Comment on When we eat the billionaires, we should spare Gabe Newell? No?
EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 19 hours agoI agree with this sentiment, but given a choice, I believe Gabe would make the right one and spend his wealth to lose billionaire status.
His supposed exploitation was not by his own design, but rather by luck - the sheer benefit of riding a privately owned and benevelontly steered surfboard on top of a collapsing capitalist society.
Basically, there’s a meme about all other companies shooting themselves in the foot so Gabe always benefits, and part of that is in the way those companies fucked and manipulated their control of capital and markets. Gabe benefits just by being one of the few that can afford to participate in that system others rigged.
So he simply rigs it the least, and wins by providing the platform with the least greedy problems. Far far less than he could given his position.
IMHO, despite all controversies, Steams cut of profits from providing equal access to game visibility despite creator, nationality, background, etc, has legitimately opened the door for nearly anyone to be successful on their platform. For all the tools and services they provide, they ask for literally the smallest cut compared to any other publishing platform.
Gabe could destroy that to his benefit on a whim, and instead he over designs it to make it possible for nearly anyone to try gaem dev if they do the work needed to develop for them.
To hold so much capital simply for providing some form of equality to access the same in a system that overwhelming benefits others with more resources is in no way greedy imo. It’s being the person with the only fire extinguisher who knows how to use it in a burning down building: popular.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
A man who owns a billion dollars worth of megayatchts is not doing everything he can to ethically spend/donate his wealth. Yes, lots of his wealth is tied up in Valve stock and he can’t sell that without losing voting rights and making Valve stop being what it is, but he’s rolling in other assets and cash, too
EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
The dispicableness of billionaires is measured by their actions not their worth. And despite being of high worth, Gabes actions are unquestionably not greedy. He’s doing almost everything he can to minimize his wealth in favor of equality to access Steam as a game dev.
If he wanted to, he could charge far more than $100 to develop for them, and buy several more yachts.
But he hasn’t.
Which makes his platform more popular. And in turn brings him even more cash to buy more yachts.
His yachts aren’t indicative of his greed, but his benevolence in the face of it.
Show me a single other company the size of Valve that has chosen to forgo profit over access to something like Steam to make money yourself. That’s basically non existent in the year 2025 aside from Valve. I’m not going to judge Gabe as a bad person for profiting from that. He could be profiting much much more and is choosing access for nearly everyone instead.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Realising that ratfucking your customers and suppliers at every opportunity makes them less willing to do business with you in the future, and therefore you’ll potentially make more money by not doing that, so then not doing that, is exactly what a greedy person would do if they weren’t also a moron. Gabe Newell is certainly not a moron. Lots of other billionaires are, or have other empathy-limiting conditions that mean they don’t realise people won’t want to do repeat business with them if they got screwed over the last time.
There’s obviously a majority of billionaires that are much less ethical than Newell, but one superyatcht ought to be enough for anyone, and anyone buying a second one instead of putting the money directly to good causes is not benevolent.
EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
I see granting access for anyone to make games for Steam as a good cause.
The opportunity cost for what profit could be made by closing that is multitudes of yachts worth.
Just because you do not value this as a good cause does not mean it is not.
Does Gabe have more yachts than are needed? Yes. But again, you can’t just say he’s greedy because he has them. That’s being incredibly biased.
Instead, how about you tell me what actions of his has made him greedy that don’t involve his assets?
I can name hundreds of ways Musk should be drawn and quartered based on his actions that have nothing to do with his wealth, but rather his actual documented choices.
What choices / actions / or anything of actual greed has Gabe done that you can point to?
It’s like saying anything with a swastika on it is for Nazis without realizing Hindus have been using a right oriented Swastika to represent good fortune for years.
Gabe Newall has done the following with his 11 Billion fortune:
Co-founded “The Heart of Racing” car racing team that raises money for Children’s charity.
Donates heavily to the Seattle Children’s Hospital and several others around the world.
Founded Foundry10, a non profit education company that helps neuro divergent kids learn through new methods of education
Started InkFish to expand the scientific study of our oceans and is now the second highest individual donor towards marine research on the planet.
80.lv/…/gabe-newell-reportedly-plans-to-invest-us…
That’s why he has those yachts.
Same reason Hindus have their swastikas.
Their actions speak louder than the symbols they use suggest. Even when those symbols are Yachts.
He has 11 Billion. Everyone else even close to his level of market control has several magnitudes more. Why does he have so little when he owns a virtual monopoly on digital distribution?
Because he’s not in it for maximizing his bank account.
ozymandias117@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Valve doesn’t have stocks
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
It doesn’t have publicly-traded shares because it’s a private company, but it’s still correct to say someone has stock in a private company that they own part or all of. Like with physical objects, they don’t stop existing just because they’re not for sale to the public. It’s an easy mistake to make, though, as the vast majority of the time people talk about stocks and shares it’s in the context of buying and selling publicly-traded stock.
Cooper8@feddit.online 7 hours ago
It is nitpicking, but in legal terms you could say he has shares in the company but not stocks. Stocks refers specifically to publicly traded shares, that is to say shares sold on a stock market. Shares is the more broad term as it can refer not only to stocks but also private equity units of various types. Valve is a Limited Liability Corporation, or LLC, which have Membership Units as the type of shares held by owners, which differs from stocks both in terms of tax treatment and limitations on how they can be transacted.