What I find amazing is how the richest person in the world also happens to be a really good person. Bill Gates generally just seems humble, kind, and... normal. Imagine if Bill Gates were instead a corrupt megalomaniac - it wouldn't be too hard to slip into amoral hedonism when you have that much money.
It's quite a redemption story. 20 years ago Bill Gates was reviled as one of the most evil people in technology. He was a bully and a thief, and crushed potential competitors for fun.
And then his mom told him he needs to start giving it away. And he said, "how can I make money if I'm giving it away". And she told him "you can give away what you already made while you make more to give away".
I play board games with some friends. While we're generally nice guys and girls, in some of the games we go full twirling moustache evil, every trick allowed as long as its in the rules. That's an in-game persona for an hour, after which we revert back to our nice selves. Which is fine, BTW, we're consenting adults and we know its a game.
I always thought of Bill as doing the same thing in Microsoft. Nice guy generally, but business is business, no hard feelings while he steamrolls your small company to death. Then, after having a fun work day doing what he should be doing, he reverts to his nice self.
He was probably shocked to learn the world knew only his evil side.
You might be right, but I do feel that it is a difference between a board game and real world.
The decisions you make for the company affects the real world (even thought it is in the role of a artificial entity, like a company) and have real consequences on people and the state of the world.
The same in not true for the decisions you make in a board game or computer game.
Of course some might say board games affect the real world but the difference in scale is so large it is negligible.
I don't expect you to change your mind because confirmation bias is a powerful force. I did see this video recently and found it interesting. Have you seen it? "Bill Gates - Microsoft Antitrust Deposition - Highlights" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE
Wow, he does seem like a massive jerk in that video. That said, I try not to judge people on how they acted in the past, but how they currently act. Compare that more recent interview and videos (like Mark Rober's) and he seems to have mellowed out a lot. Maybe it's all for the cameras and he's privately still a massive jerk, I don't know, but my impression of him lately based on stuff I've seen online has generally left a good impression.
He is not speaking personally in that video but after hours of coaching by lawyers. He sounds rude the same way a suspect refuses to speak without a lawyer is rude.
To me it is clear that Gates was prepared by a host of lawyers, which makes sense.
But the interrogator doesn't grasp the subject entirely as well, I too would want clarification to the question if a content provider uses IE. You could ask a helpful question, e.g. Do you mean if they develop sites specifically for IE?
But That is not how you go about a deposition, you're not there to help people build a case against you.
It’s important to understand that gates and his people have put in a _lot_ of work to reform his image in the last 20 years.
We think gates is humble, kind, normal because that’s the image he wants to portray.
I agree his philanthropy goes a little further than typical billionaire reputation laundering, but he still has a limit. For example, he said he’d vote for trump if the dem candidate supported a wealth tax.
> We think gates is humble, kind, normal because that’s the image he wants to portray.
Maybe... however, the narrative that people never change and that any apparent changes are but a thin veneer on an unchanging person rubs me the wrong way.
I like to think I can change - that I can iron out my personality flaws and become a better person (more patient, kind, open-minded, charitable, etc.) over the decades. So why shouldn't I extend that benefit of the doubt to other people too? I assume a lot of people have an innate desire to change and improve as well since lots of people are religious, and the core message of a lot of religions is just that - that you can repent of your past mistakes, change, and become better.
It's crazy what paying for better branding can do.
This is the same guy that tried to take all of Paul Allen's stock while he had Cancer. He's the same, he's just worked on his image.
I think if you scroll back to discussion on slashdot in the 90s, you'd see public opinion in the tech community was very different back then. That said, I agree with your take on Gates.
Gates has a much bigger pr organization behind him than Mellon or Carnegie ever did in a previous era of monopolists and oligarchs.
Since Gates funds a lot of the western media, (UK Guardian, BBC etc) you never hear any criticism of the WHO (which Gates also effectively owns) or GAVI, which is a Gates Vehicle. This is not a healthy situation at all.
