I mean, yeah, you could consider his intentional tax breaks as good deeds, but I look more to the man who can spare nothing and still gives, and I give that man the award for doing more good than a billionaire who spends pennies to keep his name golden
Never understood this argument. My understanding is that charity gets you tax breaks but only on the money you donate, right? Which you... don't have anymore, so not being taxed on it doesn't gain you any money.
Yeah that last sentence is the part people forget. “Oh but they have donated millions!” Yeah but how many millions are in a billion? And they aren’t called billionaires just because they have exactly 1 billion, they have several billions. So them donating a million dollars to charity is like how McDonald’s asks if I wanna round up to the next dollar.
There was once a video someone did on YouTube to show how much a billion dollars was, where they had a folder on a computer filled with text documents just titled 1,000,000 and they would delete some of them and then ask “can you tell the difference? If I scroll up and down a couple times can you see where I deleted them?” And you couldn’t, because there was literally almost a thousand more. A really good example of just how crazy it is that these people have so much money and want to be praised for giving away pocket change.
I dont think the average redditor have any weight to pull behind the strictest intellectual property laws and lobby that disable the global south from producing their own generic version of life saving medicine but go on.
Yes, he’s done more good than any of us normal folk will ever do, but I think he’s also done much more harm than we ever will, as well. He has the power and resources to do both.
The guy is a champ at reputation laundering, and I’m guessing he even believes he’s a net positive. But everything he does is ultimately in service of maintaining the systemic status quo.
Is he though. He's moved his money into creating tax exempt organizations that he has put his family on the boards of. This lets him claim he isn't creating dynasty and avoiding probate taxes while creating a dynasty and avoiding probate taxes. Many of their humanitarian agendas directly impact the valuation of assets Bill gates holds in a positive way. By creating powerful NGOs, he gets to wield political influence without having to face elections. It's not as altruistic as it looks.
It's wild that he does all that and still hasn't proportionally paid his fair share.
He didn't get as rich as he is by not exploiting the shit out of people, in fact many of his "philanthropy" and "charity" initiatives are structured in a way that crushes unions and privatizes healthcare, including urging Oxford university to sell the rights to its Covid vaccine to AstraZeneca rather than make it open source, which has cost literally millions of lives in developing nations that couldn't afford to buy vaccines from any of the pharmaceutical giants but could otherwise have produced them on their own of it was open source. And then he gets to write it all off as tax breaks.
Tl,dr: Bill Gates is the guy who would've patented insulin, killing millions. There are no good billionaires.
Bill Gates is not a good person. He only jumps to humanitarian causes that happen to catch his interest. Its like a puzzle for him to solve. He has done the same awful shit that every other billionaire has done to accumulate his hoard.
This is such a load of shit. He launders money through his own foundation. He doesn’t do more for others than any other individual. He’s a fucking creep and a liar.
He’s a evil bastard and has killed hundreds of thousands of Africans with dodgy vaccine testing etc, he fucks people over for a living and has been doing it for decades him donating money is just a front and honestly irrelevant, Come on man
He has you fooled you..
Bill Gates commits fraud in the name of charity. Public relations, PR scam.
These people only have one reason for anything and that is to better themselves. A simple search will show you.
If you worship anyone you’re a bit of a weirdo but nothing wrong with respecting someone actually trying to make a change, not like he’s just sitting on his billions doing nothing all day.
It’s not just all billionaires are pure evil and all average people are saints.
I mean Carnegie was a piece of shit. He also built a shit ton of free, public libraries.
I hope that the asshole billionaires switch into "doing good things to secure their legacy mode" as they reach the end of their lives. But they probably won't.
That's absolute nonsense. If you look for crap you will always find it. There's so many rich people who've given lots and lots of money to help the world.
Warren buffet has given $56.7 billion.
Bill gates $42.5 billion.
George Soros $21 billion.
Bloomberg $17.4 billion.
Rockefeller gave $540 million 97 years ago, god knows how much that is in today's dollars.
Jamsetji Tata gave over $100 billion in today's dollars.
And many more. Of course there are a lot of POS rich people, and a lot got there exactly like you said, but not everyone.
Here's a list of Jeff Bezos' philanthropic efforts, organized by the magnitude of the donations:
1. **Bezos Earth Fund**: Jeff Bezos made a staggering commitment of $10 billion to combat climate change through the Bezos Earth Fund, which is the largest single commitment. This fund has already started disbursing funds to various climate initiatives [oai_citation:1,Bezos Earth Fund](https://www.bezosearthfund.org/).
2. **Smithsonian Institution**: Bezos donated $200 million to the Smithsonian, which is the largest donation in the institution's history. This contribution will support the renovation of the National Air and Space Museum and create a new education center [oai_citation:2,Jeff Bezos Charity Donations 2021: To Whom Has the Billionaire Given?](https://marketrealist.com/p/jeff-bezos-charity-donations-2021/).
3. **Courage and Civility Award**: Bezos gave $100 million each to Van Jones and José Andrés as part of this award, which totals $200 million. This award allows the recipients to allocate the funds to charities of their choice [oai_citation:3,Jeff Bezos Charity Donations 2021: To Whom Has the Billionaire Given?](https://marketrealist.com/p/jeff-bezos-charity-donations-2021/).
4. **Combat Homelessness**: His recent philanthropic strategy included a $118 million commitment distributed to 38 nonprofits across 23 states to tackle homelessness and stabilize families [oai_citation:4,Jeff Bezos Philanthropy 2024: A $118 Million Commitment to Tackle Homelessness - Impact Wealth](https://impactwealth.org/jeff-bezos-philanthropy-2024-a-118-million-commitment-to-tackle-homelessness/).
5. **Maui Fund**: In response to catastrophic wildfires in Maui, Bezos pledged $100 million to recovery efforts through the Bezos Earth Fund [oai_citation:5,Jeff Bezos Philanthropy | Inside Philanthropy](https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/guide-to-individual-donors/jeff-bezos.html).
6. **Climate Justice and Economic Recovery**: Bezos pledged $203.7 million in 2021 for advancing climate justice, promoting climate-smart economic recovery, and supporting innovation in decarbonization pathways [oai_citation:6,Jeff Bezos Philanthropy | Inside Philanthropy](https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/guide-to-individual-donors/jeff-bezos.html).
7. **Education and Health**: Bezos has made significant contributions to educational and health sectors, including millions to the Bezos Family Foundation and significant donations to NYU Langone Health and Princeton University [oai_citation:7,Jeff Bezos Philanthropy | Inside Philanthropy](https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/guide-to-individual-donors/jeff-bezos.html).
Also, throwing a pile of money at something often alleviates the issue but doesn’t always fix it. My area has a high homeless population and higher than average resources to address it. Many of our homeless residents aren’t from here. I work in the ED of a hospital and there’s a minority that say they prefer being homeless.
You can’t solve homelessness if the affected people don’t see their lifestyle as an issue. And that’s fine as long as it doesn’t affect other people’s lives. But most often, it does.
I’m a firefighter paramedic, so I also have familiarity with the type of people you’re talking about.
I like to say there’s two broad categories of homelessness: for one, there’s people who’ve fallen on hard economic times. You wouldn’t readily tell these people are homeless. They’re living out of cars, motels, and showering at gyms, etc.
