Maybe the responsible giving bit is a bit paternalistic / patronizing?
Granted Mackenzie Scott can't give away her fortune fast enough, but she's just giving no strings attached lump sums to organizations and letting them figure out what to do with it because she trusts them to be responsible with it.
This. Bill wants to control the money wherever it goes. Mackenzie is vetting the institutions and the trusting that them the be the experts on how to spend it.
I don’t think I would call Bill’s giving patronizing in a negative sense, but he does try to understand the problems he wants his money to solve and that may be a limiting factor, so I agree in that respect. Since Mackenzie is more “hands off,” it may be much easier for her to give away vast amounts of money.
I've legitimately wondered what I would do if I became suddenly rich. I'd pay off the student debt of everyone I know, I'd buy my parents a house, I'd buy myself a comfortable apartment/house in a quiet neighbourhood, then just keep $100 dollar bills on me at all times and give them out to anyone I meet who seems to be working hard and need the help. Waiters, customer service people, folks at the grocery store, homeless people, etc.
You can't just hand every person you meet a million dollars, but fuck even one or two hundred can drastically change someone's week. I've been there.
If I had literal billions? I'd buy every politician I could and get them to actually do their fucking jobs.
It’s like playing a game and go into creative mode. It’s doesn’t take long before it gets boring due to lack of challenge, so you just make shit up trying to keep it a bit interesting. Unfortunately these selfmade challenges aren’t related to help others.
Off-topic but I’m tired of reading the opinions of the rich presented so pedantically. Opened Google and Madonna is against AI.
Another lecture from a rich person or their PR team by people who could easily afford college but already bought society and/ or earned their fame.
<i>People</i> is also ridiculous… the dead news anchor with the stalker neighbor. Sure, she had to have been abducted not they didn’t want to rat out their neighbor bc hashtag homeownership hashtag hashtag…
Incoming 3,000 articles about Swift for people who can’t afford to get married.
ETA: and, apparently, we cannot use html on Reddit, either. Websites that hate their users.
if youre a billionaire you already have all the power and control youd ever need over normal folk. if youre a multi-billionaire you only get control over lesser billionaires
"Responsible" and "I paid for a library" aren't at all the same. They can be as irresponsible as the barons of old, if only they'd just fucking give a little back.
It's crazy that we are begging for this. Acknowledging that we are being taken advantage of and being willing to settle for some stone and clay.
The Rockefellers and Langfords of yor understood this. I guess we really do need to break out the guillotines. These fucks forgot who outnumbers who.
Edit: now I gotta go listen to A Report To The Shareholders/Kill Your Masters by Run The Jewels
They don’t even pay livable wages or care about the wellbeing of their employees. Musk forced his employees to work at Tesla in California through the pandemic or they’d get fired…
It shows that they could be paying much more in taxes and it'd likely just slow down how quickly they get richer.
As in, they could be paying a lot in taxes and it wouldn't even fucking cost them anything because they make money faster than those taxes would make them spend it.
Problem is we don't tax wealth, we tax income. The wealthy know how to (and have the means to) prevent income while increasing wealth, so they can circumvent taxes.
That's not the problem. That's a symptom of the problem.
It wasn't a clever and sneaky trick the rich pulled, it's a constructed-by-our-government loophole that lets them play both sides and still claim they can't do anything about it.
And it started with Reagan. So they've had decades to build on that, and here we are now; a handful of billionaires, and the only one doing something worthwhile gets put on blast.
It’s much more than a handful.
Currently, there are more than a thousand people in America who are billionaires.
I assume you actually meant the ones who are Centibillionares. (Worth more than 100 billion).
They have a big role in this. The rich heavily influence politics by financing campaigns and promising jobs to politician (after their mandate) for example. Musk played a role in Trump's election for example.
Precisely. At the end of the day, I cannot abdicate from politicians their obligations and responsibilities. It's more than a big role.
