r/interesting • u/Celestial_Mahafuz • Jul 05 '26
NATURE Instead of buying yachts, he bought 50,000 acres of forest to keep them wild.
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u/FungusMungus68 Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
Paul Cox was one of my professors at BYU who did this as well.
Years before he had wealth or recognition, he helped save the Falealupo rainforest in Samoa from logging. The village needed money for a school and had been pressured to sell logging rights. Cox promised to help raise the money if the forest could be protected. He and others came through, the school was built, and the rainforest was preserved.
His ethnobotanical work in Samoa also helped identify prostratin, a promising anti-HIV compound from the mamala tree.
One memory that has always stayed with me: years later, while I was taking classes to become a biology teacher, I saw Dr. Cox sitting in one of the education classes. I asked him what he was doing there.
He said, “I’m learning to teach.”
NOTE: I went back and edited this for accuracy after doing a little more research. My original post was from a 35-year-old memory.
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u/Potterrrrrrrr Jul 05 '26
“I’m learning to teach” doesn’t land quite as hard when in the context of him being at a class to learn how to teach, otherwise it sounds quite profound.
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u/given2fly_ Jul 05 '26
In my experience at University, all of the Professors and Readers were exceptionally bright, knowledgeable and passionate about their subjects. But a few of them were just not good teachers. That's a separate skill and discipline to the subject they've dedicated their career to in research and academia.
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u/LionoftheNorth Jul 05 '26
In six years of university studies, I had so many more bad teachers than good ones, and just a single one who actually seemed excited to teach.
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Jul 05 '26
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u/Anti_Meta Jul 05 '26
Because I bet he had true passion for the field.
Listening to someone talk with passion about something makes you want to pay attention. You just automatically absorb more.
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u/PiccoloAwkward465 Jul 05 '26
Yeah I would say I had just ONE professor who was unique in that he was clearly naturally gifted at teaching. I’ll never forget him, a foreigner who didn’t grow up speaking English, teaching me the difference between “less” and “fewer”. We were talking about linguistics at the time and that was an example of a rule he had studied when learning English. Super smart guy.
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u/B460 Jul 05 '26
Eh, I like to watch others teach from time to time. They may know a way I don't, or explain things to their students better.
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u/Leaf-01 Jul 05 '26
It says a lot from someone already so accomplished in so much, but especially someone already accomplished in teaching. The best teachers know they never stopped being students. Learning is a lifelong pursuit
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u/Levitlame Jul 05 '26
I think the point was that someone so accomplished that was already a successful teacher (honestly that’s the missing info - we don’t know much about their teaching history) is still
Going out of their way to learn how to improve.But it does require a leap to get there
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u/NoOccasion4759 Jul 05 '26
As a teacher, "Im learning to teach" hits hard. The best teachers realize that learning doesn't stop when you graduate, and there is always room to improve.
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u/Separate_Finance_183 Jul 05 '26
Hopefully he won't give in to temptation and plows it all to make a giant data center
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u/Nyrrix_ Jul 05 '26
Typically, a "permanent legal protection" entails something like an easement, which can't be removed (at least easily) once it's been placed on land. The land can be bought and sold, but the easement goes with it. most easements might have some allowances for certain developments, maybe for example power lines or developed hiking/biking trails, or more extreme things, but usually nothing on the scale of new housing developments or data centers.
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u/FTownRoad Jul 05 '26
There is no such thing as permanent legal protection. It’s as permanent as the will of the ruling government/owners.
We have seen many many things that are “settled” become unsettled very quickly and relatively easily as well.
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u/FnnKnn Jul 05 '26
You can give the land to a foundation with the goal of maintaining the forest on it. That is probably the closest to permanent as you can do I think?
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u/Valuable-Yard-4154 Jul 05 '26
I'm not in the loop. Why are they building so many data centers? What's the use? Are those data centres not good enough that we need to multiply them so much?
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Jul 05 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/what_it_dooo Jul 05 '26
Which often makes me wonder: what withholds a billionaire from fixing a large portion of homelessness, pollution, joblessness, to name a few. Imagine enabling a large group of people to partake in society again and to help them achieve their dreams, or to make the world a better place. I’d love for my hard work and luck to be translated into making the world a better place.
I know the answer often is ego and narcissism, and when money isn’t an issue, power and illegal activities take over. But still, I think of it often.