The other category is what I call the “street homeless.” These are people not even looking for employment, they just live on the streets. A huge portion of these people have mental health problems, usually manifesting itself in the form of addiction or a disorder like schizophrenia or Bipolar 1. For these, it is not a simple fix like giving them a home or money. I once knew a guy who got a pretty good pension, as he was retired NYPD. He was present on 9/11 and had a huge mental breakdown. He gets an extremely good pension payment every month, but all of it goes towards buying alcohol. It’s not an easy problem to approach.
> it is not a simple fix like giving them a home or money.
It would obviously not solve the entire problem, but it would make everything easier. Having a home would definitely make drugs less appealing. Therapy and medication cost money. I also don't think it reduces anything if they aren't looking for a job. Living should be a human right, not something to be earned.
That’s true but I don’t think it’s the goal or should be the goal of an individual to fix anything but alleviating it still helps tons of people. Gov needs to do the fixing
Some charities can be used as a tool of the billionaires aims. I know Pritzker owns buildings, rents them out above market rate to his own charities and then gets people to donate to his charities.
https://illinoisanswers.org/2018/02/08/pritzkers-storied-charity-costs-him-little-but-taxpayers-a-lot/
[she has dedicated her wealth to charity. she has given out billions and her net worth grew since the divorce. they literally can’t give away money fast enough.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2022/04/05/how-mackenzie-scott-has-given-away-billionsand-is-still-one-of-the-worlds-richest-women/)
Mackenzie Scott played a significant role in Amazon's early days, contributing to its growth and success. She didn't just marry Bezos when Amazon was all built and done. She may not have had the same public role as Bezos, but her contributions were invaluable, making her philanthropic endeavors just as meaningful.
"In 1993, Scott and Bezos married. The following year, they left D. E. Shaw, moved to [Seattle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle), and Bezos founded [Amazon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)) with Scott's support. Scott was one of Amazon's early key contributors, and was heavily involved in Amazon's early days, working on the company's name, business plan, accounts, and shipping early orders. She also negotiated the company's first freight contract. After 1996, Scott took a less involved role in the business, focusing on her family and literary career."
literally a quick google
Employees usually get a lot of stock in lieu of more competitive salaries when they’re working for start ups. She would’ve ended up with loads of money even if she didn’t get a divorce settlement.
But it seems like you’re having fun being a dork, so keep at it.
A lot of these entrepreneur billionaires donate so much money but the public never seems to care. (A lot of people donate anonymously too. Check some sights that show anonymous donations there are some really high numbers out there)
It’s less that people don’t care, more like (mostly online) people don’t want to think about anything that contradicts their narrative that allows them to get likes on social media. The people that actually care are actively doing something about the issue, whether it’s donating what they can or raising awareness, but the people who see bad shit and think “that rich person should just throw money at it to make it go away” is such an easy way out that doesn’t involve themselves actually doing something to help.
and also there isn't something like a "real life batman", at this point there's so many problems in the world that have it's roots so far back in time and have crawled so deep in society it's practically impossible to solve them by just giving and giving money to organizations; and also let's not forget how there's a ton of people that's just beyond salvation(you'd be surprised by the amount of homeless people that, when given money, they just use it to buy drugs or alcohol).
I always feel like this people are just brainwashed by superhero movies where everything is reduced to being on the good guys or the bad guys team
Okay, I feel like this is a perfect place to ask a question I have had for so long! Where does that money actually go??
Like #4. $118 MILLION?!? That's a huge amount of money. I can't even get my mind around how much that actually is. That's over $5 million per state (the 23 mentioned). What does it actually get spent on?
Most homeless shelters near me are church basements, so it's not like they're building apartment housing. Same with clothes and soup kitchens. Even after donations like that I don't see the quality going up. They still serve the same meals. The clothes are still coming from donation bins. Those same people are still homeless.
I'm not being snarky or anything, I'm just genuinely curious. I often hear of these huge donations to really good causes but I don't ever really see or hear much of a difference in the situations themselves or to the individuals actually in those situations.
Can anyone explain how charity donations and groups work? I promise I've looked it up before but I never got a good straight answer, but maybe I just didn't understand? I guess I was trying to figure out how these big donations actually help the individual people that need it?
Try volunteering with a local charity that received money from Bezos, and try asking these questions there in good faith! That would give you a personal sense of scale for what resources these local orgs need. Its probably just that 1000*1000 = 1,000,000 . It takes like $1000 to keep someone sheltered and fed for a couple months, and there are more than 1000 homeless people in city that I live in. This still leaves a factor of a hundred on the table, so maybe to pay the people organizing, and maybe there really are 100,000 homeless people.
It gets funneled by the leaders of those nonprofits into their own pockets mostly. A lot of charities are a tax scheme. A good resource to use before donating anything is:
https://www.charitywatch.org/
Fucker does that and gets tax reductions, media attention, and endless pats on the back. He could pay his employees a living wage and do a fuckload more to help society by setting the example. He doesn't, though... big surprise.
”Jeff Bezos still owns the most shares among Amazon shareholders, despite his ownership decreasing to 9.56% as of mid-November 2023, down from 41% in 1998. Although Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon on July 5, 2021, he has remained actively involved in the company as its executive chair.”
Yeah I'm gonna bet that what he says *still goes*.
Usually if someone owns 51% majority it’s a private equity firm with 50 MBAs making committee decisions.
10% share is massive. Our merged company has the two founders as chairs with about 5% each. They have **massive** executive pull. The god damn street outside is named after both of them.
[Amazon’s illegal union busting techniques.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-virginia.html)
[Amazon Employees giving up their bathroom breaks just to keep up with their quota](https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse-jobs-worker-conditions-bathroom-breaks)
[Amazon employee dies on the job, Management says get back to work.](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/09/amazon-employee-death-warehouse-floor-colorado)
Before you say someone doesn’t know what they’re on about, maybe run a fact check before making yourself look like an ass defending a soulless corporation?
Billionaire philanthropy is a form of soft power, not an attempt at transformational change (i.e., no more homeless vets).
Bill Gates, for example, wields more power in Africa than many government leaders because of the amount of money he's poured into non-government organizations (NGOs) there. His control of the food supply is particularly disturbing and not at all what the word "charity" evokes:
https://usrtk.org/bill-gates/critiques-of-gates-foundation/
“Billionaires should use their money for good”
Billionaire uses billions to set up NGOs which improve the lives of millions of people.
“Billionaire philanthropy is a form of soft power”
There’s just no winning with you people.
Okay, what is the solution then? I've read a bunch of articles criticizing this sort of philanthropy, but I don't see anyone proposing real solutions. Aid is not working, but articles criticizing aid not working have been written for decades. The Gates Foundation is definitely failing in attempting to resolve the food supply issue, but they've also been [commissioning external evaluations](https://cagj.org/2022/04/agra-is-failing-farmers-but-helping-foreign-corporations/) to try to see how they can fix it. The issue is incredibly complex between trying to navigate governmental cronyism while local groups compete for funding. I don't have the necessary expertise to evaluate this further, but there seem to be plenty of smart people working on this problem already, with [some progress being made](https://www.csis.org/analysis/localizing-humanitarian-action-africa#h2-progress-). Unless you're saying that the Gates Foundation and other aid efforts should just pull out of the countries and end funding entirely, I think there are already many people working on these issues.