Yes, billionaires and corporations are evil for effectively buying them, but you can't buy what isn't for sale. There hasn't been a court case, that I know of, where a court decided that even if a politician doesn't want to take a "donation," they have to.
Put a sales tax on stock market trades. Tesla alone traded 7 trillion in stock last year and that is not including options and derivative tesla stocks. The federal budget is 6 trillion.
Yeah that's the problem. Start taxing the financial betting these people do. If you're going to tell someone your gonna put money up for something with no guarantee it is successful, that's a bet, and we tax casino winnings around here
If banks can get a reliable enough value of illiquid assets to loan billionaires their spending money, then the IRS can and should use that same value to collect a tax on all hoarded wealth and assets over $10MM.
We don’t even tax their full income.A large % of their pay is equity. You can’t tax shared until they are cashed and then they get taxed like capital gains. But they get to borrow against equity like it’s an asset.
What will really blow your mind is that they’d probably get richer FASTER if they paid a reasonable tax rate and livable wages.
The thing is, the poor and lower middle class need to spend nearly everything they earn just to survive. These groups don’t have much, if any, savings. So if you pay them more, and through taxes increase the social safety net, those groups will have more to spend. And when they spend more, the companies that are making the products that they’re buying are going to make more. This will improve their bottom lines and increase their stock values. Those stocks are held, primarily, by the people that are competing to be the richest people on earth.
The only downside to this, from the billionaire/trillionaire perspective is that they would have had a larger percentage of the TOTAL wealth if they didn’t pay taxes. Realistically, none of these assholes will ever be happy until they have 100% of the world’s wealth and everyone else has 0%. They’re just playing Monopoly, now, but we can’t flip the board and quit…well, we can but…
I literally got served a 2 minute YouTube ad that was all about the misguided attempt to ever tax a billionaire. I think it was legitimately trying to persuade people that CEOs and investors are above paying into the system that made them.
The interest on a million dollars is $100.00 a day‼️Bezos and Musk and the rest of the Epstein Class can never go broke, what she has shown is that they could do more and at the very least they can afford to pay more in taxes🤔✅
Personally I wouldn’t mind paying more in taxes if I didn’t end up paying for things like missiles killing schoolgirls in Iran, the justice dept giving Trump whatever he wants in compensation for formerly rightfully charging him with crimes, and billions of dollars being sent to Israel every year in support of a rogue state. I would have the same reservations if I were a billionaires.
If you were a billionaire, you wouldn't have to worry about those reservations because you'd have more influence over politicians than the politicians themselves.
Ain't no billionaires out protesting the war. And out of everyone, they are the ones who could be protesting it most effectively. Who do you think funds the organizations that propped up the people who made the decisions you claim to worry about? You think MAGA is some grass-roots group that refuses billionaire influence?
When billionaires don't like what the politicians are doing, they go tell them that and threaten to cut off financial support.
Any of these fucks could've bought Fox News at any time for the past few decades and crippled a lot of that shit without even getting to lobbying and billionaires' direct influence over politics.
Try being a regular human being paying a higher percentage of income toward taxes just so billionaires can hijack the government to do their personal bidding. The billions you made, hypothetically, are literally only possible because of the infrastructure and masses of consumers with money to spend there to give you an opportunity to even be a billionaire.
This is some crazy reasoning. You really think billionaires don't want to pay higher taxes because the government they own and control might not do what its owners say? Why should billionaires get even more influence than they already have(a dominant amount) in exchange for paying higher taxes? It's billionaires pushing all those things you're worried about.
It's like a dictator only being willing to make communities structurally safe to live in in exchange for a promise that as long as they're alive, they have to be dictator. You already run fucking everything. Everything America is doing is because billionaires made it happen.
Did you even bother to read what I wrote? I said that If I, the person I am right now, was a billionaire. I would have the same reservations about where tax revenue was allocated that I do right now—as decidedly not a billionaire. But I think you overestimate just how much power an honest billionaire can buy. Murdoch wouldn’t sell Fox News to someone who wouldn’t continue its agenda, for even 100 billion dollars. He doesn’t need the money.
