Just because they could afford to give more doesn't make this money meaningless.

I'm not saying we need to like, bow down and praise Bezos over this, or that it erases any other bad things he may have done...but let's try to acknowledge that hundreds of millions toward this kind of charity is an actual good thing and not just a pointless PR stunt.

I'd prefer if Amazon et al paid their taxes and society as a whole could decide how to spend it to better itself, through the democracy that we are supposed to live in.

To that end, to put the $400MM in perspective, Amazon has received $671MM of disclosed tax breaks and other subsidies from New York State. [1]

(Context note: NYS 'jobs for tax cuts' program may be the most aggressive in the nation? I'm not an expert.)

[1]: https://goodjobsfirst.org/amazon-tracker/?state=New+York

What taxes do they not pay? Have you contacted the IRS about this tax evasion? They have a whistleblower program so you could pocket some cash!

Well, sure, there are lots of things that could happen in the world that would be even better than a $400M donation like this, but that doesn't make a $400M donation a bad or pointless thing.

Nor does it make this donation somehow responsible for stopping those other good things from happening.

It's also in the ballpark of what one AMZN warehouse in Alabama cost to build. ($325M)[1]

I'd like to see this $400M number as a fraction of what AMZN has spent on paving the planet.

https://www.constructiondive.com/news/amazon-breaks-ground-o...

I mean, nobody should have this much money, so it isn’t like I want to defend the guy, but it was the most expensive show ever. If “less expensive than Rings of Power” is the benchmark, almost every other project in the world is a tiny indie affair. IMO the lesson there is “money can’t buy competence.”

I bet they can make some nice parks for $400M. According to Wikipedia, Disneyland cost $130M adjusted to 2021 dollars. 3 Disneylands isn’t nothing.

That doesn't mean that $400MM is a small amount of money, it means the LOTR reboot was an expensive TV show or whatever it was. It is a large amount of money.

what a nonsense comparison. anyway, you're showing a misunderstanding of the complexity of capital allocation.

So he should have donated 1 billion? why not 2? why not 5? why not 10? well hang on, 10 billion for greening some areas? That's not an optimal use of 10 billion. 8 of those should go to doctors without borders. wait hang on, have you seen the ukrainian refugee crisis? and you're putting 8 billion towards doctors without borders? they should get at least 3 of that. wow so you've donated 10 billion dollars but not a single dollar towards educating women in third world countries? etc ad nauseum.

I guess your take is probably that it's his responsibility to donate 100% of his wealth optimally across the world, and spend the rest of his life doing that. but i'm appealing to people with more sense when I say: don't underestimate how difficult it is to "correctly" spend a large amount of wealth.

It's bigger than that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Corporation_of_New_Yo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation

And now

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Philanthropy (not significant enough yet to warrant it's own page)

A classic move by exploitative billionaires to launder their legacy. But what's the alternative? NOT doing it? We should support it, and shame the billionaires that DON'T. do this.

> But what's the alternative?

Taxing the crap out of them in some way that passes constitutional muster, and if necessary changing the constitution?

Definitely hard to trust their philanthropy. This was also a nice watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OH4uh8cHuto