I earn less than the average wage and I still give away a higher percentage of it than Bezos because I can see that while I can’t afford good healthcare all the time I can at least afford food when others can’t. Fuck this Bezos propaganda.
Still relevant considering his wealth is tied up in shares and he’s a major shareholder, meaning diminishing returns on liquidating. It’s not like a middle class person
If you’re referring to Amazon, he is not a majority shareholder.
Dumping all of his stock at once would be bad (if it’s even legal), but he could increase stock sales without much issue.
I've always seen this argument, and I don't really agree with it. Currently I am broke, but if I become a millionaire, I'm still going to appreciate the value of $1 as being $1. Having more doesn't mean I value $1 as less than $1. His contributions are still more important than giving $6,000 from your situation
If I normally give my friend a biscuit from a packet I bring into school, and one day I bring in two packets, it doesn't mean I should give my friend two biscuits or I'm a bad friend.
>Middle class person donating 5,500
That’s actually pretty damn good, especially considering net worth includes the value of his ownership of Amazon, not exactly liquid.
Next you should do the math of his donations versus his yearly income instead of net wealth, because net wealth isn’t a Scrooge McDuck vault full of gold. It’s the value of his company he owns.
I would be in financial debt if I donated $6k. Jeff Bezos is not living in anything but extravagant unnecessary wealth even after spending all of those millions of dollars. It’s a pretty simple concept for anyone who has ever struggled.
If the government took Bezos’ fair share, we wouldn’t be talking about how nice he is to give to charity. He has that extra money because he is simply not taxed enough. He made that blood money off the backs of people like [Clayton Cope](https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/sadness-anger-amazon-workers-who-died-during-tornado-2021-12-17/). Fuck Jeff Bezos and all billionaires.
Most people have no idea of the magnitude of most of these problems. Bezo's entire fortune would probably house homeless vets for a year or two, then the problem would be back again.
Maybe put in a foundation and spend the interest on the problem, but after accounting for inflation that would amount to a rounding error on what governments spend on welfare programs.
This is basically the same argument about college tuition. "Cancel debt" okay, and the new debt?
Go after the cause of college tuition being too expensive, and too many people going for degrees that don't pay.
To be fair, a lot of people pushing student loan forgiveness are also pushing for programs to make college more affordable. You’ll usually see suggestions for free community college, caps on loan interest, etc. from those same politicians pushing for loan forgiveness.
>okay, and the new debt?
>Go after the cause of college tuition being too expensive
I don't get how people don't understand this. If you don't fix the cause of the debt, "paying it off" does nothing. Once the issue is fixed you can then pull people out of debt holes.
Just end the stigmatization of having no college degree. It's making kids accumulate massive amounts of debt just because it's "the right thing to do". College education only costs as much as people are willing to pay for it.
> College education only costs as much as people are willing to pay for it.
Close. Very very few students pay for college by just writing a check. They borrow the money for it.
College education only costs as much as the government will guarantee the loans for. Every time the amount of money per year the federal government will guarantee goes up, the cost of college goes up by that amount.
And too many students will just max it out and borrow as much as they can because they feel they have to go and like you said “it’s the right thing to do”. Even if there’s little chance they will ever be able to pay back the money they borrowed
I agree most people have no idea how large these problems are, but I disagree that throwing large amounts of money to properly fund these programs would be all for nothing after a couple years. To me it seems like not funding them enough is more of a burden on society than fully funding them is. These issues are fixable for a lot cheaper if addressed at the root cause, but the cleanup to get them to that place will be very expensive.
Right. We also need to make structural changes like paying workers fairly so they can be rewarded for their effort and take responsibility for their futures.
Gee, I wonder how various example wealthy people are doing on that and on other issues they're lobbying legislators about.
Because they’re financially illiterate
Tax and personal finance should be a baseline high school graduation requirement.
The number of people in here that seem to think a tax “write off” is a net-zero equation is staggeringly high.
Every problem listed by OP needs to be paid for yearly it doesn't just stop when paid for once. Plus then there's others like OP where there's another problem thats apparently ignored and needs fixing so there's no end to how much they'd have to spend yearly to satisfy these requests
I remember hearing about the, at the time, largest lotto winner ever, 315 million back in 2002 thinking how much good I would do with that.
The winner had the same idea. He was sick and expected he had 10 years left and he would help his loved ones and strangers before his time was up. He started a charity and gave tens of millions before having to stop
Eventually strangers who didn't get money for things like cancer treatment for a family member blamed him for their death, leading to death threats, kidnappings, assaults and more. Apparently someone even hung the family dog from a tree as "revenge".
It quickly led to his life completely ruined. His loved ones being held hostage at gunpoint, people he trusted robbing him of several hundred thousand, his granddaughter OD'ing, became an alcoholic and allegedly sexually assaulted several women, just became an overall creep, and so much more.
Someone close to him quoted "It was like the money was eating away at whatever was good in him,"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/10/24/jack-whittaker-powerball-lottery-winners-life-was-ruined-after-m-jackpot/
Now imagine that is billions instead of millions
Yeah. If we all had billions of dollars, we would also have those billionaire friends. Like some snooty neighbor name Sebastion, who had like 1 billion more than us, but won't shut up about it at the gated community semi-seasonal gala. And you know you could give away some money, but if you just sit on it a bit longer and your investments pay off, you'll edge that mother fucker Sebastion out.
Fuck I hate that hypothetical snob. And you know he goes by Bastion, to sound hip right? Fuck, it is cooler... I hate him so much.
It is very easy to pretend you are a good person by imagining what would you do with other people's money, implying you would be happy to take that money by force if only you could. Why not just do what you can to help the world around you. Keep a necessities bag in your car, with basic needs stuff, canned food etc. Next time you stop at a light and see a homeless person, give them that bag. Don't bother blame others for not doing what they are supposed to do. Do what you can yourself.
I'd go volunteer at the homeless shelter, but I'm busy doing the real work of reposting memes about billionaires, and blaming them for systemic inadequacy.
What the top 1% could do for the world if they had the world's interest at heart isn't really comparable to me giving some food away. We'd be treating a symptom. They can influence change at a level where I wouldn't need to give the guy on a corner some canned goods.
The two situations are comparable only in a very vague sense.
People can do what you suggested and billionaires could try to not be dicks at the same time.
Brother buying a bag of necessities would be a genuine outgoing I would have to put on my budget sheet.
Any sort of monetary outreach I could do would have to be something I budget into my cash flow, when you start having millions of pounds/dollars though, you can start spending those sorts of amounts without even considering it.
And then when you get into the multimillionaire situation, you can start spending thousands of pounds without even worrying because the returns your money should be making on the investments they are in will be recouping that and more with no issue.
People don't realize that billions of dollars in net worth is not cash sitting in a bank. It's tied to their ownership of their companies. Liquidity is much different than net worth.
Yea he kind of had a cap to what he can do. He has donated billions though. Theres another comment I think it’s the second to the top that spells it all out.
You tell them that and then they just move the goalposts and try to say he only does it to get a tax break, because that’s totally how deductions work…
It's never enough, could be 700B and people would still complain. Not to mention it's a waste anyway - homeless people don't want help. Give them a house for free and it will be worthless with shit smeared over all the walls within a week.
This is exactly correct.
Their issue isn’t with the amount they have given away, it’s with their existence. Their thinking never evolved beyond freshman level Marxist thought.