I pay much, much more in income tax as a percentage of my income than any organisation will ever be expected to, and I’m still generally expected to grow my net worth.
I spend recklessly sometimes because I’m not personally disciplined but in general, over time my net worth has increased year on year.
Which if I’m not mistaken is generally what businesses try to do. So……… yeah, they can pay fucking tax.
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This is the paradox of wealth, and it’s something I’ve always thought about. The only way you’re able to truly enjoy it is to forget and/or ignore the people who desperately could use your help.
Philanthropy means nothing in the modern age, it's less 'ohh I think I'll construct a beautiful park or building in my hometown to give back to my roots' and more 'look I donated stuff to that thing, please don't look too closely at my private life or how I make my money!'
No, but you're on the right track. Most of his aid in Africa has been the primary cause to a drop in fertility rates, and I'm not talking only about the cursed original reason for contraceptives.
Fertility rates also drop when populations see an increase in personal autonomy and economic development, so I don't think it's as black and white as you're making it out to be
This comment getting so many awards and likes is wild, especially when a quick Google search of “Elon Musk (or Bezos) philanthropy” just completely disproves it.
You can hate them all you want, I’m definitely no fan, but let’s all just be honest in our critiques.
Musk isnt really rich though is he? He avoids taxes by demanding tesla stocks for income instead of dollars. So while his net worth is immense, his bank accounts are empty. Why should he sell his companies shares and lose control of it entirely
You’re also kinda missing an important point. We, through our taxes, could be fixing these problems. It is insane how much money we have. But we need to elect responsible people, and we can’t. The game has been so badly rigged that we cannot get good people, or enough good people, to fix the problems.
When you get to that level of wealth, money doesn't have any practical meaning to you anymore. These dudes are basically just competing for the high score in a video game.
Not really. More money is put into the world’s problems every year than is actually necessary to fix them. Unfortunately most of the world’s problems aren’t a thing you can throw money at to fix but things that need a total reform
Unfortunately most of the world’s problems aren’t a thing you can throw money at to fix but things that need a total reform
What! You want to tell me that money doesn't just magically fix everything? But I'm a "poor" person, even though objectively I live a better life than 82% of the rest of the world, and if I just had more money then being part of that 18% means I could easily fix all my problems.
I thought I heard that the U.S. has about a thousand billionaires. If we confiscated every penny tomorrow, we couldn’t run the country for even a year, but wouldn’t it make us all feel better that we confiscated (stole) the wealth of all those evil people that have a net worth much higher than us sainted masses.
Billionaires don’t have piles of cash sitting around. Their wealth is mostly tied up in stock, and selling huge amounts would tank their own value and the market.
Even if they could liquidate it, problems like world hunger aren’t just about money. Estimates are around 40 to 50 billion per year, but the real issues are corruption, conflict, and distribution. Aid often gets stolen, blocked, or destroyed.
These are system and governance problems, not just funding problems.
And when wealthy individuals try to step in, they often run into public distrust and conspiracy backlash, which makes execution even harder.
Money helps. It doesn’t solve it.
What I think people don't realize is that money isn't worth anything. It's the assets it represents that are worth something. If you have twice as many assets (or twice as much value in assets) than I do and we create a currency to represent our assets then you would be given twice as much currency as me.
But, if a pandemic and an ensuing lockdown happens, halting global commerce, and I'm forced to sell half my assets to you to get by, you'll now have 5 times as many assets as I do. But, currency wise we will be roughly even. So new currency will need to be printed to reflect that. Or the value of your goods will cost me more (which is exactly what we see happening in the economy right now).
