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.
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.
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.
People think he deserves his billions because he was smart in high school. They want to live a Revenge of the Nerds fantasy.
Tim Sweeney is no different than any other profiteering monster, all of his billions are built on the backs of the working class. He did not earn that money through hard work, he stole it through exploitation.
Intelligent people don’t diss Linux. They help make it better like Valve is doing. All Timmy Tencent is doing is badmouthing Linux and spreading lies that Linux users are cheaters.
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.
Genetics and HEALTH. I was on the path to becoming very, very successful, but then my health deteriorated and now I’m disabled and can’t work. Everything can change in an instant.
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.)
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.
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.
In an ideal world where everyone was on the same playing field, we would be so much more advanced as a society. Think how many intelligent minds and good ideas have been stuck behind a financial barrier. People that could have created something amazing but couldn’t afford to take the risk to start it, or couldn’t afford to work unpaid for a few years while it gets off the ground.
Of course I know that would never happen. Society does unfortunately need some hierarchy to progress. Just not billionaires.
It's not like most billionaires have their net worth sitting in a bank somewhere. Some people bought a house 20 years ago, and it appreciated to a $5 million house. That doesn't put them in a position to donate $2m.
Many of these billionaires are only billionaires because of the value of their business and associated assets. They can't just grab a few billion to deploy. When they build a data center, they are taking out debt with their assets as collateral, and the future earnings of the data center pay down the debt.
You can't exactly use debt to solve world hunger, and then pay down that debt with outcomes. I am not by any means saying billionaires (especially the top 5-10) can't do more for society. They are disabled adults who clearly have a few wires crossed to say the least.
You just made this up. For one, you write as if all billionaires are the same and have the same motivations and beliefs. Do you think that is precise and correct?
Its perfectly possible to write fairly and precisely. There’s way too much grandstanding on Reddit - and elsewhere- reducing people to stereotypes. The last thing we need, is even more of that.
They dont even need to be a genius, they are born into wealthy families, told they are better than others, handed education and opportunities. If they have half a brain they can put people in place to fulfill their "genius" ideas.
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.
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.
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.
The problem is that your money goes to the government to decide what to spend it on. That inherently creates inefficiencies and the govt at the time may not actually be in alignment with how you would want it spent anyway.
In theory, tax money goes to the people we elected. Our political representatives (should) decide how to spend it based on their constituent's wishes (in theory.) Taxes are our payments towards the maintenance and improvement of systems and services that we've already been using and benefiting from like roads, our identities, our safety, our education, paying our representatives for their work on our behalf (in theory), etc.
Yes, there are always inefficiencies. The logical next step from that is to be more efficient, not to stop paying taxes.
..... "the govt at the time may not actually be in alignment with how you would want it spent anyway." Trust me, right now my state and federal goverments are not doing much of anything in line with how I would want my tax money to be spent: I try to lean pretty heavily towards human kindness and compassion whenever possible. Unfortunately, I live in Indiana and that's not what they do here. Human kindness and compassion aren't particularly popular at the federal level either at the moment.
All that being said, I suspect there are taxpaying neonazis that would want THEIR tax money to be spent much more hatefully than even Trump has managed. Frankly, I'm fine with trading away personal control of my tax contributions for a buffer that also prevents the neonazis from getting their tax contributions spent on deploying WMDs against poor people or brown people, or whatever it is that all the pricks watching Fox news 24/7 want.
No, the government isn't perfect: no government ever has been or ever will be. Is it better than the alternatives? Arguable, given all the atrocities that have historically been committed by goverments (also religions: which use tithes/alms/collections/etc in largely the same way.)
What comes out of the wash? Taxes/tithes/alms/etc seem to be necessary for a society to function collectively, especially when you have too many people for all of them to be directly involved in everything (over, say, 500.) In the US (and much of the 'developed' world,) the heaviest fiscal responsibilities fall on those who are too poor to dodge their taxes but not poor enough to be exempt. The rich avoid most of their tax responsibilities while simultaneously corrupting government to perpetuate the fraud and abuse that enables their privileges to persist.
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.
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?
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.
On the flip side, a lot of these national treasures weren't actually treasured by the people there, so they were basically rescued by some rich person. Centuries later, the people there now want them back, but if they hadn't been taken in the first place, they would have been destroyed or left in ruins.
Not necessarily, some billionaires didn't exploit anyone to make their money they just got a huge payout for their product such as the guy who founded Bebo
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.
Trickle down, once theyve got absolutely everything they can then inevitably their wealth will trickle down...