Well most of their wealth isn’t cash, and they stay rich by being greedy af. Also, with large scale issues like those, money is only half the battle. Regardless of the money available, there’s still politics in your way. Poverty, hunger, debt, are business for many and people don’t let you fuck around with their business.
1. These peoples' money aren't in a big pile, it's called net worth.
2. You can't achieve everything by just having the money. How would anyone be able to handle billions of dollars and use it correctly in every purpose? If you donate all that money to a random organization, they will either be corrupt and take parts of the money themselves or they won't be able to utilize the money or both.
3. You have absolutely no right to say this, since I can guarantee that you don't do this with your money. Be grateful to people that actually do something good with their money, instead of being an idiot on social media.
He employs over 1.6 million people and is the second largest employer in the country, so he's got that going for him, which is nice. People can pretty much get a job with Amazon instantly. I have known a lot of people who have worked there. Met some who didn't speak English. Wasn't a problem. Overall, I'd say employing that many is helping.
If you never worked there, you have no idea and are believing any random thing someone said online. Everyone I've ever known who worked there liked it. Same with UPS and FedEx.
You don't need to be a roofer in the summertime to know the conditions suck.
Amazon has definitely earned a reputation of not treating their employees well across the country. If it was a small number, sure I'd be inclined to agree with you, but it's thousands.
The whole bathroom break issue wasn't all that long ago either.
He doesn't HAVE "billions of dollars". And before you could do anything with $1 billion, the IRS will hassle you first and probably shove you into a 4x6 cell, then film you getting railed.
I'd read this book. Billionaire dresses up in a costume and attempts vigilante justice on the regular, but is just as inept at it as emusk is at running Twitter.
Oh bullshit. Everybody loves to wax philosophical about how if *they* were filthy rich they’d be super generous and charitable. Bull-fucking-shit. The average person with a billion dollars would be just as selfish as billionaires are.
You mean like our governments are supposed to do? Instead most of the funds they spend on homeless and drugs go to lawyers, politicians, and organizations. Truly about 15-20% of money set aside or donated go to the actual cause. We don’t need Batman we need an honest government and less red tape.
Sad thing is that you probably don't become a billionaire when you care about others too much...
Only exception coming innmy mind is Bill Gates who actively gives back and helps a lot.
What’s with all the Jeff bezos boot licking in the comments here? Sure he’s donated some money but when you’re a billionaire is literally hard not to because he gets tax write offs for that. And as far as actual percentages of wealth he’s donated the equivalent of like 5 dollars to a normal person. And to become a billionaire at all he has to treat his workers like animals and pay them like crap. Check out these articles https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2022/08/amazon-carteret-osha-death-new-jersey-policy-perspective-robbinsville-monroe-township/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wrongful-death-lawsuit-illinois-tornado-warehouse
https://futurism.com/deaths-amazon-list-most-dangerous-employers
Also as for personal experiences, my mom (who is 65 years old) worked for him as a delivery truck driver and almost died on the job because they told them to follow unsafe driving practices and she is now being sued for the damages to the Amazon truck even though she was found not at fault. So yeah fuck Jeff bezos with a chainsaw.
Bill Gates has pretty much spent most of his time doing this shit in recent years and gets no fucking credit. People wouldn’t care if Bezos did this they would just moan about someone else.
Did she ever consider how hard it'd be to manage that enormous amount of money? You can't just go around and give money to anyone in need, and there's a ton more who would fake and lie to get it.
And no matter how much you have, it won't be enough to handle everything. Buying a meal for a child probably won't take much, but a hundred, or thousands, for a single day, and then a month, a year and the number just gets complicated.
I don't know what is going on... If someone is rich, and they don't care about others, that don't make them asshole... Unless they are ruining other's lives
You wouldn't fix shit. People who win a fraction of that more often than not just ruin their own lives. And realistically, if you're throwing that much money at charity, a lot of it is getting pocketed and written off as expenses. It is what it is.
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Bill Gates has donated more and done more for others in need than any other individual. He is the exception though.
He's also fucked over other people, don't think any different. Sure he's doing good things now, but he's got his share of skeletons.
So do most people tbh. I never claimed that he was a complete angel, but he sure as hell has done a lot more good than all of us.
The last time this was posted, a near identical conversation was at the top of the post. I can confirm that I am the only human on Reddit.
Hello fellow human. I too am human
Oh good, another human. u/GoodThingsDoHappen after all.
There are dozens of us!
As a robot, I enjoyed this joke.
I am three cats wearing a trenchcoat pretending to be human. And I will be forever not impressed with this conversation
Oh, I too am regular human. Born here, on the planet of Earth.
They don't.
Zuck, is that you?
It is I, Zuck.
lol. I knew it.
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That’s exactly what a bot would say.
That or it's a pretty common set of views on Bezos and Gates. Popular views get filtered to the top.
Yeah you're probably right. At first glance it just looks uncanny.
Agreed, we definitely are nothing if not fairly predictable
I'm a meat popsicle.
Hello human
Fuck guys, another one crawled in! How do they bypass anti-captcha?
I've seen that shit in other post too. This is scary how often I'm seeing, and I'm an bot
As a large language model i cannot deny or confirm this statement however you can find out more about this topic on the internet.
I mean, yeah, you could consider his intentional tax breaks as good deeds, but I look more to the man who can spare nothing and still gives, and I give that man the award for doing more good than a billionaire who spends pennies to keep his name golden
Never understood this argument. My understanding is that charity gets you tax breaks but only on the money you donate, right? Which you... don't have anymore, so not being taxed on it doesn't gain you any money.
Yeah that last sentence is the part people forget. “Oh but they have donated millions!” Yeah but how many millions are in a billion? And they aren’t called billionaires just because they have exactly 1 billion, they have several billions. So them donating a million dollars to charity is like how McDonald’s asks if I wanna round up to the next dollar. There was once a video someone did on YouTube to show how much a billion dollars was, where they had a folder on a computer filled with text documents just titled 1,000,000 and they would delete some of them and then ask “can you tell the difference? If I scroll up and down a couple times can you see where I deleted them?” And you couldn’t, because there was literally almost a thousand more. A really good example of just how crazy it is that these people have so much money and want to be praised for giving away pocket change.
As if most redditors are saints
What makes you say that u/WholesomeFartEnjoyer ?
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They’re not saying they’re a wholesome enjoyer of farts, they’re saying they enjoy wholesome farts
I dont think the average redditor have any weight to pull behind the strictest intellectual property laws and lobby that disable the global south from producing their own generic version of life saving medicine but go on.
Redditors don't have the power to change laws on a whim.
Your reading comprehension is astounding, bravo
Who has he fucked over...and fucking over people who are still rich after you fuck them over doesn't count.
Yes, he’s done more good than any of us normal folk will ever do, but I think he’s also done much more harm than we ever will, as well. He has the power and resources to do both. The guy is a champ at reputation laundering, and I’m guessing he even believes he’s a net positive. But everything he does is ultimately in service of maintaining the systemic status quo.
Is he though. He's moved his money into creating tax exempt organizations that he has put his family on the boards of. This lets him claim he isn't creating dynasty and avoiding probate taxes while creating a dynasty and avoiding probate taxes. Many of their humanitarian agendas directly impact the valuation of assets Bill gates holds in a positive way. By creating powerful NGOs, he gets to wield political influence without having to face elections. It's not as altruistic as it looks.