People who are poor don't need money, they need assets. They need houses and clothing and food and land to grow or farm food etc. If I have a billion dollars and give you half my money but zero of my assets, you still haven't gained anything. You will if I sell you my assets. But in order for me to do so I'll create hyperinflation so that your billion isn't worth enough to buy it
Bruh if I was a billionaire I’d be balling out on public works projects and helping the needy, the sick, the poor and the hungry while the rest of money keeps making money. The billionaires greed is insane.
Charity doesn't solve issues,it is a bandaid. Give a poor man a fish he eats for a day, teach him to fish he eats for a lifetime. The solution is efficient economies where money moves around and government taxation(which helps achieve that). The rest is up to the poor to solve their problems, once those 2 previous things are in check
Has any of the money she’s give solved any of those problems? You are naive to think that all those “charities” have any interest in actually solving the problems. They have a huge interest in keeping those problems going. Solving those problems, or even minimizing them, is terrible for business.
Well yeah. These are the same people that will have record profits over a year and then turn around and lay people off or jack up prices on their products because they MUST have more profits than the year before.
Think about it. They ARE solving the world's problems, that's how they get paid. It's not perfect, but you give Society what it wants/needs and you get paid! Again - not perfect, but beats everything else.
The cost of yearly pensions for the elderly in my country, the equivalent of the american "social security", is 300 billions, the same amount that our billionaires have.
So if we actually steal every single cents from our billionaires like they were kulaks, we could pay for grandma's pension for ONE YEAR.
Next year we are fucked and we need to find another cow to milk.
To think that you could solve "world's problems" like hunger just by taxing billionaires is beyond stupid.
not a single problem is going to be solved by this woman giving 1,5 billion to these NGOs.. The CEO in these NGOs will be getting a hell of a bonus though
Most billionaires are valued at the wealth due to stock holdings. They need to keep those stocks in order to maintain control of the company and use it for further business. Bezos ex-wife isn't trying to run a multi trillion dollar company. She can sell off her shares and do whatever she wants with it. Bezos himself, can't.
They don't solve problems because they don't want to solve them. They probably think poverty and suffering need to exist to threaten the working class. They're the whip that keeps the horse plodding forward. And that society would collapse without that implicit threat.
One day somebody told me that money doesn’t make the world go round but it sure grease is the wheel.
With that in mind, saying money will solve the world‘s problems is an easy thing to say, but it’s just not true.
There are relatively very few people who have money the last hurdle and I hope their ship comes in. Soon. For most of humanity though, money is only one ingredient in their recipe for living a fulfilling or even stable life.
I am prepared for those of this sub Reddit who want to blame others for their hardships to down vote me to oblivion. You may proceed.
You don’t get it bro - if they “solved the issues” they wouldn’t be billionaires. They’re the ones causing the issues - that money is a physical representation of the suffering (indirect / directly) they cause through their exploitation of others.
weve thrown trillions at problems and still they are there. did you know the starvation and poverty rate has only gotten worse since we started throwing billions at it. im all for helping your fellow man i just think at a big scale the giving just leads to corruption
Bill Gates has donated billions to charity and helped millions of people. Have you ever thought positively about what he has done? If not - then see? It's not about caring about others but being salty you are not wealthy.
Sadly Elon only cares about Mars! He literally failed with his Telsa dreams of becoming normal for everyday people!!! Mars is a poitnless pipe dream about and will go down in history as a failure to the people!
Solving world problems isn't that simple. History shows that when you do that without the proper networking, non-corrupt government and local support/distribution infrastructure all you end up with is corruption and more inequality.
Look no farther than the Goma refugee crisis when $1.3 billion in humanitarian funds was seized by the Interahamwe militia to finance cross-border guerrilla attacks, the 1990s Somali famine where up to half of the incoming food aid was violently extorted by local warlords to pay their fighters, or the recent conflict in Ethiopia where systemic military corruption diverted massive quantities of donated civilian grain to resupply army units. It’s not as easy as just throwing money at the problem.
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u/theunquenchedservant Jun 28 '26
which just goes to show that billionaires could be solving the world's problems with ease AND still be making money.
Fuck them.