I wasn't aware of this, but apparently, yes, he does.[1][2] I think it's important to note that this doesn't have to be because he expects something in return, he could just think funding good news organizations is a good thing to do. It's also important to keep in mind that even if he doesn't expect favorable reporting doesn't mean he doesn't get it anyways as a byproduct.
The problem I have with articles like that is they are long on innuendo and implication and short on data. We get a lot of "not much bad is said about them" without much comparison to sources that aren't funded by them that might be more neutral.
In the end it's very hard to tell if they are talking about pit bulls or puppies. Having nothing bad to say about a dog breed known for high profile attacks, dog fighting, and other negatively associated events would be extremely suspect. Having nothing bad to say about puppies in general is expected of such a benign subject. I doubt the Gates foundation is either a pit bull or a puppy, but I can't responsibly make an assumption even about what side of the spectrum they are from an article about how suspicious the absence of criticism is for an organization which is supposedly trying to do good as a charity.
I think you find this amazing, in large part, because in 2021 the American culture (and to an extent, the global culture) has equated wealth with corruption. If somebody has wealth, then they must have done something distasteful to get it. The wealthier they are, the more people they must have exploited to gain their wealth. So the logic goes.
This is wrong-headed but pervasive thinking. In reality, rich people are just people. Politicians are just people. Celebrities are just people. All people are corrupt to some degree, and some people are corrupt to a large degree.
It's easy for you to imagine a very wealthy person slipping into amoral hedonism, but I contend that their wealth has little to do with it. I once visited a rural Siberian village where a significant contingent of the older men wandered around town drunk. It was so commonplace that 10-year-olds in the community could tell you which of the men were angry drunks, and which ones could be led by the hand back to their homes. Those men lived on food rations from the government, and the first thing they would do when they got their ration of bread was to take it to the local convenience store and trade the bread for vodka. There are probably lots of reasons why someone would wallow in drunkenness for months at a time, but one reason is that they're just following whatever desires they have at any moment in time. Amoral hedonism isn't strictly a rich man's game.
At the same time, nobody has accumulated a billion dollars in personal wealth with a totally clean conscience. Millionaires, sure, thats an order of magnitude less wealth though. Billionaires are such a distortion of economic allotment that just to be one necessitates having such a profound influence on so much of their economic sphere that to have gotten into that position required someone else being taken advantage of at some point, and in practice its a lot of someones and a lot of harm caused. Its no different than diverting a river into a reservoir - you can make a small lake with minimal ecological damage, but when you divert into a sea or an ocean the entire environment shifts around it for some good and some ill with there always being some consequences for it happening.
For a lot of people (myself included) it is not mainly about the ethics of individual billionaires, its about the ethics of the existence of billionaires to begin with.
The spread of this narrative is fascinating, given how easy it is to find counterexamples. I attribute it to a lack of education around business.
One of my good friends is a highly-paid engineer at a tech company, and he told me, "Businesses want to keep people poor, so they have cheap labor." Which is about as sensible as saying consumers want businesses to be poor, so we get cheaper products. This is actually a pervasive myth believed by many intelligent people.
Of course businesses want to pay as little as they can for labor, the same way literally anyone paying for anything wants to pay as little as possible. But other concerns obviously come into play as well, e.g. the quality of the people you hire, the affluence of the customers you can sell to, your top-level revenue numbers, etc. This should have been obvious to my friend, who works at a tech company that's happy to pay him and others $200k+.
The reality is that businesses actually prefer wealthy societies with wealthy customers who can buy more things. It's a chronic problem that poor communities are under-served by businesses, because poverty makes it harder to profit.
And yet the myth that businesses want people to be poor persists.
As does the myth that you can only make large sums of money through cheating, scamming, lying, stealing, etc.
I'll agree, but I really do think being a successful politician is probably heavily correlated to being prone to corruption/other immoral acts. The type of people who are attracted to and capable of succeeding at political are necessarily immoral. Those with morals generally lose elections and aren't able to raise money.
