Love how people are confusing salaries or yearly income to net worth.
Net worth is the total accumulated value of all the stuff you own (value of assets minus the liabilities) - houses, cars, investments, etc. That is massively different than what you are getting paid each year which is what a lot of people here are using as a metric.
It isn’t out of the question for someone to make “only” $100 or 200k/year and be considered a “millionaire” by most people’s definition. They might be older and have paid off their house. That house might be worth $500k and all the other stuff they own is a few hundred thousand more. Plus maybe $100k in some investment portfolio. Thus making them technically a millionaire. There are a lot more millionaires out there than people realize, including some people here or their parents or maybe grand parents.
That’s not to take away from the argument that billionaires have too much money, but at least phrase the movement correctly. Stop equating someone making $50k/year with someone’s who’s assets are worth $1B. That’s comparing apples to oranges and not just by the sheer difference in the numbers either.
Just for context, if you made 100k a year, an extremely enviable salary, and saved every penny somehow, you’d be a billionaire in exactly TEN THOUSAND YEARS.
No one can earn a billion dollars through honest labor and the sweat of their brow. It must be exploited out of others. It must be stolen. You cannot possess a billion dollars and be a decent human being. For any good you do, you can’t approach the harm you’ve already inflicted upon others in the name of insatiable greed.
Oh I’m sorry, they’ve used their wealth to warp the culture and language to their benefit, so greed doesn’t exist anymore. I meant “rational self-interest.” also we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Buddy it ain’t stealing if we keep using the product and indirectly (directly) supporting the billionaires exploiting others.
EDIT: this comment was only directed at people who will see this kind of thing and not care. To those who don’t believe you have a choice in dropping Facebook because of life events. I get it. Most people do business through Facebook even.
The problem is that Facebook has a hold on the market. I do understand this but the truth of the matter is if we could get people to stop supporting Facebook then they wouldn’t make the money users keep fueling them with. It isn’t your fault Facebook is a power house of social media. I don’t blame consumers but was stating Facebook will continue to hold this market until consumers care.
I also do personally believe you can let go of Facebook or mitigate its use and I know this is possible because I do this myself. Yes, the guy who made the comment about supporting Facebook is using Facebook but only when necessary.
If you would like some tips and person tricks on how to mitigate your use then message me. I have just custom tailored my experience to use Facebook less and only for essential need, what little it provides.
My problem with using the word, “stolen.” Is that stealing is usually being done without our notice. It isn’t stealing if you have been caught multiple times and no one cares. At that point it’s just using.
I think you underestimate the propaganda influence they have. I don’t consider it voluntary by most, any more than I blame a North Korean citizen for hating the west as they’ve been indoctrinated to do, it’s the fault of the power above them.
The power above us isn’t our purchased government, it’s capital. And it propagandizes us to defend this system from Kindergarten to colleges of economics to the for profit news they own. And if that doesn’t work, they control the means of state violence through the government and both major parties they fully own and control to defend their profits and interests against the peasants. We aren’t approaching Orwellian society, we’ve surpassed it. Legions of peasants advocate directly against their own interests because thats what all of us are taught to do, you have to buck that pressure to even truly open your eyes and know whats going on.
Problem is that it’s not against the interest of the peasants.
Everybody knows how poor life can be in the rest of the world. Once you go human decency you want to share with everybody. You may even care about animals.
any more than I blame a North Korean citizen for hating the west as they’ve been indoctrinated to do
I assure you that North Koreans don’t need to be indoctrinated in order to hate the west. The genocide committed upon them by America was enough to do the job. But don’t take my word for it, read what USAF General Curtis LeMay, who was also head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, had to say on the matter.
We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too.… Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?
I was off Facebook for years, and was never a heavy user, but I had to get back on because the school my daughter goes to sends out so many notifications that way.
Facebook is very ingrained in how business and groups interact these days, what’s an individual to do? Disconnect from the world and miss important school notifications, among other things?
Plus the “stealing” isn’t just from people using the platform, it’s also in wages and benefits for employees. Why aren’t they getting a bigger share of those profits they worked to produce?