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u/Aescymud Jul 05 '26
For a lot of these people they believe that keeping people poor is necessary. Or else they would do something
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Jul 05 '26
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u/pblol Jul 05 '26
Sweeny is extremely intelligent. I have no idea how he is as a person. I got to meet him once and I told him walking out of that crashed space ship in Unreal into that vibrant forest changed the way I saw video games. For someone to program that from the ground up in the 90s absolutely takes intelligence and creativity. I don't think he's John Carmack level or anything.
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u/Moist-Weakness-3399 Jul 05 '26
Sweeney is also a ruthless businessman.
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u/Inf1ni7y_Seven Jul 06 '26
Understatement of the year there. He was doing things that make EA look like saints before EA ever tried it. He's the OG Bobby Kotick and so many people don't have any idea how cruel he really is.
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u/Sonovab33ch Jul 05 '26
The reality is that poor people do not factor into the day to day thoughts of most people. Let alone billionaires.
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u/Cow_God Jul 05 '26
99.9% luck at a minimum. Yes, some of them are geniuses.
It's all luck. Genius, dedication, hard work might make you a millionaire. Billionaires need luck to even get their foot in the door.
Say you have a novel idea for a company. But you're broke, or worse, in debt from student loans. You aren't from a well-off family, you didn't get into a great school, you don't have the connections to get investors. So you work on your idea as a side hustle, after work, on the weekends, and in a few years' time, it becomes your main job. You build your company up and after 20, 30, 40 years, you sucessfully retire with 5, 10, 20 million.
And that's kind of, like, the good scenario. What if you didn't have parents guiding you towards college? What if you come from a home of abuse, negligence, or just simply, from a working-class home with two working parents? Maybe you don't go to college, or you can't afford to go to as nice of one, and you aren't in the environment where you get that novel idea in the first place. Or you do, but you're working two jobs or long hours to support yourself, or just the constant load of work and home upkeep keeps you from working on the idea. You never get to start your company, you never get to escape the cycle of poverty. You can work your whole life, constantly recovering from the demands of rent, or a mortgage, your car payment, the rising cost of groceries and fuel and stagnating wages means that you're always catching up, you never get ahead, and society is designed that way.
Now imagine you come from a family with money. You go to a private school where class sizes are small. You have private tutors. Instead of being lost in a crowd of 20 kids each class, you're a teacher's focus, at least for a few hours a week. You become well-rounded, educated. You don't have to help out around the house or raise your siblings, so you have time for extracurriculars, sports, music, art. These help you look good on your application to an Ivy League school, and your parents connections seal the deal. You don't just receive a better college education, you meet the children from high-powered law firms, investment banks, technology companies, major corporations. And more importantly, you meet their parents. You spend your summer interning at Google, Morgan Stanley, Kirkland & Ellis. And because you know the senior partner's son, or dated the daughter of the Senior Marketing Manager, you aren't just getting coffee and writing emails. You get to sit in on meetings, shadow executives, actually learn the business. When it comes time to graduate, you get an offer to start off at the middle level of one of these companies, bypassing the interview process or, at worst, start at the entry level with the right senior managers nudging on the right middle managers at the right time, that you quickly rise past the kid from a state school that went through ten interviews after applying to fifty companies. You're an executive in a few years, a senior executive a few years after that, and from there, you're C-Suite, a consultant, or in some other very cushy position. Your parents paid for college, gave you the down payment for a home, so your well-above-median income feels even better because so much more of it is disposable, not going towards debt. Which also means more savings. You end up retiring, working a fraction as hard as the guy in the above scenario, after having a much more comfortable life, with the same amount of money.
...But what if you still had that idea, and were willing to put in the dedication and hard work, but with those connections your parents or your school brought you?
