From what I observe, his personal motivation really does seem to be “build the most powerful social media company” and not “accumulate as much personal wealth as possible”. I think the VR bet is a good example of that - any sane CEO trying to maximize shareholder value would have scrapped it long ago.
I’m not saying Mark is a great person, far from it, but I think it’s worth scrutinizing how billionaires got in their positions. There’s a lot amount of difference, in my mind, between Bill Gates and John Bogle.
This is a systemic failure to be sure, but a failure nonetheless. The end result is these people ending up with massive surpluses of resources and power that others desperately need, simply because they have accumulated a larger amount of "money" from the luck of their circumstances.
In the old days, these failures were mediated by debt jubilees, potlatches and such. More recently, we've moved on to wealth taxes, although these are a poor shadow of what we had before to ensure a minimum level of equality in a society.
I totally get it if the donations aren't actually doing anything good, but most EA donations go to global health initiatives that save lives, in quite large numbers (I think SBFs did not, however).
Edit: I would also get it if donations were being used as an anti-tax argument, but I don't see that being the case? I've never seen any billionaire say their donations should make them exempt from taxes. I believe eg. Gates and Buffet both favour higher taxes for the rich (publicly, at least). Sure there are anti-tax billionaires, and billionaires who make large charitable donations, but I'd guess the correlation between the two things was actually negative.
In the early days, people who became too wealthy were killed by the rest of the villagers. Potlatches were a natural response to this because equalizing society reduced the resentment and also raised the prestige of the givers. Charity giving is the modern equivalent of this, but in a severely watered down form (they still get to spend their entire lives in unfathomable wealth).
With 2 million USD, you can dump it into safe, passive investment vehicles and life comfortably off the proceeds for the rest of your life. Anything more than that is simply avarice, and needs to be discouraged in order to mitigate the steady slide into extreme inequality that comes as a natural consequence of unequal luck or opportunity.
Can you make the case for me that eg. 250k preventable deaths is a better outcome than accepting a billion dollar donation from a very rich person?
Then there's the "what's mine is mine" argument, that whatever was acquired legally is by rights yours and nobody can say otherwise. In America, this philosophy is very prevalent.
> Can you make the case for me that eg. 250k preventable deaths is a better outcome than letting somebody donate a billion dollars?
I don't understand... why is this a dichotomy? I must have missed something in the conversation somewhere?
Those are the options for EA-type organizations, aren't they? You accept the money and use it to further your goals, or you refuse to accept the money and accept that you're passing up the opportunity to help a lot of people.
It's admittedly blurred because a proportion of EA donation goes towards "growing the movement" or weird "long-termist" causes (as with most or all of SBF's donations aiui), but most (I think 68% last time I looked) goes towards effective global health initiatives.
So sure, I get that by refusing to accept the billionaire money you'd send some sort of anticapitalist message. I see why people would like that part, in isolation. But, is it really worth hundreds of thousands of lives? I find it really odd that anybody would even think about that question for longer than a millisecond.
250k is admittedly on the high side of how many lives you could save for $1bn. It's in the ballpark though.
Look at the Gates foundation : they finance vaccine in Africa, which is good. How to they spend it? By buying overpriced vaccines from companies in which they have interest. They spent a lot of money to avoid the COVID vaccine becoming open source to avoid a precedent, killing thousands of people in low-income countries. (Bill Gates has ideologically always been against the notion of sharing any knowledge, remember "Letter to hobbyists".
Saving lives is just what they put on the marketing cover. Truth is that they are spending for their own prestige and also to "feel-good" about themselves.
It’s normal. It’s how we are wired as human. When you give money to charities, you simply maximize the "feel good" and minimize the "feel guilty" (which is why most charities are nowadays essentially huge marketing organizations). There’s no way for an individual to really do "good" on a large scale with money. The best use of money is to share it as much as possible and let people decide themselves what they want to do with it. (every single study about effectiveness of fighting poverty came to the simple conclusion that you only need to give money to the poors. It’s the best possible use of money. But we hate to do that because we don’t really want to fight poverty. We want to feel good about ourselves and maybe gain a bit of prestige)
I am fairly confident that stopping people dying of preventable diseases is an actual thing that happens in the real world. There's certainly prestige and feel-good involved in saving lives, but are you sure that makes saving lives bad? What's an acceptable exchange rate? If somebody saves a thousand lives and feels only slightly good about it, would that be acceptable? How many people would you have to watch die of preventable diseases, before you'd start to think it was OK for somebody to feel good about preventing them, or even enjoy a bit of prestige?
> every single study about effectiveness of fighting poverty came to the simple conclusion that you only need to give money to the poors
Givewell's current list of top "high-impact, cost-effective" charities has two Malaria charities, vitamin A supplements and cash incentives for vaccinations. GiveDirectly (which "gives money to the poors") was there until a couple of years ago.
The main take is that "doing good "is not their motivation. They are pursuing their own selfish interests. And when those interests align with the general good, they use that opportunity to do some marketing and say "look, we are doing good." Which is true but they fail to mention "because it’s in our own interest and we are also doing very nasty stuff in our own interest but we will, of course, try to hide it as much as we could".