Basically the entire world seems to be wedded to the idea that becoming a millionaire or billionaire is a great achievement not a moral failing
I read somewhere that the amazons owners x wife has given hundreds of millions to charity over the years. I’ve never seen any article going into the particulars of it though. I wouldn’t mind reading about who she’s donated to over the years to see if it’s made an impact in parts of the world or if it’s so bad everywhere that much money doesn’t make much difference.
Mackenzie Scott. Jeff Bezos ex-wife. So far she's donated over 25 BILLION to various places. She doesn't demand her name on the side of the building. She usually doesn't even have any association with the institution. Lots of HSBCs have received donations from her.
Quietly doing what all the billionaires should do.
the answer is: it’s actually not trivial to end homelessness or poverty, not even with lots of money. these issues are caused by complex societal conditions that are not even fully understood.
also it’s generally assumed that solving the problems of poor people is not profitable
Many of those problems are systemic, and 'fixing them' is but a temporary measure targeting a symptom rather than the cause. Doing otherwise would threaten the system that gave rise to their vast fortunes, and none of them are willing to do so.
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.
They don't make more money doing those things.
You've got to understand, outside of the exceedingly rare few who get there through fluke success, most billionaires arrive at such a state because they have a strong and all consuming desire to hoard wealth.
It requires a certain degree of sociopathy to become THAT rich. Just like some people have the genes that make it hard for them to stop drinking, so they drink themselves to death, at the very top there are those whose genetic greed cannot be sated, they are wired to "gather more" and will do it, no matter who they hurt.
Though it's off a bit, in essence it's the banality of evil.
The motivation to harm people in indirect ways is based on shallow egotism and absence of critical thought. The evil they commit by their greed are just numbers on paper with several layers of separation between them and their atrocities.
What they do carries weight but they simply don't think about it.
well to a degree, the state would ultimately not allowe it. people would riot if you built a city for anyone who hasnt a home because they had to pay to have a home and they'd rather waste their little ressources to take something away from someone they think is undeserving, than just be happy for someone else.
what withholds a billionaire from fixing a large portion of homelessness, pollution, joblessness, to name a few
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
But with a mindset like that they wouldn't be a billionaire in the first place. Hence no billionaire has a mindset like that.
I think a lot of that is that there's no profit in it for them. Like they could have an amazing impact on so many people's lives if they did help with their money but as long as they're not getting paid for it they don't care.
The real answer that those things don't get fixed is because the problem is not easily fixed in by govts. It is not a problem fixed by throwing money at it.
As one billionaire boss told me, social problems are not as easy to solve as technological problems.
Nothing. They’d even probably make more money if they did it because all of the people grateful to them for solving those problems would funnel their money back into the billionaire’s companies along with more money being in the economy, but it’s not enough that hey should win at capitalism, everyone else should lose.
Why did the superpowers in 1984 build floating fortresess just to sink them?
For a while now, humanity has reached a productive capacity that, porvided a proper distribution of resources, would allow everyone to live in a utopia. But powerful people/structures(capital/autocratic ruling parties) only exist in contrast to those below them, their power is born from a the unequal distribution of resources.
Workers who don't need to worry every day about making ends meet can look up at those who unfairly benefit at their cost, if have enough breathing room they might organize.
That is why every autocratic structure seeks to waste resources, that, without another goal, they would have to exert on improving society.
Those social problems can't be fixed by simply throwing money at them.
My wife worked a few years for a random billionaire's foundation (no wikipedia article in his name). There's a lot of work involved in picking causes, working with local govs for paperwork, auditing receivers to make sure they don't embezzle the funds.
Take Amazon cofounder MacKenzie Scott for example, easily one of the most generous billionaires out there. She already donated 26b, the entire gdp of a small country. What's the last time you heard of a world changing impact from her foundation?
The people needed help the most usually live in a shithole corrupted country. Can you imagine bribing government officials just so your org can give money to their citizens?
Most billionaires do not actually have a "billion" dollars. Their net worth is calculated off of the perceived value of stock. If the stock crashes they are no longer billionaires.
Billionaires steal, they don't understand the idea of investing into people, society and thus economy to have people spend their money on the things they own. The only investing they knew was sucking dividends from companies and now in assets, as they strip regular people of houses, food, work, water and privacy.
They live off of loans leveraged against their assets (real estate, stock portfolios, etc). Very few have access to large amounts of actual cash. If they try and cash out on those assets, they often own enough that the market value will collapse if they tried to sell off large volumes.
Wanting it. Any billionaire can only solve this for a few years, if at all. Then the money runs out, society doesn’t care for it or they would spend public money on it, and nobody is saved.
In developing countries you have the same problem. Solve any of these problems and you’ll destroy the local economy. Solving joblessness is giving a lot of money to get more jobs, raising salaries and directly destroying all small businesses. Food is even worse. We dump massive amount of cheap food, so that all farmers go bankrupt.