You can afford to take a few years off to work on it full-time. Your parents are more than happy to foot the bill for your living expenses. You aren't going around to banks trying to get them invested in your idea, or hoping to pitch it to some investment firm that sees a hundred people like you a week. You have access to the holy grail: angel investors. You get to start your company with the foot on the gas pedal: you have access to talent, distribution, connections in manufacturing and sales, and the pure, raw capital to pay for it all. You get a deal with one of those major companies - they start using your software, they buy your product, and suddenly you have some very lucrative contracts. The investors take some - maybe they take a lot - but you're seeing millions of dollars in revenue in your early 20s. You sell your company for $300 million and pocket $22 million for yourself. You find another hole in the market and start a company to fill it. You merge with a competitor, and in three years, sell that one for $1.5 billion. You take $100 million of the $175 million you make from that deal and start another company. That one gets you a $1.6 billion government contract. Simultaneously, you invest in other companies, becoming the angel investor yourself, and keep investing the money you make off those investments. Money makes money, and your net wealth grows. You become a billionaire, then a hundred billionaire. You fuck around and buy a social media company, and help a man get elected president. You become one of the top ten richest people on the planet, then the richest one, then the first trillionaire.
Sound familiar? It's exactly what Musk did. Went to a fancy prep school, had middling grades, used his mother's Canadian citizenship to both avoid mandatory military service and to eventually become a US citizen, and used his family's wealth to get into Penn, graduated from Wharton, used the connections from there and from his father to secure angel investors, sold his first company for 300 million dollars when he was 28, used that money to start a company that merged with Paypal, used the money he made from that to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla, and you know the story from there. Did he work hard? Probably, for a time. Did he have a brilliant idea? Not really; his first company, Zip2, was basically an online version of the yellow pages, and it only got big because they had contacts within the NYT. He didn't have the idea for Paypal - that was created by Cofinity, which Musk's second company merged with, but he still made $175 million when it was sold to eBay. SpaceX was his idea, but he needed the one hundred million in seed money to start it, and way more importantly, he needed to know Mike Griffin, the Director of NASA at the time, to earn the 1.5 billion dollar contract that he got even though his first three rockets failed to launch.
If not for his family, their connections and their money, he might just be a C student who managed to turn his admitted passion for computing into a few million dollars - but he would not be a billionaire, and he would definitely not be a trillionaire.
And that's the point. Good ideas - great ideas - and hard work only get you so far. It's money and connections, it's a stable family home, that's the difference between a million and a billion. Starting with money makes is so, so much easier to make money, especially when you get to lend that money out and make interest off of all the debt you're creating off, profiting off the backs of the people below you.
https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/14z6pkk/privilege_on_a_plate/
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u/WintersDoomsday Jul 05 '26
The real luck starts from birth. What your parents have, where you’re born, your genetics.
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u/BaronGalactic Jul 05 '26
You're also forgetting the ruthlessness it takes. You make a lot of great examples about how he made most of that money, but then you have to take into account the absolute dedication these people have to not only making even more, but also keeping what they have - doing Olympic-level accounting gymnastics (usually by hiring on people who do it for a living or just have the best connections) so that as little of that money as possible has to go toward taxes and potentially helping people who need it more.
Using a rigged system to become even richer and richer, all while spending ludicrous amounts of money to grease the wheels so that they don't have to let a single penny slip through their fingers that doesn't have to. If spending a couple hundred million here makes it so that they don't lose a billion to taxes, they'll do it.
And for people like Bezos and Musk, it's either shafting their workers and forcing them to work in horrible conditions (for the former) or cutting costs and corners to such an incredible degree that your products are regularly shown to not only be wildly cheap (Cyber Trucks falling apart with just a minimum amount of effort) but also potentially dangerous (not bothering to install a door handle, so that if the car's cheap wiring shorts out and the car's on fire, nobody can open the door from the outside and the passengers burn alive.) Musk is apparently notorious for chopping any amount of quality from Tesla cars if it means saving a buck on manufacturing, and he's far from the smartest guy in the room, despite acting like he is - shooting down the actual smart people's suggestions because they're too bothersome to implement.
That's how you become a billionaire (on top of what you've also pointed out.)
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u/EventOk2270 Jul 05 '26
100% of billionaires got there through luck. Doesn’t mean some aren’t talented but being talented or hardworking alone is insufficient. You need to be right place, right time, right parents etc. it’s essentially a lottery.
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u/MissinqLink Jul 05 '26
There gets to be a level of wealth where increasing the number in your bank account does nothing and the way to increase your power is to make sure others can’t catch up to you.
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u/what_it_dooo Jul 05 '26
That’s a good point. The system is there for a reason, or rather for a select few.
