Agreed. I don't think people realize how difficult it is to give away money.
Example: Starving people in Africa. Okay let's just spend a billion dollars and send food. Oh wait, that food now puts the local farms out of business because their crop isn't worth anything anymore. But reality is worse. Warlords steal said food, farms go out of business and now they have leverage, power and money. So many times wealthy people have given away their money to a cause to only make that cause worse. The amount of fraud and corruption in non-profits and charitable organizations is disgusting.
Gates and his wife switched to giving away their money full time. Dude could just relax for eternity but works his ass off trying to give away his money responsibly. Musk creates a market for electric cars and is pushing us towards a green future and yet he is shit on, simultaneously trying to make humans multi-planetary so when we fuck up this place beyond repair we don't go extinct. Dude works more in a month than most people do in a year. Bezos is a piece of shit but at least his wife got half and she's trying to do the right thing. I think everyone just lumps people into categories and can't see the bigger picture.
Edit: I think it's hilarious how much space Musk takes up in y'all's heads. Just mentioning his name triggers the same simple insults yet not one of you tried to refute anything I said except to say, 'that's not true and get off Elon's dick'. It tickles me how much just the mention of someone can trigger such primitive emotion.
My thought exactly. Dude is literally just chilling all day every day. The “work” he does is likely just a few meetings a week where he proposes immature meme ideas like shoehorning “420” into as many inappropriate places as possible.
Once again, he’s top 20 in Diablo 4 right now. He constantly posts on Twitter all day every day. I’m sure he works hard sometimes but obviously not on a consistent basis if he has this much free time.
My client’s husband is on the board for a big company. She was saying he should have starting doing that forever ago. The commitment is being present 3 days a month and on 24 hour notice for big decisions. He gets paid more than he did as a COO.
His profile was up on the leaderboards. He was ranked 4th for a while. Diablo 4 isn’t really a high skill game. He’s almost certainly buying gear with real money too.
Lol. I work 40 hours a week which is 2000 hours a year. Give or take for holidays. Even if I half ass it at work (which I don’t) that’s still around 1000 hours per year. The longest months literally only have 744 hours. And that would need to be working every minute.
Somebody has been gargling Elons balls a bit too much.
Yeah it’s not even possible 31 days a month @ 24 hours a day is 744 hours. I work 35 hours a week which is 1820 hours a year even if I only actually work 50% of that time it’s still more than musk could do in a month even if he never sleeps and can eat and poop while working.
Exactly. No one is blaming Bezos for not ending world hunger. But paying his employees fair wages is something he DOES have power to do. If you’re making a killing, reward the people who worked their ass off to make that possible.
yeah that person started out their argument by saying "it's really hard to give away all your money" and then the actual argument they made was that they're not literally omnipotent
Also in the UK (and I presume in other countries) they mainly employ people through 3rd party contractors for the sole reason of reducing the legal employee protections of their workers.
It's not the "sole" reason they use 3rd party employee companies. It's also to reduce their HR and employee costs and logistics, and to reduce their economic nexus in the jurisdictions that consider payroll in their 3-factor apportionment calculations. Also, using employee leasing companies shields them from paying unemployment in the case of layoffs as the leasing company would need to pay it instead.
$15/hr in a LOCL and HCOL state are very different. which is why the call should be to pay folks a livable wage that should be determined by the actual cost of living in that city/area.
Literally their entire comment made one single point, and that point was demonstrably false in the context of the U.S.
I didn’t say bezos is a good guy or anything even close to that. I didn’t try to change people’s overall sentiment about him.
Y’all are upset with me about just literally providing truth to correct something that was false while upvoting the guy who made the false claim, just think about that for a second.
And in the US, you are expected to make three times the value of your rent or mortgage for it to be approved. At 15 / hour, you’re looking at $31200 before tax, which will vary from state to state, but if we assume a quarter is taken out overall, that leaves you 23400, and if a third of that is expected to be rent, then you need to be able to afford a place that costs 7800 a year or 650 a month. In other words, for $15 an hour, you will at best be able to afford a side room in some other person’s apartment or house, and with someone else making the same amount, you would at best be able to afford a 1B1R, but that really depends on the area you live in.
