[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8760199/gates-foundation-criti...
> "The Gates Foundation has played an extremely negative role in efforts to develop replacements for strong patent rights and high drug prices," James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International and a critic of the foundation, writes on his blog. Or as McGoey put it: "There’s immense concern surrounding the Gates Foundation’s position on intellectual property rights, and whether this major global health player is cognizant enough to ensure property rights are fair for citizens in wealthy and poor nations."
[2] https://theintercept.com/2016/11/04/koch-senate-hawks/
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisroberts/2021/01/12/the-las...
Further to the point, the personalities and temperaments of people is only weakly correlated with their moral quality, which is what you’re talking about when you talk about “doing good”. For example, many well meaning people who “like to do good” nonetheless participate in factory farming, which is a moral atrocity that subjects tens of billions of animals to suffering and death per year. If you don’t like the animal rights example, take the example of all the “like to do-gooders” who supported Jim Crow.
Democratic states aren't perfect, but at least there are fail safes against the wrong people having power at the wrong time. The people supposedly all collectively own the wealth and direction of a state, so a single person can never be that powerful. Authoritarianism or dictatorships will always feel appealing in the face of dysfunctional governments, because there is always someone who is actually good at they do, and effects real change (if you disregard all the usual xenophobia/populism/oppression). In this case, you can see people saying "government is not doing anything about this, so why shouldn't these people fix it". Power eventually corrupts, if not the person then its descendants, at some point it goes terribly wrong and itends up tearing a society apart. This has happened pretty much everywhere.
Also the level of wealth some people are accumulating right now is absolutely unheard of in history. You can now "easily" have a business that reaches billions of people from your basement. If this exponential accumulation of wealth continues, government as we know it will become obsolete, and democracy will stop functioning because some people just have too much lobbying power.
If Zuckerberg cared about doing good instead of accumulating money and power he would have made a few different decision in the past.
Because Zuck's version of 'good' includes building a platform optimized exactly for fomenting discord and hatred in order to create ad revenue and bring in eye balls and clicks. It's a part of the survielence economy and has been weaponized in countless ways, Zuck may not be the one building it any more, he has many of you do that for him.
But it stands to reason that of those 3 you listed you have a very clear 'orge' in the bunch.
What good has he done for Society over all exactly?
Even with unfathomable wealth all he seems to be responsible for is creating a greater divide and discord amongst people and that help promote absurd conspiracies and crate time-wasting habits especially so in developing countries as his platform is what most associate with what the 'internet' as they cannot afford to browse anything else once they have access to it via FB enabled smart phones.
I'm glad SpaceX had his satellite blow up on the launch pad!
God only knows what horrible things would be possible had it actually made it into orbit.
As for Mark Cuban, I'm on the fence but his talk and backing of Andrew Yang makes me think he isn't an ogre, but Zuckerburg certainly is, willing or not at this point.
Some like to be told they are doing good.
Subtle difference with big ramifications.
You arrange for a tire place to come and replace all the tires. But you leave an anonymous note. You have done good, and seek no reward.
Alternate.
You show up with a camera crew and surprise the person by giving them tires. Everyone glorifies you for your kindness.
End result is the same. Person in need has tires. Yeah.
One is a person helping others. One is helping others to help themselves to look good.
Both are accomplishing good. There maybe overlap in motive.
Both people giving have earned a reward. One of the earth, recognition and status.
The others reward is emotional and or spiritual.
Yes, a lot of people like to do good.
On the other hand, we've seen from Zuckerberg specifically - not a generic random person - these power moves for as long as he's been on the radar. If you believe Zuckerberg is motivated by wanting to do good, you haven't been paying attention.
Trump and his supporters probably believed what he did was for the good, and many of us quite strongly disagrees.
Ask any kid what they want to be when they grow up and no one will say "I want to become a scary ogre".
I want to do good, and most likely you want too. Zuckerberg and Musk and Cuban, apart from their money, are people like me and you. They don't wake up in the morning and think "how can I be a scary ogre today". They want to do good, and they happen to have the money to do it.
Why is this miserable?