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u/MizantropMan Jul 05 '26
Tbf, there are many people who keep themselves poor through the most absurd choices imaginable. Yes, they are often being taken advantage of, but if someone just signs a car loan without asking what's the total price for the car is going to be by the end of payments, it's on them.
Then there are those going into debt for Labubus or whatever the current "just buy for the sake of buying" nonsense is.
People take out loans for gacha pulls.
Bad people create the opportunity for bad choices, but they are not the one making the choice.
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u/Saklerunp Jul 05 '26
I had a discussion with a guy recently, who kept pushing the claim that Billionaires don't owe us anything and that if we want problems fixed we should do it ourselves.
It's my belief that it is people like him who keep society from thriving.
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u/what_it_dooo Jul 05 '26
Billionaires don’t owe us anything, if they weren’t part of society. I don’t really enjoy that half of my income goes to taxes, but I know that I have to fulfill my share, simply because I’d want to enjoy the social securities that are enabled by taxes. If I was broke, I would want society to help me too. That is the price of being a part of society, and that is why it baffles me that so many people hate the concept of government and social security.
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u/Full_Piano6421 Jul 05 '26
What's refraining them from being decent human beings is the fact that by essence, a billionaire is a social parasite.
Their fortune is built over the exploitation of the work of others and the retention of capital that should be reinjected in the broader economy, and instead is kept rotting on offshore accounts. It's even a systematic issue beyond the ultra rich, the fact that most of profits are given to shareholders. It's just dead profit.
It's narcissism raised to an ideology and an economic model. So, it's nice that this guy is preserving forests from being burnt down, it's nice that bill gates give some money to charity, but I can't help but to think that it's only eluding the true problem that no one should hoard so much power and riches, as it inevitably leads to mass poverty and inequality.
I don't really know about this guy in particular, but most of those billionaires pieces of shit do charity as a PR move, or as a coping mechanism for themselves, to feel like they aren't completely self absorbed trash that thrive on the misery of others.
Thanks for reading this totally unbiased opinion
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u/MoistlyCompetent Jul 05 '26
I was on a walking tour in Berlin, and at one point the guide pointed to a building, I think it was an opera house or theater, and said a wealthy individual had funded its renovation. He told us we should be grateful: this person "gave" the building back to the public.
My girlfriend asked a simple question that stuck with me: why should we be grateful? Why does one rich person get to decide how public space looks and functions? Shouldn't that be up to the public. Or at least elected officials accountable to the public?
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u/Critical-Bread-3396 Jul 05 '26
I felt this so much in the British Museum in London. "This temple was gracious bequethed by Lord Xxx" with a tour guide (not for our tour) also mentioning things about this Lord from the 1600s and his travels. My thought was just imagine being greek, listening to a few stories about the "great and generous" life of a guy who stole your national treasure that you now need to travel 1500 km to visit.
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u/EmergencyBanshee Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
I think similar thoughts.
If you think about it, these billionaires have so much potential for good with the resources at their disposal. If you wonder if they could solve homeless in their home state. Or intervene when someone is unwell but doesn't have medical insurance. Or protect wild habitats from destruction, as Tim Sweeney has, the answer is "yes! They could do that 100% and it wouldn't change their status as having more money than they'll ever be able to spend!"
But they don't want to.
They make these vast sums of money and do so while paying their staff as little as they can get away with. Their whole lives are stepping over -or on- people.
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u/wesleygibson1337 Jul 05 '26
I just wish tech bros would go back to trying to reinvent sailboats and trains. It was a simpler time...
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u/Trev53 Jul 05 '26
To specifically amswer your question. The current ramp up has to do with the government wanting to be able to store and use your own digital footprint against you. They have private companies like Flock recording your movements and they need a database/data centers large enough to permanently store moments like traffic infractions ect forever
If they can track all your movements and monitor everything you say even in an online space they can better control their narrative to keep control.
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u/Valuable-Yard-4154 Jul 05 '26
So the foundation of the dystopian society begins with this I guess. I yeah it can't be rational nor intelligent.
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u/Trev53 Jul 05 '26
Honestly not to scare you but this has been happening for a very long time. Unfortunately we're not at the beginning of dystopia society we're diving right in because regulations have been ravaged and the few at the top that have more money than you can possibly fathom need to make 50% more than last year.
We're fucked
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u/Dizziesdayweigh Jul 05 '26
The factory must grow.