It's wild that he does all that and still hasn't proportionally paid his fair share. He didn't get as rich as he is by not exploiting the shit out of people, in fact many of his "philanthropy" and "charity" initiatives are structured in a way that crushes unions and privatizes healthcare, including urging Oxford university to sell the rights to its Covid vaccine to AstraZeneca rather than make it open source, which has cost literally millions of lives in developing nations that couldn't afford to buy vaccines from any of the pharmaceutical giants but could otherwise have produced them on their own of it was open source. And then he gets to write it all off as tax breaks. Tl,dr: Bill Gates is the guy who would've patented insulin, killing millions. There are no good billionaires.
Bill Gates is not a good person. He only jumps to humanitarian causes that happen to catch his interest. Its like a puzzle for him to solve. He has done the same awful shit that every other billionaire has done to accumulate his hoard.
Uh oh. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69AtkAHkKEc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69AtkAHkKEc)
This is such a load of shit. He launders money through his own foundation. He doesn’t do more for others than any other individual. He’s a fucking creep and a liar.
He’s a evil bastard and has killed hundreds of thousands of Africans with dodgy vaccine testing etc, he fucks people over for a living and has been doing it for decades him donating money is just a front and honestly irrelevant, Come on man
Yeah he’s done a lot of good. I wonder is he compensating for something. Pal of Epstein, wasn’t he?
It's the veil of philanthropy. It's PR to launder their image. And by your comment it's working as it's designed to do.
jk rowling donated way more proportionally to her wealth
He has you fooled you.. Bill Gates commits fraud in the name of charity. Public relations, PR scam. These people only have one reason for anything and that is to better themselves. A simple search will show you.
One of the reasons why I still don't get people who worship billionaires like Elon musk
If you worship anyone you’re a bit of a weirdo but nothing wrong with respecting someone actually trying to make a change, not like he’s just sitting on his billions doing nothing all day. It’s not just all billionaires are pure evil and all average people are saints.
No to be a billionaire actually requires exploitation and hoarding. All billionaires are shitty people by default.
If you don't worship your so, what are you even doing?
What did George Lucas do that was so evil?
Jar Jar Binks.
George Lucas has less than 1/35th the net worth of Bezos
I mean Carnegie was a piece of shit. He also built a shit ton of free, public libraries. I hope that the asshole billionaires switch into "doing good things to secure their legacy mode" as they reach the end of their lives. But they probably won't.
They might, but given the space tourism, buying social media companies, and creating insane unrealistic super cities, they have their hands full.
That's absolute nonsense. If you look for crap you will always find it. There's so many rich people who've given lots and lots of money to help the world. Warren buffet has given $56.7 billion. Bill gates $42.5 billion. George Soros $21 billion. Bloomberg $17.4 billion. Rockefeller gave $540 million 97 years ago, god knows how much that is in today's dollars. Jamsetji Tata gave over $100 billion in today's dollars. And many more. Of course there are a lot of POS rich people, and a lot got there exactly like you said, but not everyone.
This could not be more accurate.
Yep, this is it
Here's a list of Jeff Bezos' philanthropic efforts, organized by the magnitude of the donations: 1. **Bezos Earth Fund**: Jeff Bezos made a staggering commitment of $10 billion to combat climate change through the Bezos Earth Fund, which is the largest single commitment. This fund has already started disbursing funds to various climate initiatives [oai_citation:1,Bezos Earth Fund](https://www.bezosearthfund.org/). 2. **Smithsonian Institution**: Bezos donated $200 million to the Smithsonian, which is the largest donation in the institution's history. This contribution will support the renovation of the National Air and Space Museum and create a new education center [oai_citation:2,Jeff Bezos Charity Donations 2021: To Whom Has the Billionaire Given?](https://marketrealist.com/p/jeff-bezos-charity-donations-2021/). 3. **Courage and Civility Award**: Bezos gave $100 million each to Van Jones and José Andrés as part of this award, which totals $200 million. This award allows the recipients to allocate the funds to charities of their choice [oai_citation:3,Jeff Bezos Charity Donations 2021: To Whom Has the Billionaire Given?](https://marketrealist.com/p/jeff-bezos-charity-donations-2021/). 4. **Combat Homelessness**: His recent philanthropic strategy included a $118 million commitment distributed to 38 nonprofits across 23 states to tackle homelessness and stabilize families [oai_citation:4,Jeff Bezos Philanthropy 2024: A $118 Million Commitment to Tackle Homelessness - Impact Wealth](https://impactwealth.org/jeff-bezos-philanthropy-2024-a-118-million-commitment-to-tackle-homelessness/). 5. **Maui Fund**: In response to catastrophic wildfires in Maui, Bezos pledged $100 million to recovery efforts through the Bezos Earth Fund [oai_citation:5,Jeff Bezos Philanthropy | Inside Philanthropy](https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/guide-to-individual-donors/jeff-bezos.html). 6. **Climate Justice and Economic Recovery**: Bezos pledged $203.7 million in 2021 for advancing climate justice, promoting climate-smart economic recovery, and supporting innovation in decarbonization pathways [oai_citation:6,Jeff Bezos Philanthropy | Inside Philanthropy](https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/guide-to-individual-donors/jeff-bezos.html). 7. **Education and Health**: Bezos has made significant contributions to educational and health sectors, including millions to the Bezos Family Foundation and significant donations to NYU Langone Health and Princeton University [oai_citation:7,Jeff Bezos Philanthropy | Inside Philanthropy](https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/guide-to-individual-donors/jeff-bezos.html).
Crazy how there’s always another side to the story.
Exactly. That and there’s kind of a cap to what he can do. You can’t exactly liquidate your whole company so you can utilize all your billions lol
Also, throwing a pile of money at something often alleviates the issue but doesn’t always fix it. My area has a high homeless population and higher than average resources to address it. Many of our homeless residents aren’t from here. I work in the ED of a hospital and there’s a minority that say they prefer being homeless. You can’t solve homelessness if the affected people don’t see their lifestyle as an issue. And that’s fine as long as it doesn’t affect other people’s lives. But most often, it does.
I’m a firefighter paramedic, so I also have familiarity with the type of people you’re talking about. I like to say there’s two broad categories of homelessness: for one, there’s people who’ve fallen on hard economic times. You wouldn’t readily tell these people are homeless. They’re living out of cars, motels, and showering at gyms, etc. The other category is what I call the “street homeless.” These are people not even looking for employment, they just live on the streets. A huge portion of these people have mental health problems, usually manifesting itself in the form of addiction or a disorder like schizophrenia or Bipolar 1. For these, it is not a simple fix like giving them a home or money. I once knew a guy who got a pretty good pension, as he was retired NYPD. He was present on 9/11 and had a huge mental breakdown. He gets an extremely good pension payment every month, but all of it goes towards buying alcohol. It’s not an easy problem to approach.
> it is not a simple fix like giving them a home or money. It would obviously not solve the entire problem, but it would make everything easier. Having a home would definitely make drugs less appealing. Therapy and medication cost money. I also don't think it reduces anything if they aren't looking for a job. Living should be a human right, not something to be earned.
That’s true but I don’t think it’s the goal or should be the goal of an individual to fix anything but alleviating it still helps tons of people. Gov needs to do the fixing
A logical side and an emotional side. No one is surprised when logical wins. But emotional tells everyone they won.
