I don't think you should be able to spend your way out of a bunch of stuff like that.
Soros didn’t make his money in a very honorable way, nor did the Koch brothers. They both have decided to use politics to exercise the same avarice that made them rich, perhaps deluding themselves and others into thinking that it’s ok if they are “doing good for the public.” Unending greed for political influence isn’t much better than greed for cash. It’s all just will to power. I feel similarly about most professional politicians, which is why I don’t have a team.
Like the journal of an out of time statistician who appraises a decade worth of work boiling all the superlatives and fanaticism out of a free formed nlp dataset called society and they're into it. I've seen so few maps of the terrain that runs perpendicular to the trench lines.
I'm not sure if I've ever seen anyone even try to do this out loud, even though I suspect a whole lot (most?) people privately do something like as they accrete their beliefs.
Maybe some day we'll be able to ask an AI to unpack aggressively simplified soundbites. A translator from misleading meme caption -> the complexes they point to and the double bind at their center.
He wasn’t just palling around with Epstein, his friendship continued after Epstein was convicted. His excuse was that Epstein gave him access… as if Bill G wasn’t the richest person on the planet at the time.
When I hear the name "Carnegie", I think of music and libraries, but his contemporaries would think of emotional abuse and robber-barony.
There are certainly many charities that are ineffective at their mission, inefficient with their funds or working on a mission that few would consider worthwhile. (And there are also some great charities out there that are effective, efficient and important, such as https://givedirectly.org.)
But charities (of which non-profit foundations are a subclass) aren't a "tax dodge". Money that you give to a charity is untaxed, so you can claim a refund on income taxes you've already paid on that money. But you don't get new money that you haven't already earned from the IRS; every penny given is money that you already had, and the tax refund is purely of tax that is no longer due on that money.
It's possible to be cynical of the motives of some philanthropic gifts, but Gates (and others) aren't financially better off from their giving itself.
I think the reason was that he didnt want company to manufacture vaccines with defects and no quality control. In theory that sounds reasonable.
Bezos stepped down from Amazon in 2021, not sure if it counts as a retirement yet.
Musk is still two years away from Gates' retirement age.
And Zuckerberg is 15 years away from Gates' retirement age.
Bill Gates is nothing but mindless aggression and wanton destruction. He is Vladimir Putin for your computer. Giving some money away does not erase his misdeeds or change him into a good person. We know his character.
The philanthropy bit I think is just a PR stunt. Bill is not a nice man, or a good man, IMHO.
Not sure about your hate on Musk though. Fighting climate change, preserving the only life in the universe that we know of, bringing connectivity to the most vulnerable and disadvantaged globally, among many other good things. Not sure what’s bad about that.
You're prasing this as if you've flown to Africa, examined something like an anti-malaria program, and decided it was useless for unstated reasons. Somehow I doubt you've done so.
Sadly the way he goes about that is less than ideal. Tesla keep selling vapourware features and releasing things that are actively dangerous. Boring company was mostly a ploy to distract from high speed rail (which would reduce the need for cars). The Twitter takeover has been a debacle so far. SpaceX are about the only untainted venture here, and my understanding is they’re not run day to day by Musk, with staff spending inordinate amounts of effort to keep him happy and out of the way of the real work.
Boring had little to do with Musk. It was an idea that seemed promising, and a Tesla manager volunteered to make it reality. Musk just provided some initial finding. It is completely unrelated to rail.
Not sure why you feel Twitter to be a “debacle”? I like diversity of though and open discourse. Also the scientific method is a good thing to save.
People have claimed musk told them its driven by his hatred for California's high-speed rail project [0]. That sounds like significant evidence that it is related to rail.
[0]. https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990?ref...
For Tesla, we still don't have fully self driving cars, but its always coming in Q4 of this year. Products are announced WAY too soon. Its been years since the cybertruck and new roadster were announced and demoed, and still none exist. This isn't their first new model, they should understand how the building of factories work, etc.
Sure I know, because it’s the one thing bad that’s repeated and repeated about him, and he didn’t even start it. And he apologized.
Any example that is actually bad?
And he apologized after substantial public backlash, not because he had a change of mind.
The guy that rescued the kids out of that cave in thailand(?), Yoel Roth, that twitter engineer that told him on twitter that he had his facts wrong... that's just a short list I'm sure that if I weren't posting this while eating breakfast I could cite more.
Regarding the Twitter guy: Yoel Roth was a different person. What was bad about how he treated Roth and the Twitter Android guy (I guess that’s who you actually were referring to)?
Roth had to flee their home due to threats to their safety.
Has Musk apologized yet?
https://gaynrd.com/if-yoel-roth-is-harmed-should-elon-musk-f...
Falsely implying other people are pedophiles or support pedophiles actions seems to be a recurring pattern in this context.
Old Twitter had countless tweets containing images of violence against children. Under Musk it took only days to remove all of that.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...
https://thediplomat.com/2021/06/why-are-indians-so-angry-at-...
And what does that mean to me? Successful businesses like Tesla and Spacex have done much more for the world through the technology they have developed than any donation ever has. I'm supposed to value charity more highly just because it's not profitable?
"Moreover, the fact that no males, only females of child-bearing age, were vaccinated..."
Referenced from the above article: http://archive.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2010/...
"We must make this the decade of vaccines," Bill Gates said in a statement.
Referenced from the above article: https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_innovating_to_zero
"Bill Gates warned that we weren’t ready for a global pandemic in a talk at TED2015. Now he’s working to make sure the world is better prepared next time around."
https://singjupost.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Innovating...
"First, we’ve got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10% or 15%. But there, we see an increase of about 1.3."