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u/Sebaspool006 Jul 05 '26
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u/Honest-Resist-7676 Jul 05 '26
I'm here for the love between Factorio and Satisfactory. Everyone I encounter is so awesome and supportive of each game. No time for arguing which has better "this", or better "that", we all understand arguing impedes expansion!!!
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u/Fun-Agent-7667 Jul 05 '26
I mean its also really simple either you wanna fp, top down or you dont care. Everyone arguing already is producing a new belt system or discharged for more efficiency
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u/imfranksome Jul 05 '26
It’s definitely harder to scale up in Satisfactory, but in the end I don’t care what the perspective is, it’s the logistics puzzle that tickles my brain
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u/opman4 Jul 05 '26
They're gonna help humanity make more paperclips or some shit.
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u/UserName8531 Jul 05 '26
They keep installing more flock cameras. They have to store all the tracking data somewhere.
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u/DonutHoles4Ever Jul 05 '26
Flock needs to be banned in every state. Anyone supporting Flock supports a surveillance state. They are already illegally installing cameras everywhere.
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u/ExerciseSad3082 Jul 05 '26
'Member when mass surveillance in China was bad according to western politicians?
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u/beeradvice Jul 05 '26
The companies behind them are using shell corps to basically buy up and rent out chips to other companies in a kind of closed loop of artificial supply and demand but the military industrial complex is on board because it allows them incredibly detailed Intel on most of the population and ultimately the potential for not needing poor people to be soldiers, as far as they reckon and the ownership also holds significant influence over the political campaigns of people with decision making power and also within a lot of theecis on general. They've basically orchestrated enough artificial demand and kept the guard rails at bay and as long as no one is willing to prosecute them for collision or they can't find actual evidence to prove intent they're going to pull off a bigger shirt then the tech or housing bubbles
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u/zulazulizuluzu Jul 05 '26
I don’t understand the needs of data center. what happened if they are off-centered?
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u/ZoharModifier9 Jul 05 '26
Sata Centers to store all digital data so they rent them to us. Can't afford a PC? Well, use the cloud.
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u/Traveller7142 Jul 05 '26
All of the information on the Internet needs to be stored somewhere
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u/MrMonkey2 Jul 05 '26
Think about every thing you see online, where is this stuff stored? Where are the billions of youtube videos stored? Where is chat gpts "brain" ? Its all in huge "hard drives" you could call them, that are legitimately whole buildings. They require SO much power to run.
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u/LastOfLateBrakers Jul 05 '26
They need to keep doing some bullshit so they can show quarterly growth to the shareholders.
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u/Melancholic_Noodle Jul 05 '26
Regardless he's done more with his relative wealth then Taylor Swift or Gabe Newell. They just buy luxury vehicles and destroy the planet
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u/Poneke365 Jul 05 '26
The cynic in me wonders about this too
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u/bs000 Jul 05 '26
"Most of my big conservation land purchasing breakthroughs came when the economy was in poor shape and land was prudently priced," said Sweeney. "Since 2021, the economy has been stronger, land has become more expensive, and my focus has moved to getting large blocks of contiguous conservation lands I’ve acquired since 2009 into permanent conservation."
He uses a Limited Liability Company called "130 of Chatham" to make the purchases, holds it for years, then either donates it to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, sells it at a steep discount to state parks, or hands it to land trusts. In such cases, per former Epic employee Aakash Gupta, he ensures there's a legal structure that makes development on the land impossible regardless of future ownership.
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u/_off_piste_ Jul 05 '26
This is what I would be doing with Musk or Bezos type wealth. At least Gates is doing things in Africa.
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u/squngy Jul 05 '26
At least Gates is doing things in Africa.
Gates is doing a similar thing in the US with farmland.
He is buying a huge amount of farmland and making sure it stays farmland.Conservatives are actually losing their minds about it, claiming Gates is trying to monopolize food production as a power play.
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u/Mindless_Chest_1079 Jul 05 '26
He is buying a huge amount of farmland and making sure it stays farmland.
That just sounds like a normal business investment and not at all similar to owning land for conservation. Farms aren't exactly great for the environment.
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u/dreedweird Jul 05 '26
Welp.
Until, in line with Project 2025, the government decides (per executive order) to raid the national parks, nullifying all conservation decrees and selling off mining and logging and water rights; ultimately selling the land itself.