You forget the impact of compound interest. If you invested 1 dollar at 1% interest, you would have a billion dollars in just over 2000 years. So these comparisons based on income are not useful.
🤔 I don’t necessarily believe that. An independent creator of a blockbuster franchise could in principle become a billionaire ethically. Like J.K. Rowling; she’s estimated to have upwards of a $1.2 billion net worth. (say what you will about her) (I don’t like her either but facts are facts)
And here’s the problem I have with that: not all labor is exploitative. No matter what economy we have, there would still be laborers printing the book, binding it, cutting down the trees and making the paper, etc.
Even if they’re not making an even split of company profits, some worker somewhere is happy with what they’re getting.
And regardless of economy, some worker will be unhappy working somewhere, feel they’re not getting their fair share, etc.
That doesn’t change simply because we switch from capitalism to some other system.
The only fair way for that book to be made from the implications given is if all of the labor is automated, but at the end of the day a human being would have to do some work somewhere no matter how many levels of automation redundancy you have, so how is he not implying being expected to do anything is the problem, and using the blatant shitty behavior of the rich as a smokescreen for that?
We could live in a Jetsonian paradise where all he’d have to do is push a few buttons once a day and he’d still complain.
I have done things that are hard work for less compensation than it deserves and been happy to give it freely (ie charity, volunteering), but that doesn’t mean we can’t examine the power structure, even if the plurality of people are happy inside it.
But it’s not the author exploiting publishing companies. It’s the execs of those companies exploiting their own workers. The publishing companies make excellent money (and same for paper creators, etc). Just it disproportionately goes to execs and possibly shareholders, not workers.
of course you can slice it any way you like. I’m not saying no one should be an author, but I am saying billionaires aren’t made without exploitation somewhere
I work 7 days a week and my wife works full time to get that $100k/year and it took us years to get where we are in our careers. $1million in assets is still so far away. It’s such an incredible amount of money and Zuckerberg and friends have thousands of times that much money. It’s just so crazy to think about.
Is there a single impressive philanthropic feat that has been achieved by any of these billionaires?
If I had access to hundreds of billions and I wasn’t able to solve a single meaningful welfare issue for even a single country in the world in my own lifetime, I would consider that abject failure.
Bill Gates has done significant good fighting disease. Still something that should’ve been decided by society, not a single person, but credit where credit is due.
Unfortunately anti vaxxers have destroyed a lot of that legacy anyway.
Bill Gates has done significant good fighting disease.
No, he got in the way of progress for the sake of his own profit. The scientists that made the covid vaccine wanted it to be open source so any country could make their own, but he forced the company to patent it instead.
He’s also been funding anti-scientific propaganda to convince people that his anti-solutions will solve the climate crisis. His foundation also regularly invests in ventures that pollute the Global South.
He’s not perfect, and your examples show why these sorts of decisions on spending and priority shouldn’t be in the hands of a single person who isn’t even an expert in diseases.
It’s still worth acknowledging that he did plenty to help with polio and malaria, even if it could’ve been done better by another method.
The real obstacle wasn’t patents, it was manufacturing capability. India early on didn’t even let US vaccines in when offered them because they insisted they had to go through their own regulatory and testing process first.
Most people say Bill Gates but it reminds me of the classic joke:
The woman you know as your grandmother is not my mother. That’s an elderly woman now trying to get into heaven
Bill Gates acted identically to Zuckerberg and Musk and every other hated billionare back in the 90s. There was a time Micro$oft was always written with the dollar sign. There was a time a young smug grinning Gates was posted everywhere as the poster child for rich assholes. The Microsoft board of directors did the smart move and removed Gates from management and then he quietly retired. He’s had an Ebenezer Scrooge moment and has spent the last decade trying to buy his way into people’s good graces.
It’s great that Gates is helping people, but I don’t think we should all have to suffer under a power hungry cut throat CEO and hope one day they have a change of heart.
He forced the covid vaccine to go private with Moderna. Micro$oft was cute and all but these pharmaceutical companies have killed and are killing hundreds of thousands simply by charging so much for the cure.