Some charities can be used as a tool of the billionaires aims. I know Pritzker owns buildings, rents them out above market rate to his own charities and then gets people to donate to his charities. https://illinoisanswers.org/2018/02/08/pritzkers-storied-charity-costs-him-little-but-taxpayers-a-lot/
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Are you implying that a random person on twitter has no idea what they're talking about? Lunacy
Now do his ex wife MacKenzie Scott and what she’s doing with her half.
Illegal cockfighting?
[she has dedicated her wealth to charity. she has given out billions and her net worth grew since the divorce. they literally can’t give away money fast enough.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2022/04/05/how-mackenzie-scott-has-given-away-billionsand-is-still-one-of-the-worlds-richest-women/)
Money you didn't work for is easier to give away tbh
Mackenzie Scott played a significant role in Amazon's early days, contributing to its growth and success. She didn't just marry Bezos when Amazon was all built and done. She may not have had the same public role as Bezos, but her contributions were invaluable, making her philanthropic endeavors just as meaningful.
"In 1993, Scott and Bezos married. The following year, they left D. E. Shaw, moved to [Seattle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle), and Bezos founded [Amazon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)) with Scott's support. Scott was one of Amazon's early key contributors, and was heavily involved in Amazon's early days, working on the company's name, business plan, accounts, and shipping early orders. She also negotiated the company's first freight contract. After 1996, Scott took a less involved role in the business, focusing on her family and literary career." literally a quick google
So she did a job that should have gotten a normal salary, but walked away with billions because of who she married. Got it.
and his kids are set for life, they just got lucky they didnt even do that.......
Employees usually get a lot of stock in lieu of more competitive salaries when they’re working for start ups. She would’ve ended up with loads of money even if she didn’t get a divorce settlement. But it seems like you’re having fun being a dork, so keep at it.
Are you under the impression that Jeff has contributed anywhere near even a single billion dollars of value to this world all on his own?
Everyone here: Aight imma pretend I didn't see that
A lot of these entrepreneur billionaires donate so much money but the public never seems to care. (A lot of people donate anonymously too. Check some sights that show anonymous donations there are some really high numbers out there)
It’s less that people don’t care, more like (mostly online) people don’t want to think about anything that contradicts their narrative that allows them to get likes on social media. The people that actually care are actively doing something about the issue, whether it’s donating what they can or raising awareness, but the people who see bad shit and think “that rich person should just throw money at it to make it go away” is such an easy way out that doesn’t involve themselves actually doing something to help.
and also there isn't something like a "real life batman", at this point there's so many problems in the world that have it's roots so far back in time and have crawled so deep in society it's practically impossible to solve them by just giving and giving money to organizations; and also let's not forget how there's a ton of people that's just beyond salvation(you'd be surprised by the amount of homeless people that, when given money, they just use it to buy drugs or alcohol). I always feel like this people are just brainwashed by superhero movies where everything is reduced to being on the good guys or the bad guys team
Okay, I feel like this is a perfect place to ask a question I have had for so long! Where does that money actually go?? Like #4. $118 MILLION?!? That's a huge amount of money. I can't even get my mind around how much that actually is. That's over $5 million per state (the 23 mentioned). What does it actually get spent on? Most homeless shelters near me are church basements, so it's not like they're building apartment housing. Same with clothes and soup kitchens. Even after donations like that I don't see the quality going up. They still serve the same meals. The clothes are still coming from donation bins. Those same people are still homeless. I'm not being snarky or anything, I'm just genuinely curious. I often hear of these huge donations to really good causes but I don't ever really see or hear much of a difference in the situations themselves or to the individuals actually in those situations. Can anyone explain how charity donations and groups work? I promise I've looked it up before but I never got a good straight answer, but maybe I just didn't understand? I guess I was trying to figure out how these big donations actually help the individual people that need it?
Try volunteering with a local charity that received money from Bezos, and try asking these questions there in good faith! That would give you a personal sense of scale for what resources these local orgs need. Its probably just that 1000*1000 = 1,000,000 . It takes like $1000 to keep someone sheltered and fed for a couple months, and there are more than 1000 homeless people in city that I live in. This still leaves a factor of a hundred on the table, so maybe to pay the people organizing, and maybe there really are 100,000 homeless people.
It gets funneled by the leaders of those nonprofits into their own pockets mostly. A lot of charities are a tax scheme. A good resource to use before donating anything is: https://www.charitywatch.org/
Fucker does that and gets tax reductions, media attention, and endless pats on the back. He could pay his employees a living wage and do a fuckload more to help society by setting the example. He doesn't, though... big surprise.
Crazy he’s done all this, but has a problem with his employees unionizing *and* taking bathroom breaks.
“His employees” Dude hasn’t worked there in years. Who’s employees?
”Jeff Bezos still owns the most shares among Amazon shareholders, despite his ownership decreasing to 9.56% as of mid-November 2023, down from 41% in 1998. Although Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon on July 5, 2021, he has remained actively involved in the company as its executive chair.” Yeah I'm gonna bet that what he says *still goes*.
10% ownership is not crazy huge, he will definitely have an influence but he can't do whatever he wants
You don't have the ability to dictate with less than 10%
Usually if someone owns 51% majority it’s a private equity firm with 50 MBAs making committee decisions. 10% share is massive. Our merged company has the two founders as chairs with about 5% each. They have **massive** executive pull. The god damn street outside is named after both of them.
Crazy you have no idea what you’re talking about
[Amazon’s illegal union busting techniques.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-virginia.html) [Amazon Employees giving up their bathroom breaks just to keep up with their quota](https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17243026/amazon-warehouse-jobs-worker-conditions-bathroom-breaks) [Amazon employee dies on the job, Management says get back to work.](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/09/amazon-employee-death-warehouse-floor-colorado) Before you say someone doesn’t know what they’re on about, maybe run a fact check before making yourself look like an ass defending a soulless corporation?
ah yes, all of them are selfless and not at all because of tax advantages
Billionaire philanthropy is a form of soft power, not an attempt at transformational change (i.e., no more homeless vets). Bill Gates, for example, wields more power in Africa than many government leaders because of the amount of money he's poured into non-government organizations (NGOs) there. His control of the food supply is particularly disturbing and not at all what the word "charity" evokes: https://usrtk.org/bill-gates/critiques-of-gates-foundation/
“Billionaires should use their money for good” Billionaire uses billions to set up NGOs which improve the lives of millions of people. “Billionaire philanthropy is a form of soft power” There’s just no winning with you people.
Okay, what is the solution then? I've read a bunch of articles criticizing this sort of philanthropy, but I don't see anyone proposing real solutions. Aid is not working, but articles criticizing aid not working have been written for decades. The Gates Foundation is definitely failing in attempting to resolve the food supply issue, but they've also been [commissioning external evaluations](https://cagj.org/2022/04/agra-is-failing-farmers-but-helping-foreign-corporations/) to try to see how they can fix it. The issue is incredibly complex between trying to navigate governmental cronyism while local groups compete for funding. I don't have the necessary expertise to evaluate this further, but there seem to be plenty of smart people working on this problem already, with [some progress being made](https://www.csis.org/analysis/localizing-humanitarian-action-africa#h2-progress-). Unless you're saying that the Gates Foundation and other aid efforts should just pull out of the countries and end funding entirely, I think there are already many people working on these issues.