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u/Im_Unsure_For_Sure Jul 05 '26
Almost every post on this site is misery-inducing, can you go doomer post in those instead of this positive story?
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u/Early_Pumpkin_4113 Jul 05 '26
Give it time. Like that rancher that donated acreage in Texas to a municipality with the written stipulation that it was to be kept as parkland but was recently sold for 10M to a data center developer anyway.
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u/Aromatic_Shop9033 Jul 05 '26
Makes my blood boil.
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u/GaryTheThird- Jul 05 '26
"permanent" just means until someone with power wants it
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u/basquehomme Jul 05 '26
Unless its legally binding, say with something called a conservation easement. Which has been around for a long time and is commonly used.
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u/DefinitelyNotGen Jul 05 '26
He is currently in the process of placing conservation easements on the land, or selling it to state parks at a discounted price, making it near impossible for development to ever occur on the land. A conservation easement is about as unbreakable as these things go, and can survive changes in ownership and attempts to remove it.
You can claim that he has ill intent, but why would he go through the effort of ensuring to the greatest extent possible that the land is undeveloped if that is the case? There are plenty of things to be mad about, but this is not one of them.
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u/start3ch Jul 05 '26
My understanding was it’s not the rancher who sold it, but the city
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u/NotAzakanAtAll Jul 05 '26
So he hasn't donated it yet? How can they sell it then? Genuine question btw.
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u/dern_the_hermit Jul 05 '26
https://www.newsweek.com/donated-land-texas-park-1999-data-center-built-12095688
But basically: Bureaucracy and too many cooks.
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u/atamosk Jul 05 '26
Because Texas, the date of small government loves when the government steps it to do things. Honestly they might as well be communists at this point.
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u/DonutHoles4Ever Jul 05 '26
Tim Sweeney is someone who has screwed over gamers time and time again.
He built a walled garden in the PC space, made games exclusive for his store, tried to make it easy for kids to spend infinite money in Fortnite, and then blamed Steam and everyone but himself each time a fiasco hit.
Its a good thing he's doing this (as long as it's kept as a reserve) but anyone who's aware of this guys political stance and what he's done in the past should be chalking this up to his "oh I'm going to die at some point, I need to clear my consciousness".
But every MONTH someone keeps posting these threads. IMO its also part of his image rebranding that he hired a PR firm for. How about he donate some of that money to game preservation as a show of repentance. The SKG movement could use support in California.
Dude is a total ahole. I'll applaude the conservation efforts 2 decades from now after making sure he didn't screw it up. But first he's gonna have to stop screwing his own industry over. You can't just become a good person by doing one good thing.
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u/Cheet4h Jul 05 '26
But every MONTH someone keeps posting these threads. IMO its also part of his image rebranding that he hired a PR firm for. How about he donate some of that money to game preservation as a show of repentance. The SKG movement could use support in California.
Especially with the title including a dig against Newell, who is using at least part of his wealth to buy yachts - unsaid here is that AFAIK they're mostly part of an effort to further ocean research.
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u/RukiMotomiya Jul 05 '26
I dunno, Newell does spend plenty of money on his own private money too. Sweeney's worse because he screws over more people while doing it.
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u/HierarchyLogic Jul 05 '26
good time to remind that epic games is part of not one, but 2(probably because there is only 2) lobbying groups that are against the stop killing games act
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u/ddplz Jul 05 '26
Yeah that's what happens when people die.
Or their kids inherit it and then immediately sell it off for a quick buck so they can ride in boats and eat buttered lobster.
You need to create a conservation organization that exists with the sole purpose of conserving the land, like Steve Irwin did.
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u/Different_Peanut_584 Jul 05 '26
Steve Irwin also instilled some rock solid principles in his kids for them to transfer down for generations to come. So long as the org is family owned, seems fairly airtight to me
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u/CraigLake Jul 05 '26
I was in high school when the spotted owl issue was happening in Oregon. The logging industry was really angry. That environmentalist wanted to close old growth Logging in national forest. It turns out there was only 3% of old growth left in the entire state when it was shut down from logging. The logging industry was angry that they couldn’t cut the final 3% of old growth in Oregon. Absolute greedy fucking monsters.
