforce it globally in the world. Some could say that communism was a failed attempt for this.
Why does it have to global? Isn't that just imperialism? Why can't it be scoped to a geopolitical unit that wants it?
(I'm highly skeptical of social movements that claim to be for equality, but of course there are officials who suspiciously enjoy non-equal luxuries. Then it just looks like greedy sociopaths leveraging 'equality' PR in bad faith, as a tactic.)
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is not their argument. You lowering your tax rate and giving that money to charity isn't magicking more money into the world, it is just a different allocation. The government's tax income is allocated by the masses (in theory anyway). It is fair and dispassionate. Philanthropy / charity is picking winners and losers based on your personal whims, and for many it is about gaining social capital.
> You lowering your tax rate and giving that money to charity isn't magicking more money into the world, it is just a different allocation. This is only ever true if you assume that government tax spending is 100% efficient, with nary a fraction of a cent being wasted. I don't think that's a safe assumption.
No. The assumption is that charity and government have roughly equivalent efficiency. Both government and charities have (wildly varying) overhead and government agencies may enjoy economies of scale that charities do not. Yet another area of the world that contains a surprising amount of detail.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#338How much power is concentrated in the hands of individuals... It's great that Gates is choosing to use that power philanthropically, but it also raises questions about the long-term role of private wealth in solving public problems.
He talks about this in today's NY Times interview and he is pretty unsparing against Elon Musk in particular for his role in killing USAID. Says he is directly complicit in killing children while at the same time, he is technically still a signatory of the Giving Pledge.
Wow, he lays it out pretty bluntly:
> the world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/magazine/bill-gates-found...
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#339This is the way that foundations and endowments should operate. Too many well-intentioned organizations wind up milquetoast tax-exempt hedge funds aimed primarily at self-preservation because the received wisdom is that they should focus on building endowments and keep their withdrawal rates below 4% in order to achieve immortality. I'm a big believer in research-driven philanthropy and mission-driven organizations.…
If wealth can be immortal why deplete it?
All money spent is voting for allocation of resource. Sometimes there is too much money fighting the same goods in which case it may not be a good allocation of resources. That money can sit to become more money.
Re: My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's an incredibly simplistic and naive view of why large public projects gobble up colossal sums of money and don't have much to show for it.
A lot of that public money somehow ends up in the private sector, usually as corporate profits. Libertarians may want to ask themselves what happens to the private sector - aerospace, energy, R&D, infrastructure, education - when public investment stops.
I am guessing that in your mind that if a private corporation bids on a contract it should only break even? Is that it? Or perhaps - for you - even better would be - the whole thing would be done by the government. There is no private corporation?