You mean the guy that suggested privatizing publicly invested vaccines? That guy is invested in saving as many lives as possible? … rofl!
Comment on The richest people in the world are morally bankrupt
MyBrainHurts@piefed.ca 4 days ago
Ehhhhhh, some, sure.
But on the flip side, you have folks like Bill Gates who has more or less devoted his life to saving as many lives as possible.
Or Buffett who last I heard had donated some 50 or 60 billion to different foundations.
Even Musk, for all his recent evil got rich trying to reduce our dependence on gas cars. As much as I dislike the man, I imagine the electric car industry would be pretty far back in his absence.
MotoAsh@piefed.social 4 days ago
tomiant@piefed.social 4 days ago
Dude is missing the fucking point anyway. So what if there actually is a generous philanthropist billionaire? Does that prove that the system is working, because it enables private citizens to accumulate enough power to change the world any way they see fit? Because then we have a system where we are at the mercy as a society of the personal idiosyncrasies of the ultra wealthy, instead of elected officials.
If money is supposed to be a metric of success, then morality is nothing but the accumulation of money, and he who gets the most gets to tell everyone else how the world is to be run.
Societies cannot successfully and equitably and fairly be run by private individuals with extreme wealth. It is, in fact, the polar opposite of what we have tried to achieve with democratic societies. That’s the whole point of paying taxes, of having laws and regulations that diminish the influence of money, because let run wild, we get countries and populations run by modern warlords and chieftains bent on getting ever more for themselves and less for everyone else.
Capitalism is a fucking CANCER on humanity.
aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
yes, the cybertruck that only sold half of what he predicted and they had a shitload of cybertrucks left over because no one wanted them.
BoycottTwitter@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Bill Gates was ruthless during the 90s. Just as a random example he tried to make ACPI only work with Windows saying “It seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work” just as a random example.
theparadox@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Bill Gates who has more or less devoted his life to saving as many lives as possible.
…
Buffett who last I heard had donated some 50 or 60 billion to different foundations.
…
Even Musk, for all his recent evil got rich trying to reduce our dependence on gas cars
Maybe they are happier than OP suspects - I’m not them so I can’t really comment on that. As far as your framing of their motives and achievements though… Hard disagree, especially Musk and Gates. All three fucked over tons of people to get their obscene wealth.
I’d go into great depth as to why, but it usually ends in nothing being learned and a lot of my time wasted so I’ll just hard disagree and bow out.
DrFistington@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Fuck ‘foundations’ their just methods of money laundering and trafficking funds.
They would have helped far more people by paying their fair share in taxes. Oh, Bill Gates paid billions to try and help people in Africa? Great plan asshole, those people died from climate change related conflict, or they’ll die in the upcoming ww3. Oh, and Americans are now essentially slaves in a fascist Dictatorship, but go on about your fucking mosquito nets.
95% tax rate on anything over $250 million for an individual. Period, regardless of source, and put a 5 million dollar surcharge on every private jet fight.
pivot_root@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Even Musk, for all his recent evil got rich trying to reduce our dependence on gas cars.
Everybody else already covered his role in Tesla, so let’s look at something else that demonstrates his concern for the environment and his fellow species:
He has a datacenter in Memphis running 35 “temporary” methane generators to power Grok, the self-described “Mecha Hitler” AI. All but a dozen of them are being used without permits for permanent generators, and none of them have air pollution filtration systems installed. Oh, and it’s near a low-income community that was already plagued by air pollution.
tomiant@piefed.social 4 days ago
But on the flip side, you have folks like Bill Gates who has more or less devoted his life to saving as many lives as possible.
Can you fucking imagine thinking that Bill Gates foundation is anything but a massive tax evasion scam set to funnel funds through intermediaries to enrich his family even more? Remember when Zuckerberg said he was going to “donate” like 90% of his wealth? Well, seems that was a fraud too.
BUT THAT IS NOT THE POINT.
We have societies and governments so that we all have equal say in how resources should be distributed, so that we can all be free and all live fair. If we have a society where we accept that someone has the capacity to end world hunger but it’s up to them personally to make that choice, then we are back to some feudal bullshit.
People should not have that much money, because money is power, and if they have a trillion dollars and vote with their wallets (like you do), then suddenly they have a trillion votes and you have one. That’s the end of democracy, period. No system can survive that.
As a counterpoint, imagine if Bill Gates instead chose, personally, to spend his wealth on propping up an armed resistance force and a private army and into destabilizing governments so that he can seize control like some global warlord, would that also be an example of how capitalism works precisely as expected? I’d say so.
The whole point is that we cannot give private citizens the power to control societies. That’s how you get barbarism and dynastic rule and slavery and human misery. Democracy is the only light in the world, and capitalism is a direct challenger to rule of democracy and law. If money is power, then capitalism is a form of government, and a fucking horrific one that will push us way back into the dark ages if we allow it.
pizza_the_hutt@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Bill Gates is a pedo who spent a ton of time with Epstein, which is likely why his wife divorced him.
Musk didn’t create Tesla. He bought it, and is currently running it into the ground. Employees have compared him to a pidgeon who flies in, shits on everything, and then leaves again. If anything, Tesla’s relative success is in spite of Musk, not because of him. Tesla is already starting to lose value due to Musk’s antics and the fact that all other manufacturers are making electric cars now, too.
Warren Buffet may be one of the better billionaires, but that’s not saying much. He still invests in fossil fuel companies and could give away more of his wealth to charity. And then there’s the underlying problem with an economic system that steals living wages from employees to enrich investors like Buffet, but that’s a story for another time.