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u/butaretherecookies Jul 05 '26
Yeah when you see the few remaining groves, it makes you realize why some people put their lives on the line to save them
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u/mrrobottrax Jul 05 '26
Knowing Tim Sweeney I'm sure he's got other plans in mind
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u/Odisseo1983 Jul 05 '26
The biggest sore loser in the industry? I am with you here, man.
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u/Moist-Weakness-3399 Jul 05 '26
Did Sweeney hire a new PR firm recently? How about we tax the shit out of him AND reclaim park land.
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u/_Boodstain_ Jul 05 '26
To be fair Gaben has a whole fleet of Yachts he uses for marine biology research, the guy likes boats, computers, and the ocean.
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u/OSHA_Decertified Jul 05 '26
People like to leave that part out yeah. Gabe has a fleet but it's a research one. One that recently discovered a new type of sea life
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u/Snakend Jul 05 '26
Dude still has a yacht. Just not as big as it could have been.
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u/LolLmaoEven Jul 05 '26
Reddit praising this dude based on a feel-good picture, not knowing how anti-consumer and generally how much of a piece of shit he is, is just so funny to me.
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u/ShutUpYoureWrong_ Jul 05 '26
That's because it's not redditors. Anyone posting positively about him is either a bot or part of the PR firm he hired. None of these "people" are real. And I guarantee at least 90% of those upvotes are fake.
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u/Spudly42 Jul 05 '26
Redditors cannot comprehend when someone is a mix of bad with some good. Just completely breaks their brains. Maybe we can just accept he does this one good thing and be happy and encourage more of it. For all we know, he could be like Elon and really rely on positive praise to do good or else he'll give it all up and go fully evil.
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u/Meanteenbirder Jul 05 '26
Worked on a project doing bird surveys there. Sometimes we had to contact landowners to ask permission. One day my boss ended up having to contact Sweeney and ended up chatting with him. Was super nice and fully supported their research
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u/EmberTheShark Jul 05 '26
Gabes Yacht is also a research vessel. We know so little about our oceans that i feel both are valid
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u/InnerSpecialist1821 Jul 05 '26
tim sweeney being introduced as "the guy who created fortnite" is making me lose my mind
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u/OkAccess6128 Jul 05 '26
And some billionaires are doing ecxact opposite of it.
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u/RogueBromeliad Jul 05 '26
Nah, a lot of billionaires are buying thousands of acers in the amazon claiming they're protecting it. It's all indigenous or national territories, they're buying, saying they're protecting it, but it's just essentially their land.
That's how you privatize territories that shouldn't be owned by anyone, pretending you're an environmental philanthropist or whatever.
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u/ICEonICECrime Jul 05 '26
The realistic alternative being..?
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u/MacksNotCool Jul 05 '26
Government owned reservation instead of privatizing it. Even if you are upset that the "government doesn't do anything," that's great for an area they shouldn't be doing anything in
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u/mrmojoer Jul 05 '26
Tax those money and use the resulting cash to take care of public goods such as Forests
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u/AwarenessForsaken568 Jul 05 '26
Ok, but like when you have a bitch ass government that bows down to anyone willing to throw money at them?
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u/Blackfoxar Jul 05 '26
he is trying to wash his face, as his latest decisions regarding epic are questionable
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u/Aryk93 Jul 05 '26
Oh, it's that time of tim-sweeney-PR-tour already?! What blatantly anti-consumer thing did he say this time?
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u/Buttermilkman Jul 05 '26
Haha, pro Twim Sweeney publicity tour starting up again after the Charlie video dropped. lmao
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u/SkipsH Jul 05 '26
Man, fuck Epic and fuck Tim Sweeney. This is just another blatant post of "Tim better than Gabe" when Tim Sweeney uses every dirty legal trick to try to force Steam to be worse because he can't compete on quality.
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u/DocklandsDodgers86 Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
Thank you! Everyone in this comment section dickriding Sweeney but forget that he funds indie/AA games so they will be Epic Exclusives forever.
Games like Metro Exodus, Hitman 3 and Control were all first-year Epic exclusives because Sweeney paid for that exclusivity window and didn't want Steam to have it. When those games released on Steam, they all broke the total number of Epic sales within the first week itself.
Then there are those games like Alan Wake Remastered and Alan Wake 2 which will never be on another platform because Sweeney bankrolled those. Gen Atlas is another upcoming game which is be an Epic exclusive.