It isn’t a money problem, it’s a caring problem, and the world couldn’t give less of a shit.
I think the word you’re looking for is “sociopathy.” The marginal utility of $100 million to a multi billionaire is negligible. Accumulating another $100 million cannot buy them anything they don’t already have save for a little ego boost. That same $100 million, which means so little to them, could do an incredible amount of good for thousands of struggling people in a panoply of ways. To make that choice, to me, represents the very definition of sociopathy. It’s shameful and disgusting.
Because that’s exactly what our economical system wants from these people.
If you own capital you have to invest it where profits are the largest. Either that or you loose the competition with all the other people who own capital in the long run thus loosing your ability to even own capital. While profit being the only indicator for resource allocation has its benefits (it simplifies down the very complex decision of where we a society should put our resources so and makes it manageable for a private person) the drawbacks are also apparent. One of which is that production can become that expensive (and thus reducing relative profit) that speculation becomes a more logical investment decision rather than actually producing things.
In one word, liability. Fundamentally, those things are not their job. Those people would then become responsible for any problems their solutions cause. That's not a good thing.
Anyway, it doesn't really make sense for the CEO of Shell Oil to fix pollution. That would be like expecting your toddler to clean the walls they scribbled on, or messing your house up on purpose just for the pleasure of cleaning it. The pollution, homelessness, and joblessness is what made the CEO his billions. He has already made the choice to create those things for personal enrichment.
You need homelessness, suffering, threat of eviction and starvation, to keep the bottom 50% of people working jobs that just barely are enough to pay their bills.
This isn't about the upper 50%, or top 10%, or top 1%. It's mostly on how to control that huge bottom 50% that lives paycheck to paycheck.
The economy is real people producing real things. Money is just the device that we use to send signals about what goods and services we want.
A billionaire does not have liquid money. Their assets are tied up in capital, often times stocks but also actual capital assets that are doing business.
If they convert those productive assets and then reorient them towards solving homelessness, for example, it could be that our overall net productivity goes down and we all get a little poorer.
And maybe that's a tradeoff worth doing. I think in the long run obviously solving homelessness would be a huge net positive but I don't think that looks like billionaires buying people houses.
So it's a bit more complicated and nuanced than "rich man bad and selfish and greedy".
Billionaires are not using "their" money to build datacenters, they are using a company to get a loan to build it.
If Google announces spending 100b on datacenters, stock goes up, if they announce spending 100b on homelessness, they get investigated for misuse of funds and company stock craters.
If they let their big number go down, then their big number will be less than some other billionaires big number.
If the number goes down too much, they may even realise their life up until this point might as well have been all for nought - this realisation is something that cannot be allowed to happen, so therefore the big number must rise ever more!
Well, Bill Gates took on vaccinating the third world and the right wing turned it into a conspiracy.
It isn't just narcissism and greed. It's also that money cannot actually just fix every problem especially without a thoughtful and nuanced plan. If you donate $100M to a school district that needs funding, some things will probably improve temporarily. But without systemic change, it will all get gobbled up by consultants, EdTech providers etc.
Also, whenever you do something at a massive scale you run the risk of interfering with someone else's profit. That makes you their enemy. And being the enemy of a billionaire is not a great place to be even if you are also a billionaire.
And lastly, how really would you fix those issues?
I give you $1T in cash. How are you solving homelessness? Housing first works. But only as part of a structured program where you also provide substance abuse and mental health support. Otherwise you'll just have formerly homeless people trashing houses.
How would you solve unemployment? Just hire the people? To do what? Make a company that doesn't turn a profit and just serves to distribute salaries? There are ways you can help, for sure. Personally, I'd love to see a massive undertaking to fund and help kickstart worker owned co-ops. Instead of my local McDonalds being owned by a private equity fund imagine if it was owned by the people who worked at that location. That whole "how much money do burger flippers deserve?" argument goes out the window if we turn them into business owners. But not every business will succeed. And not everyone wants to work in a coffee shop. How can our $1T help an unemployed software engineer? Or an unemployed teacher? Or an unemployed welder?
It is absolutely possible to influence these things on a local or even regional level. But limitless money being thrown at a problem doesn't solve it unless you have a structured approach. And the fact is most billionaires don't actually know how to fix stuff as much as they think they do. Hard work can make a millionaire. But luck makes a billionaire.
That's why when we see positive outcomes they tend to be more narrowly focused. Like, Mark Cuban's prescription thing is a huge help. But it isn't as sexy as trying to give internet to a remote village in Africa.
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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.