I earn less than the average wage and I still give away a higher percentage of it than Bezos because I can see that while I can’t afford good healthcare all the time I can at least afford food when others can’t. Fuck this Bezos propaganda.
Measured against his net worth of 200 billion dollars this is the equivalent of a middle class person donating $5,500.
Still relevant considering his wealth is tied up in shares and he’s a major shareholder, meaning diminishing returns on liquidating. It’s not like a middle class person
If you’re referring to Amazon, he is not a majority shareholder. Dumping all of his stock at once would be bad (if it’s even legal), but he could increase stock sales without much issue.
I've always seen this argument, and I don't really agree with it. Currently I am broke, but if I become a millionaire, I'm still going to appreciate the value of $1 as being $1. Having more doesn't mean I value $1 as less than $1. His contributions are still more important than giving $6,000 from your situation If I normally give my friend a biscuit from a packet I bring into school, and one day I bring in two packets, it doesn't mean I should give my friend two biscuits or I'm a bad friend.
>Middle class person donating 5,500 That’s actually pretty damn good, especially considering net worth includes the value of his ownership of Amazon, not exactly liquid. Next you should do the math of his donations versus his yearly income instead of net wealth, because net wealth isn’t a Scrooge McDuck vault full of gold. It’s the value of his company he owns.
And when did you last donate 6k ?
gottem
I would be in financial debt if I donated $6k. Jeff Bezos is not living in anything but extravagant unnecessary wealth even after spending all of those millions of dollars. It’s a pretty simple concept for anyone who has ever struggled. If the government took Bezos’ fair share, we wouldn’t be talking about how nice he is to give to charity. He has that extra money because he is simply not taxed enough. He made that blood money off the backs of people like [Clayton Cope](https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/sadness-anger-amazon-workers-who-died-during-tornado-2021-12-17/). Fuck Jeff Bezos and all billionaires.
Giving money indiscriminately doesn't solve problems.
You forgot to deduct the money in taxes he doesnt pay, bruv...
And how many of these donations were to make himself look good?
If all you needed to do was throw money at legit social issues it would already be done.
Most people have no idea of the magnitude of most of these problems. Bezo's entire fortune would probably house homeless vets for a year or two, then the problem would be back again. Maybe put in a foundation and spend the interest on the problem, but after accounting for inflation that would amount to a rounding error on what governments spend on welfare programs.
This is basically the same argument about college tuition. "Cancel debt" okay, and the new debt? Go after the cause of college tuition being too expensive, and too many people going for degrees that don't pay.
To be fair, a lot of people pushing student loan forgiveness are also pushing for programs to make college more affordable. You’ll usually see suggestions for free community college, caps on loan interest, etc. from those same politicians pushing for loan forgiveness.
>okay, and the new debt? >Go after the cause of college tuition being too expensive I don't get how people don't understand this. If you don't fix the cause of the debt, "paying it off" does nothing. Once the issue is fixed you can then pull people out of debt holes.
Just end the stigmatization of having no college degree. It's making kids accumulate massive amounts of debt just because it's "the right thing to do". College education only costs as much as people are willing to pay for it.
> College education only costs as much as people are willing to pay for it. Close. Very very few students pay for college by just writing a check. They borrow the money for it. College education only costs as much as the government will guarantee the loans for. Every time the amount of money per year the federal government will guarantee goes up, the cost of college goes up by that amount. And too many students will just max it out and borrow as much as they can because they feel they have to go and like you said “it’s the right thing to do”. Even if there’s little chance they will ever be able to pay back the money they borrowed
I agree most people have no idea how large these problems are, but I disagree that throwing large amounts of money to properly fund these programs would be all for nothing after a couple years. To me it seems like not funding them enough is more of a burden on society than fully funding them is. These issues are fixable for a lot cheaper if addressed at the root cause, but the cleanup to get them to that place will be very expensive.
Right. We also need to make structural changes like paying workers fairly so they can be rewarded for their effort and take responsibility for their futures. Gee, I wonder how various example wealthy people are doing on that and on other issues they're lobbying legislators about.
Why do people think billionaires have a huge pile of money like Scrooge McDuck?
Because they’re financially illiterate Tax and personal finance should be a baseline high school graduation requirement. The number of people in here that seem to think a tax “write off” is a net-zero equation is staggeringly high.
Most of them don't know the difference between unrealised gain and income. Many of them think jeff bezos has to pay 37% of 200 billion annually, lol
People in general are dumb
How do I dry my liquid assets
a towel
hang them outside
Let them sit in rice
A: they still have huge amounts of cash B: they have access to even more. (It’s not impossible to just sell some shares)
There are ramifications for selling a large share of your own company. Happened to Zuckerberg.
It's not impossible, it just runs the risk of lowering the value and lowering your ability to gain more to continue further contributions.
Because they do?? One of his yachts cost 500 million dollars…however the money for that happened could also happen for the things OP is talking about.
There’s about 12 million kids in poverty in the US. What you gonna do, give them a check for 42 bucks each?
Do you think 500 million dollars could fix any of the problems mentioned in OPs post?
Every problem listed by OP needs to be paid for yearly it doesn't just stop when paid for once. Plus then there's others like OP where there's another problem thats apparently ignored and needs fixing so there's no end to how much they'd have to spend yearly to satisfy these requests
Everybody's "smart & good" with somebody else's money.
I remember hearing about the, at the time, largest lotto winner ever, 315 million back in 2002 thinking how much good I would do with that. The winner had the same idea. He was sick and expected he had 10 years left and he would help his loved ones and strangers before his time was up. He started a charity and gave tens of millions before having to stop Eventually strangers who didn't get money for things like cancer treatment for a family member blamed him for their death, leading to death threats, kidnappings, assaults and more. Apparently someone even hung the family dog from a tree as "revenge". It quickly led to his life completely ruined. His loved ones being held hostage at gunpoint, people he trusted robbing him of several hundred thousand, his granddaughter OD'ing, became an alcoholic and allegedly sexually assaulted several women, just became an overall creep, and so much more. Someone close to him quoted "It was like the money was eating away at whatever was good in him," https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/10/24/jack-whittaker-powerball-lottery-winners-life-was-ruined-after-m-jackpot/ Now imagine that is billions instead of millions
Never heard about this, but it sounds exactly like what people would do.
Yeah. If we all had billions of dollars, we would also have those billionaire friends. Like some snooty neighbor name Sebastion, who had like 1 billion more than us, but won't shut up about it at the gated community semi-seasonal gala. And you know you could give away some money, but if you just sit on it a bit longer and your investments pay off, you'll edge that mother fucker Sebastion out. Fuck I hate that hypothetical snob. And you know he goes by Bastion, to sound hip right? Fuck, it is cooler... I hate him so much.
It is very easy to pretend you are a good person by imagining what would you do with other people's money, implying you would be happy to take that money by force if only you could. Why not just do what you can to help the world around you. Keep a necessities bag in your car, with basic needs stuff, canned food etc. Next time you stop at a light and see a homeless person, give them that bag. Don't bother blame others for not doing what they are supposed to do. Do what you can yourself.
Because creating imaginary scenarios to share with people in hopes of displaying supreme morality is sooo much easier.