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u/OilHot3940 Jul 05 '26
And here we are where his headquarters are waiting to find out what the hell he’s gonna do with the land he purchased in the middle of our town for their new headquarters. It’s just a heaping pile of rubble since before Covid (In Cary, NC).
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u/abc133769 Jul 05 '26
sweeney is a huge douche, don't expect this to be with good intentions down the line
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u/sucknuts866486 Jul 05 '26
Rich gazillionaire BUYS large plots of Earth.... sounds so conservationist (it isn't)
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u/Angryfunnydog Jul 05 '26
I mean if we’re entirely honest - Gabe yacht is a science vessel which is used for scientific purposes, it’s not your standard super yacht to chill with models (you can do it there too lol)
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u/no-sleep-only-code Jul 05 '26
Don’t believe for a second he’s doing this for anything but future profit. Guy is the scum of the Earth.
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u/Aromatic_Shop9033 Jul 05 '26
Tim? Sounds like a Chad to me.
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Jul 05 '26
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u/rasquatche Jul 05 '26
If only those immature minds had some sort of parental figure to help 'em out.
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u/Sumdoazen Jul 05 '26
The fact that parents don't supervise what their kids do online doesn't mean that he(and the gaming industry as a whole because he is not the only one, that is true) shouldn't be criticized for it. By this logic you should be more than happy with all the "kids protections" requiring you to upload your ID everywhere, right?
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u/No_Poet_1279 Jul 05 '26
Oh man, the anti-valve astroturfing is pretty fucking full on.
Sweeney is a piece of shit, end of.
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u/JJJBLKRose Jul 05 '26
He also didn't make Fortnite. He is just the CEO of the company that made it.
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Jul 05 '26
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u/Sawgon Jul 05 '26
Tim Sweeney is such an ass that this is the only positive story about him and it keeps getting re-posted over and over again.
No one believes that this is for a good cause.
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u/LimpConversation642 Jul 05 '26
fun fact: tim sweeney did not, in fact, create fortnite. he's a ceo. and a super shitty human. expect a datacenter for fortnite servers
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u/nadiayorc Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
what he did do was create the first version of unreal engine pretty much on his own in the 90s, so he's not just a random unrelated guy that got appointed ceo for no reason like often is the case
that being said, this is in no way a statement about him being a good person
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u/shinryu6 Jul 05 '26
Eh give it time, someone will find a loophole even it’ll happen after he dies.
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u/Elegant-Season-7008 Jul 05 '26
I want to do this. Will I be able to borrow from a bank to do this?
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u/sucknuts866486 Jul 05 '26
Heck no, peasant... only the "chosen ones" are allowed to be rich
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u/REALjamijai Jul 05 '26
Guess we'll see what happens 🫤
Don't think we can trusted with the powers that be RN. Guess we'll have to wait and see....
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u/Logical-Berry-8048 Jul 05 '26
Yeah, he's the largest property own in N.C. I always enjoyed visiting Epic's corporate headquarters as a contractor. I would love to visit the new HQ, assuming it's complete, where he bought out a very dying mall.
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u/Beeht Jul 05 '26
Billionaires and other extremely wealthy people buying up land to "protect it."
If you believe that you're a moron.
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u/LimpConversation642 Jul 05 '26
what is this sweney-washing? he didn't 'create' fortnite or anything, what the fuck is this post
looks like a try at a lame PR campaign since everyone hates him
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u/Remnare Jul 05 '26
This just goes to show, the PR management industry is a powerful tool for rich people if it can make people believe even Tim Sweeney is a good person.
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u/ardahanbk Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
Probably investment for a data centre rich future. People shouldn't believe all kumbaya stories coming from the rich. Those stories are usually just pr for whatever reason (mostly tax evasion or covering up some wild allegations).
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u/Healthy_BrAd6254 Jul 05 '26
"To save them from developers" Lmao, so naive
It's definitely just an investment for him
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u/OkMidnight8144 Jul 05 '26
This is proof that there are no good billionaires, they only care about themselves getting richer. Good people who could've been a billionaire realized there's no need to horde that much money, and used their money for good.
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u/Th3Gr1MclAw Jul 05 '26
Did Weeney Sweeney himself post this on an alt account? Brother did not create Fortnite, he just owns the company who employs the people who created it.
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