Even if they are doing 90% good stuff, it is really scary to realize that those people have so much power because they had the luck to won at what Cory Doctorow call the "lucky orifice lottery" (they had rich parent then they compounded on that to become even richer). Which means we can’t trust them, we should not trust them. Elon Musk is an excellent example : what he was doing seemed good (electric cars, space stuff) until you realize what he really did (founding the hyperloop project as a scam to prevent, on purpose, any big scale public transportation project that would compete with Tesla).
At what point was Jeff supposed to give away his ownership of Amazon? Who should he have given it to? Would they then get to run the company, would Jeff keep running it?
J K Rowling wrote some books that lots of people liked and accepted a modest payment for each copy, making her wealthy.
To check, are you saying it's not good enough even if she decides to give away the money now, because she should never have had that much financial power in the first place, to decide what to do with so much?
If so, what should she have done instead? I think a wildly successful published author can only avoid getting rich by giving away their royalties. Declining to take royalties in the first place is just another form of giving them away, and that decision exercises equivalent financial power to taking them and giving them to someone else.
Same with making the books freely available, free to copy: that's exercising the power to give away the wealth to readers who would have paid, instead of someone else.
So taking less money in the first place is not a way out of your ethical constraint. It's just another form of being rich and giving it away, but with a faster cycle.
In some sense it's not her fault she acquired financial power, except in the sense that she chose to make something lots of people loved enough to be willing to pay for, which is hardly something to criticise. The power simply exists by virtue of large numbers of people being willing to pay without coercion.
If there's no way for a person to avoid having financial power as a result of some welcome action they did, not even by choosing to give every penny of their wealth away while earning it, I don't think it's fair or ethical to blame them for having that unavoidable power, nor sensible to deem them a psychopath. If you're going to judge the person, better to judge how they exercise the power they have, not that they have it.
Michael Jordan thought selling shoes was more important than making a statement denouncing a racist man running for office in his home state.
JK used her money to stifle fans free speech and fair use with lawsuits galore if she disagreed that they were "true fans".
Those are the worst things I can think of for those 3. I don't think it rises to the level of psychopathy but it certainly is questionable behavior.
There are plenty of truly evil capitalists if you want to look for them, but many just aren't.
Economy isn't zero sum game, like the truly evil communists would have you believe. Capitalism let's people vote continuously with their wallets. J.K. rowing might have gotten a big paycheck from everything, but much of the economic value dispersed to everyone else. And people wanted those resources in the hands of people making the movies.
Nothing is free. There's always a price, and many times the margins of profits are just the margins required for stability anyway. And stability always comes with a price for risk, and it's always the investors paying the risk. What turned out as positive outcome could come from a negative expectation value distribution. There's nothing morally wrong from making a profit especially if you took a risk with negative expectation outcome. You expect these people to give you for free, but if they gave you for free on success they have negative expected outcome and they will never do it. That's like expecting people to give you money, and that's rude.
So, let's say you start a company. Then raise some VC money. You start getting users and things are going really well, but you aren't quite profitable. You see a path to that but need to make investments to get there. So you raise another round of money. However, as you are doing well, the valuation of the company is set to three billion. As the founder, you still own 50% of the shares.
You are technically now a billionaire. Of course, just on paper but Forbes will still put you on the "overnight billionaire" list.
What are you supposed to do in this case ? When exactly did you go from "not psychopath" to "psychopath"?
1. Found a unicorn. Congratulations!
2. Get a tax bill
3. Either loan against your shares (good luck) or(and probably even if you do get a loan)
4. Go public early, selling your shares and let others partake in the companies growth
Alternatively, give your shares to employees, donate, whatever. It's not really rocket science, just tax wealth (radical markets proposes a nice way to get honest self assessments...) and as a side benefit, you benefit employees by creating much more incentive against staying private forever
So if you IPO at 1b ( probably the valuation will drop after ipoing early but ok ) you are not considered a "psychopath" ?
I'm sure all the employees with stock options will be thrilled as well after they drop in value.
That is to say, in many ways I agree with your assessment, but let's be careful not to over-generalize.
You can’t become a billionaire without f* lot of people and exploiting the system’s loopholes. There’s no way to be a moral billionaire. In fact, by definition, every billionaire is a dangerous psychopat (normal people would stop focusing on earning money pass a given amount. You can’t be intellectually sane and a billionnaire).
Every billioniare is a policy failure.
So now, we have those dangerous psychopats who f* the system for money who try to justify their action by using the money in a way that they find morally good according to their own f** up moral values. Which means that they get even more power than just money: they start to define what is good and what is bad.
The only sane way to give money is to let the community decide how to spend money.
That’s called taxes.
Strangely enough, every single billionaire is against paying taxes. Because they consider themselves morally superior.
I agree that government are corrupts. I agree that democracy has lot of failures. But between a system which is not perfect and a dangerous psychopat who consider himself superior to any democratically elected government, I know which one is the worst for our future.