This guy really proves that there are no good billionaires thing. Being good stopped him from staying a billionaire. Anyone who hoards wealth while others suffer from impoverishment and starvation is evil.
Yep. Those billions are made on the backs of suppressed wages and benefits, more employee productivity with less flexibility, enshittification, etc. It’s “earned” by squeezing it out of others.
I guess he understood that, felt guilty, and wanted to give it “back” to clear his conscience. That’s my personal take. I really want to believe there are good people with power and/or money.
Ok… but then we are beholden to where they choose to dispense their largesse. Great, the billionaires have a few pet projects they direct their philanthropy to, and it does help those recipients specifically.
But how about the lifetime earnings of the employees who saw their benefits packages shrink, their medical copays and premiums climb? Maybe that was enough to force their kids into crippling college loans instead of the parents having enough extra to help wirh 529s or just smaller more manageable loans? How about the customers who got inferior products or services that support, returns, or exchanges were obfuscated by deliberately ineffective phone menus or website resources that were designed to make people give up instead of receiving what they deserve? How about the billonaire’s pursuit of anti-tax laws to further line their pockets at the expense of government services? All of these things happen directly by command of the wealthy or by those riding on the coattails of those decisions as major investors or board of directors. All of them in service to the bottom line, and that bottom line is increased at your and my expense.
They may be good people. But you do not become a billionaire with clean hands.
I’m going to admit to being too tired to read that big middle paragraph, but that last short quip I support fully. I suppose that’s all I was trying to say. Even good people succumb to greed sometimes. For some it’s a disease. Kind of like what gambling does to the brain, but with success instead of loss. And I support someone who 1) has a conscience, and 2) actively tries to clear it. ❤️
But I don’t try to neglect those who have been negatively impacted along the way. That’s definitely a valid point. And an important point.
Money is power. Power corrupts. No exceptions. They get into the situation because they can no longer identify and understand their fellow man. There are no good billionaires. There aren’t any any good millionaires. And we should all do them a favor. And never allow them to achieve that status of hoarding.
That’s probably the unfortunate truth, yes.
co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers Group, the travel retailer of luxury products based in Hong Kong
Sort of squeezing second-hand. But you have to know his primary client pool is the business elites passing through international airports and taking advantage of a legalized form of tax evasion while exploiting the working class in sweat-shops on the mainland/surrounding Pacific islands.
A bit like becoming a billionaire by selling yachts or luxury hotels or cocaine. Even if you can argue you didn’t abuse your staff to make your mint (spoilers: you absolutely did), you know all your biggest customers did.
Technically, you’d have to declare what you are importing into the country where you live and pay tax at customs on import. It is kinda logical you dont pay VAT as a visitor since you dont live there and wouldnt benefit from the taxes you paid. Going further, I remember tax exempt cards in the 80’s you could use and show your id in stores and not pay VAT. Online versions of this exist today, I buy something from the UK and ship it to EU, I can request they not charge VAT as Im going to pay it on import.
So basically, no good billionaires but maybe good former-billionaires?
Except at some point he would have been between the two - an active billionaire giving away his wealth - and presumably still a good person.
In Northern Ireland he supported “mixed” (i.e., Catholic and Protestant) child education. In 1991, he gave £8m to the Integrated Education Fund,[20] a grant-making charitable body which aims “to make integration, not separation, the norm in our education system”.[21] Queens University Belfast also received grants of more than £100m,[20] for capital projects, child education and medical research.[22]
More controversially, Feeney gave substantial personal donations to Sinn Féin, a left-wing Irish nationalist party that has been historically associated with the IRA.[14] Following the IRA ceasefire in 1994, he funded the party’s office in Washington D.C.[20]
Feeney supported the modernization of public-health structures in Vietnam,[18] AIDS clinics in South Africa, Operation Smile’s free surgeries for children with cleft lips and palates, earthquake relief in Haiti, and the UCSF Medical Center at the University of California at San Francisco.[8]
Jim Dwyer wrote in The New York Times that none of the one thousand buildings on five continents that were built with Feeney’s gifts of $2.7 billion bear his name.[1]
On September 14, 2020, Feeney closed down the Atlantic Philanthropies after the non-profit accomplished its mission of giving away all of its money by 2020.[25]
Immensely based
We found him
The good billionaire
Millionaire*
The good billionaire… eventually? How many people never become billionaires in the first place because accumulating all that wealth in the first place is bad. Unless you have a billion in inheritance in one go or something.
It still would have been better if workers got the money in the first place. There are no good billionaires.
yeah this is like saying Elon Musk is a “good billionaire” because all his money is just stock and he doesn’t own any lavish mansions or whatever.
Your real thoughts are leaking there. “No, don’t give the money to the starving and homeless that need it most! You are supposed to give it to us!”
My real thoughts are that we should get rid of the elites who prop up the current system so that homelessness doesn’t have to exist anymore. Don’t put words into my mouth.