Capitalists actually keep the developing world from fully developing. On purpose. And NGO Aid has been proven to stagnage rather than assist countries that are constantly receiving it, such as Haiti. Yeah I would consider that failure, too. But they certainly wouldn’t. And perhaps, with that many eyes in you, it might actually be harder to get things done that go against the interests of other rich and powerful people.
What are you solving with money alone? We need intent before money. Globally we lack intent, even if some rich guy spends some money, we need to locate human resources. That doesn’t mean I can disregard philanthropy. That alone doesn’t solve things
Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Vanderbilt University and Duke University. John D. Rockefeller funded the University of Chicago
Denny Sanford, of Sanford Health, has donated about $1.5 billion to healthcare.
I mean, hate on him if you want, but this isn’t really hypocritical. He doesn’t take a salary, his entire fortune is from Meta stock he owns, and he has a sort of Bill Gates thing going on where he plans to donate the majority of his Meta stock wealth through his own foundation. From what I’ve heard they’ve funded some serious medical advancements and have plans to bring more AI to the space.
I don’t think billionaires should exist either, but it’s not like he can just give it all away without losing control of his company.
I'm sure he's self aware enough to know he doesn't deserve it. I think there's very few people that believe that there exists a meritocratic place in this earth and Zuck doesn't strike me as the type to believe he was chosen by God.
I get the impression plenty of these ultra-rich techbros come to believe that they’re there by merit. They don’t see all the luck that went into their riches, and they habitually take credit for the work done by those beneath them. People like Bezos and Musk may genuinely believe they’re better (smarter, more insightful, more capable) than others. I expect many ultra-rich CEOs get like that, not just in tech companies. And certainly many of those investors who do nothing but mess around with the stock market think they’re more brilliant than everyone who doesn’t.
As someone who works in tech any co-founder who gets anywhere abso-fucking-lutely believes their shit smells different. They wrap it up in all of this colorful language about making a difference and helping people and “impact,” but at the end of the day they’re there to exploit you and your coworkers to make millions
Sounds like he’s been humbled by the Metaverse’s failure. Big money also means big losses one day.
Jeff Bezos recently pledged to donate about $124b for charity and fighting climate change. It really seems like these billionaires have been hit by 3 ghosts.
Still eat the rich, but I guess there’s been some good news from them.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos plans to give away the majority of his $124 billion net worth during his lifetime, telling CNN in an exclusive interview he will devote the bulk of his wealth to fighting climate change and supporting people who can unify humanity in the face of deep social and political divisions.
Though Bezos’ vow was light on specifics, this marks the first time he has announced that he plans to give away most of his money. Critics have chided Bezos for not signing the Giving Pledge, a promise by hundreds of the world’s richest people to donate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes.
Yeah, the wealthy “giving it all away” is always a bullshit scheme in some way. If they really felt that way, they would have shared the profits with those who helped create them. This sort of wealth only happens in literally one situation: greed overcomes compassion for others.
These schemes usually fall into one of three categories:
I fucking hate my kids and don’t have anyone I think actually deserves this money, so I’m giving it to some random charities of my choosing when I die because I know damn well I can’t spend it all and I have to do something with it
I’m just putting it all into a charitable trust that I still have full control over and likely won’t spend much out of it, unless it benefits me personally
Straight up bullshit PR campaign about a future promise that is not binding
Quite often, it’s a combination of 1 and 2, locking up the money for a loooong time and only to be used for a specific purpose.
Charitable trusts have to be donated to charity. You can’t pull the money back out. It’s like giving it away that year.
Yeah, a ton of things can be a “charity”. You can donate the money to your friends at a church or a clubhouse for your friends and still have it be a “charity”.
I think we’re saying the same thing, but it’s definitely not like giving it to charity that year. They are irrevocable trusts so you can’t take the money back from it, but the majority money doesn’t immediately have to go anywhere.
And even when money does flow out (beyond admin/establishment costs), there are TONS of creative ways to use it for personal benefit.
See Rolex and Hershey for two of the biggest examples. Or giant charity galas.
Many ways to use the funds for “non-profit” entertainment. Plenty of ways to get kickbacks from “charitable” donations. Non-profit status is not that high of a hurdle.
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