Does anybody still believe his philanthropic efforts are out of the goodness of his heart?
It’s tax evasion, power brokering, influence peddling, and straight up corruption with a side of reputation-washing.
For example. He donates to his foundation. He doesn’t pay taxes for that income. He then uses his foundation to pay travel and expenses vaguely related to that.
The foundation owns facilities and stuff that would also otherwise be taxed. Including property taxes.
He donates to a different org, let’s say a college. He gets a seat on the board and gets paid money back…
… and uses funds frim that org to pay expenses…
Or he buys a shit load of books from campaigns of politicians he wants to bribe. Or rather, his 501c Corp trust does that, because fuck paying taxes on bribes…
I’ve had this discussion before, some people still believe it. Another example of philanthropy abuse is how he stopped the Oxford vaccine from being given away as an open source vaccine, and insisted on it being licensed to one pharmaceutical firm instead. He succeeded in demanding that because his foundation has enough pull with universities because they received donations (with money that otherwise could’ve gone to taxes, which could’ve been used to fund universities directly).
And on his ‘private’ side, he’s heavily invested in pharma stocks, so you can do the math there. Millions of people in the global South died from COVID because Indian and South African firms were delayed by about a year before they could produce the vaccine.
I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. Carnegie pulled it off too
Plenty of gullible people out there who don’t question such qualifiers when they’re almost all you can see without digging a bit, billionaires like him also have a lot of influence on the media, the French ones outright own all the news outlets. I don’t know about the specifics for Bill Gates, he’s probably clever enough not to do it in his name if he’s going to control the narrative.
I never believe any billionaire’s philanthropy is anything but self-serving. I just hope it helps anyway.
Why the fuck are opinion pieces and advertising being treated like news on here?
Is he still the richest? I doubt it.
The article talks about gates in the 90s.
I would imagine the richest person in the world is some Saudi royal or Putin on a technicality.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually someone else who’s been able to hide how truly wealthy they are.
Eg. the former British queen and the royals used judicial decrees and their opaque influence to secretely alter laws, in order to hide how rich they actually are. Guardian
Juicy, thanks.
Well, the Queen is dead, so who knows anymore.
But the South African con man?
He’s the richest publicly.
Officially, it’s Elon Musk. Realistically, yes. It is someone who basically owns their own country like the king of Saudi Arabia or Sultan of Oman or something.
The man never stopped placing himself strategically to further enrich himself.
Selling $950M is ONLY CUTTING to 9% stake? Holy WTF.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/05/bill-gates-climate-crisis-farmland
And never, never EVER forget that he set back computing technology by at least a decade with his bullshit at Microsoft.
🙄 I’m sure it would be year of the Linux desktop by now. That last one is delusional stuff.
Hey we are at ~3% market share, so any day now. 😁
I have not read the book, I’ve read enough about Gates by now to have my own thoughts on how dogdy he is. What is this article in defense of Bill Gates? The author met Gates a few times and he feels confident to claim that
That man was very far from the sexist, arrogant, miserable predator that Schwab portrays.
And what is this conclusion?
The world needs their money; maybe managed by party bureaucracies, that much is not clear. Bill Gates’ money, that is, but not Bill Gates himself.
Really?
Anyways, here is another article that talks just about the tip of the iceberg of the “Bill Gates Sexism Problem”, let’s call it this way.
Long Before Divorce, Bill Gates Had Reputation for Questionable Behavior - The New York Times - Oct 2021Melinda French Gates voiced concerns about her husband’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and a harassment claim against his money manager. He also had an affair with an employee.
Maybe the first problematic thing I can think of about Gates dates back to 1976. It is called:
“Some of the employees said that while they disapproved of Mr. Gates’s behavior, they did not perceive it to be predatory. They said he did not pressure the women to submit to his advances for the sake of their careers, and he seemed to feel that he was giving the women the space to refuse his advances.”
He’s a creep, but it doesn’t sound like he’s a Weinstein or even a harmon.
I understand why anyone wouldn’t like gates, but I have trouble reading these articles and feeling the same vitriol toward him I feel toward other indisputable offenders.
Do you have any more information on the Epstein gates relationship?
I’ve heard about their relationship, but the article you provided says that they never did any business together, so I’m curious if there’s any evidence of him on that disgusting rape island.
I guess the following video by Coffeezilla will provide enough answers on the matter:
Bill Gates Won’t Stop Lying About Epstein Connections [13:34]
Not for me. Focusing on assumptions and assumptions are not very convincing.
I find it crazy that the video owner thought of Bill Gates as a “lovable grandpa” until 6 months ago.
This video broadcasts how personally disappointed this video maker is that Bill Gates is not a paragon of virtue, but it doesn’t really provide a solid foundation for the Epstein Gates relationship.
And I have to say it, apart from the circumstantial evidence, the fact that he looks like Charlie in conspiracy mode does not help.
He keeps remarking how strange it is. That gates would downplay any interactions with Epstein no matter how innocuous, and says that he can’t understand why you would downplay that.
But of course gates wouldn’t want to be associated with Epstein and wood down play any relationship they had whether they were friends or acquaintances?
It would be very damaging to your reputation regardless of the relationship, so I don’t think that’s very strong evidence either.
I’ve heard all this circumstantial logic for the past couple years, but I don’t think it carries much weight with regards to Gates being amoral on the same level that Epstein was, or much more than an obscenely powerful man.
Having said that, thanks for sharing the video, I wondered if there was any more concrete evidence that has been released or developed since I last looked into gates.
The problem is that we don’t know if he’s lying about his connections with Epstein because he did something horrific through him or if he just thinks it ruins the ‘aw shucks, I’m just a regular guy’ image he’s tried very carefully to cultivate for decades.
Because honestly, for someone like that, an ego hit is enough.
What is problematic about his open letter?
He is asking people not to pirate his software because the software development team is barely breaking even.
I’m fully prepared to believe I’m missing context here.
This makes him sound a bit money-grubbing, maybe, but without context, it sounds like a software owner being anti-piracy, which is not an obscene position to take.
What is problematic about his open letter?
I guess the answer to that depends on how one sees proprietary software. I like the free and open source community and this is why I find this letter problematic, to say the least.
In the first 10 minutes or so of the Revolution OS documentary -which is very old btw- one can get a general overview of this time period.
I’m foss all the way myself, but I don’t think wanting to be paid for your work is an indicator of some implied amorality or some character failing.
Especially not 30 years ago, where it was universally expected in the loudest advocate culture for capitalism.
Oh, thanks for that link, I actually have watched it before, I think I stumbled on it on Reddit somewhere years ago
Yeah, this article is like “the main thrust of the book is completely true but it’s very mean and Gates was nice to me personally so it’s wrong” wtf