If your goal was to end homelessness and other societal woes, you would not say that a billionaire working to do the exact same thing using different means is not good. That is why I wrote you exposed your true motivations ;)
We are talking about systemic issues here. The capitalist class as a whole benefits from homelessness being extremely widespread as a way to put pressure on everyone else. One “good” billionaire won’t change anything. We have to put an end to the entire class. The world can only become a just place when former billionaires are limited to levels of economic and political power comparable to everyone else.
No, you claimed
It still would have been better if workers got the money in the first place. There are no good billionaires.
Claiming this specific billionaire is not good either. Now you are trying to switch the topic to a systemic issue when your self-serving claim was called out.
Are you really gonna be pedantic about me using the word “good” one time? With fucking quotes to denote how i’m practically spitting it out…
You are a living meme, and I mean that in the worst possible connotation. You are the personification of a Reddit argument. The president of the Ben Shapiro debate club. I am so done with this…
Are you really gonna be pedantic about me using the word “good” one time?
The title of the post is “The only good billionaire”. You seriously expect anyone to believe that was a slip of the tongue and not denial of the title?
You are a living meme, and I mean that in the worst possible connotation.
What do you expect? You guys are regurgitating quotes and theories with so many holes the Marvel movies are more believable. Of course the only reason I reply is to watch you rage, struggle to come up with excuses or desperately try to change the topic when I call out your nonsense. Bonus if it ever helps some lemming not to fall to this brain rot.
Want a genuine constructive good faith discussion? How about instead of regurgitating anticapitalist quotes, you post something worth discussing seriously. For example a plan for a fair system that does not fall apart as soon as some people act greedily and selfishly, like they always do. Or at least an outline of one, that we can work on to refine. Or you know, if you can’t come up with a whole new system, how to improve the current one.
Until then, you and lemmings like you are my comedic relief.
Starving people are the result of class divides.
Which is irrelevant when discussing the morality of a person who bridged that divide by giving his wealth away.
What makes you think the workers downstream from him are not among the starving and homeless?
What makes you think a system where workers are fairly compensated would not also be a better system for food/housing security?
I’m assuming this isn’t a dumb comment and just a fun thought exercise.
Or that people remain homeless because they know a job wont solve their homelessness.
What makes you think the workers downstream from him are not among the starving and homeless?
Because RoyaltyInTraining made that statement without referring to any additional information? So I obviously assume that he made his statement based on the information in the post.
Besides, even if they were, would donating the money be less effective than paying them in wages? Charitable donations are tax exempt, wages are not. Also, you assume he was in a position where he could do anything about the worker wages, which seems unlikely given how most companies work (wiki says he was not a full owner, just co-founder).
From the his Wikipedia:
More controversially, Feeney gave substantial personal donations to Sinn Féin, a left-wing Irish nationalist party that has been historically associated with the IRA.
He was a basically an Irish-American George Soros.
And it’s down Along the Falls Road, that’s where I long to be, Lying in the dark with a Provo company, A comrade on my left and another on me right And a clip of ammunition for my little Armalite.
Based.
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates created The Giving Pledge, a legally binding agreement to give at least half of their wealth to philanthropy by death or through last will and testament. It currently has over 240 signatures from over 30 countries.
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This video explains the scam that Billionaires use:
Why There’s No Such Thing as a Good Billionaire
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4 - High-end philanthropy is subsidized by regular taxpayers.
I feel like this is really under-appreciated. Like, Rich Dude decides he wants to donate $100M to…whatever - early childhood education. In the US, he avoids up to $37M taxes, which you can either look at as other taxpayers making $37M matching donation or $37M taken from other society objectives.
To the extent that government is a (marginally) publicly accountable system for funding a society’s competing goals - education, health, defense, research - charity allows the very wealthy not just to bypass the social structure for prioritizing goals, but to force other taxpayers to adopt their personal priorities. Maybe the goal is good, maybe it’s not - the point is that they’re completely unaccountable.
What makes high-end philanthropy different from low-end philanthropy? Don’t they both get the same tax cuts?
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They probably do not get the same tax cuts: a “normal” person, making a paltry $250,000/year only reduces taxes by 24% of their giving, where the ultra-rich get 37%.
But the real difference is scale. A million people each giving $100 to their favorite charity is going to distribute that money more-or-less according to the community’s overall priorities. One person giving $100M to their favorite charity has no connection to the broader community and social goals. They supercharge that one thing, which takes attention and resources from everything else.
“Can we have some of your billions?”
“Over my dead body”
- The Giving Pledge
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There’s a big difference between giving away 99.975% of your wealth, leaving your self with what 1 person can OPTIMISTICALLY make in a lifetime for retirement, and allowing people to scarp half of whatever is left after your life of destruction.
Not only does that mean Gate’s grand children have a grandpa with unimaginable wealth and power, but half of that is still in the family and all of them and their children’s children are all set for an absolute decadent life even if they all decide to never move another muscle ever again. All while the world continues to burn rapidly, waiting for the dragon to bleed.
This is the bare minimum, and they only do it to gain sympathy and trick us into believing they aren’t evil.
RIP
If I had that money it would all go towards awakening working class conscious and hopefully destroy the system that allowed such hording. But then again noone freely relinquishes power.
Millionaire