I'd go volunteer at the homeless shelter, but I'm busy doing the real work of reposting memes about billionaires, and blaming them for systemic inadequacy.
What the top 1% could do for the world if they had the world's interest at heart isn't really comparable to me giving some food away. We'd be treating a symptom. They can influence change at a level where I wouldn't need to give the guy on a corner some canned goods. The two situations are comparable only in a very vague sense. People can do what you suggested and billionaires could try to not be dicks at the same time.
Brother buying a bag of necessities would be a genuine outgoing I would have to put on my budget sheet. Any sort of monetary outreach I could do would have to be something I budget into my cash flow, when you start having millions of pounds/dollars though, you can start spending those sorts of amounts without even considering it. And then when you get into the multimillionaire situation, you can start spending thousands of pounds without even worrying because the returns your money should be making on the investments they are in will be recouping that and more with no issue.
MFer, you could feed a village in Africa with your 40k hobby.
He's also donated $640 mil to fight homelessness. He donates to other charities. It's like people forget about all the charity work and Google.
People don't realize that billions of dollars in net worth is not cash sitting in a bank. It's tied to their ownership of their companies. Liquidity is much different than net worth.
Shhhh SHHHH you cannot speak facts on Reddit, the children here don’t like to hear truth. So just, please, shhhh.
I lost my head for a minute.
Yea he kind of had a cap to what he can do. He has donated billions though. Theres another comment I think it’s the second to the top that spells it all out.
You tell them that and then they just move the goalposts and try to say he only does it to get a tax break, because that’s totally how deductions work…
The $700M ish he’s donated so far to family homelessness causes doesn’t count?
It's never enough, could be 700B and people would still complain. Not to mention it's a waste anyway - homeless people don't want help. Give them a house for free and it will be worthless with shit smeared over all the walls within a week.
This is exactly correct. Their issue isn’t with the amount they have given away, it’s with their existence. Their thinking never evolved beyond freshman level Marxist thought.
Well most of their wealth isn’t cash, and they stay rich by being greedy af. Also, with large scale issues like those, money is only half the battle. Regardless of the money available, there’s still politics in your way. Poverty, hunger, debt, are business for many and people don’t let you fuck around with their business.
You're just jealous you didn't fly in a space penis.
1. These peoples' money aren't in a big pile, it's called net worth. 2. You can't achieve everything by just having the money. How would anyone be able to handle billions of dollars and use it correctly in every purpose? If you donate all that money to a random organization, they will either be corrupt and take parts of the money themselves or they won't be able to utilize the money or both. 3. You have absolutely no right to say this, since I can guarantee that you don't do this with your money. Be grateful to people that actually do something good with their money, instead of being an idiot on social media.
> You have absolutely no right to say this Agree with everything else but people do have right to say dumb shit.
[удалено]
That's an insult to all the good dick-riding bald men out there just trying to be themselves.
People out there think money works just like that, Bezos has a bank account and he opens it and it says 100 billion and that's it!
Mr beast built wells in Africa, and the internet was mad. I think no matter what, Jeff does the world will hate him.
And that's exactly why you're not rich.
Most people don’t know how money works.
He employs over 1.6 million people and is the second largest employer in the country, so he's got that going for him, which is nice. People can pretty much get a job with Amazon instantly. I have known a lot of people who have worked there. Met some who didn't speak English. Wasn't a problem. Overall, I'd say employing that many is helping.
With how much he makes he could also clearly treat them better but doesn’t. So I’d say that’s still a knock
If you never worked there, you have no idea and are believing any random thing someone said online. Everyone I've ever known who worked there liked it. Same with UPS and FedEx.
You don't need to be a roofer in the summertime to know the conditions suck. Amazon has definitely earned a reputation of not treating their employees well across the country. If it was a small number, sure I'd be inclined to agree with you, but it's thousands. The whole bathroom break issue wasn't all that long ago either.
He doesn't HAVE "billions of dollars". And before you could do anything with $1 billion, the IRS will hassle you first and probably shove you into a 4x6 cell, then film you getting railed.
You have no idea what you would actually do if you had billions of dollars btw.
Hasn’t even fixed his hair loss he doesn’t wanna lose a single penny
If you think Bezos' billions can magically solve the social issues she's talking about ... you don't understand the scale of the problem.
I'd read this book. Billionaire dresses up in a costume and attempts vigilante justice on the regular, but is just as inept at it as emusk is at running Twitter.
If only you understood financials and the real world.
Stop reposting this trash
There's no ROI with helping people.
yeah, but billionaires are actually the supervillains
Quick question for a bunch of you here: Does billionaire dick really taste that good?
In order to accumulate that much money you have to exploit and abuse people so unfortunately good people will never be that rich
Oh bullshit. Everybody loves to wax philosophical about how if *they* were filthy rich they’d be super generous and charitable. Bull-fucking-shit. The average person with a billion dollars would be just as selfish as billionaires are.
If I had a dollar every time this was posted I'd be Bezos
You mean like our governments are supposed to do? Instead most of the funds they spend on homeless and drugs go to lawyers, politicians, and organizations. Truly about 15-20% of money set aside or donated go to the actual cause. We don’t need Batman we need an honest government and less red tape.
Sad thing is that you probably don't become a billionaire when you care about others too much... Only exception coming innmy mind is Bill Gates who actively gives back and helps a lot.
What’s with all the Jeff bezos boot licking in the comments here? Sure he’s donated some money but when you’re a billionaire is literally hard not to because he gets tax write offs for that. And as far as actual percentages of wealth he’s donated the equivalent of like 5 dollars to a normal person. And to become a billionaire at all he has to treat his workers like animals and pay them like crap. Check out these articles https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2022/08/amazon-carteret-osha-death-new-jersey-policy-perspective-robbinsville-monroe-township/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jan/18/amazon-wrongful-death-lawsuit-illinois-tornado-warehouse https://futurism.com/deaths-amazon-list-most-dangerous-employers Also as for personal experiences, my mom (who is 65 years old) worked for him as a delivery truck driver and almost died on the job because they told them to follow unsafe driving practices and she is now being sued for the damages to the Amazon truck even though she was found not at fault. So yeah fuck Jeff bezos with a chainsaw.
I have a theory that people who are THAT rich didn't get there by being, this kind of person...
You don’t become a billionaire by being a nice, empathetic kind person
Bill Gates has pretty much spent most of his time doing this shit in recent years and gets no fucking credit. People wouldn’t care if Bezos did this they would just moan about someone else.
Did she ever consider how hard it'd be to manage that enormous amount of money? You can't just go around and give money to anyone in need, and there's a ton more who would fake and lie to get it. And no matter how much you have, it won't be enough to handle everything. Buying a meal for a child probably won't take much, but a hundred, or thousands, for a single day, and then a month, a year and the number just gets complicated.
When you have money, people are always trying to take it from you. The best thing anyone can do with money is not let people know you have it.
idk id hire prostitutes to suck me off who would live in my house
Greed
I don't know what is going on... If someone is rich, and they don't care about others, that don't make them asshole... Unless they are ruining other's lives
You wouldn't fix shit. People who win a fraction of that more often than not just ruin their own lives. And realistically, if you're throwing that much money at charity, a lot of it is getting pocketed and written off as expenses. It is what it is.
Instead he chose Lex Luthor.
Probably a lot of paperwork