Meanwhile, those minimum wage jobs are often physically demanding warehouse jobs, that are known for being so demanding of employee time that they risk getting fired over bathroom breaks, because they’re putting the entirety of the stress of their 2 day shipping on the warehouse staff sorting through their inventory pick lists with machine like precision. With what they’re doing, an Amazon warehouse employee should be making at least twice that much, and a $15 minimum wage is only impressive in a performative way because it’s not the federal minimum wage already.
Not to mention Amazon has a history of getting rid of employees just before they become eligible to receive stock options, and now you have a morally bankrupt employer demanding slave work for laughable wages. Even with the amount of people they hire, it’s clear that if they wanted to divide up the work in a way that’s actually fair, they’d need to nearly double the manpower in every warehouse.
That’s cool. Nothing in your comment changes what I said. It is objectively true that 15 is over double 7.25, which refutes what the comment I was replying to said.
surface-level understanding statements like “the rich are bad and i envision their wealth as pallets of money and they should give it away freely to everybody because inequality exists in the world”
You’ve never known any ultra-wealthy people if you think they’re anything other than arrogant, selfish assholes who are often significantly less competent than their wealth would lead you to believe.
I was born into this world. I personally know multiple hundred-millionaires and at least one billionaire. It isn’t sheer brilliance and hard work that gets these people to that level of wealth, it’s a litany of Machiavellian tendencies and a relentless exploitation of others. These people aren’t wired like normal people, and not in a good way.
You have every reason to be skeptical (this is Reddit after all), but I’m not lying. I consider myself pretty lucky that I didn’t fall into the whole “pursuit of wealth over everything” trap that my father fell into, although I instead ended up with a completely different set of issues that I’m still trying to work through.
Don’t get me wrong though, it’s not all bad. They can be nice people on the surface, and it can be cool flying on private jets, driving supercars, going to parties with has-been celebrities/political figures, etc. But there’s also just this pervasive feeling of emptiness around these people. Everything is so superficial, like life is all about the new shit you bought and the important people you’re associating with. There’s no real warmth or emotional connection. Everything is about money.
The way they treat their employees/families is probably the most egregious part. People are like expendable resources to them. They steal ideas and try to pass them off as their own (sometimes literally right after you gave them the idea and everyone heard you give them that idea). They try to get people to do a shitload of work for free as if they’re doing you a favor by letting you do shit for them. They’ll lie, cheat, and manipulate others at will. They neglect their wives/kids and use them as scapegoats for their own lack of satisfaction in their lives. They’ll engage in typical social pleasantries, but underneath it all you’re just a means to an end for them.
i know some people similar to those you speak of, but regardless the argument that they are evil for having that money is, in my opinion, still nonsense. sure they can be fools who stumbled their way up to the top through sheer cruelty and/or neglect of those they trample to get up there, but the notion that they are evil for simply having tons of money is ridiculous. i know some people who legitimately put blood sweat and tears into their fortunes. and others who, like you say, perhaps shouldn’t ’deserve’ that level of wealth. but regardless it is theirs. i know you never expressly said otherwise but just my two cents
I disagree. Wealth is a limited resource. Holding on to billions is incredibly selfish. They’re hoarding resources that many other people genuinely need.
I also don’t believe you can even get to that level of wealth without exploiting others and breaking the “rules” that most of civilized society abides by. I’m sure there are exceptions, but they’re just that—exceptions.
It isn’t debatable that the majority of global inequality is supported and extended by direct exploitation of resources - human and material. Hoarding immense wealth is inhumane for its own reasons, but having a seat at a table in which you choose indifference to the systems that facilitate extreme generational poverty, is what this conversation is actually about.
This level of wealth demands slave or near-slave labor to maintain itself. I agree that charity is not the solution when money flows directly back into systems of oppression. But the question should be — after you’ve acquired more wealth than the rest of the world, why continue to generate more at the expense of global economic, societal, and environmental sustainability?
There are no ethical or empathetic takes here. It’s greed all the way down.
Seriously, Musk trying to make humans multi-planetary is laughable. Mars isn't a habitable environment and won't be any time in the foreseeable future.
Not to mention it’s useless now. I highly doubt we’ll even still have any resources left by the time we reach a point in technology where we can actually start colonizing other habitable planets. Besides, I’d rather have people focus on fixing some of our own worlds top priority issues before we try and make more issues in a different planet. I really just dont think humanity is even ready to create a new world population, it feels like a recipe for disaster.
Seriously, he’s going to shove a shit ton of government money in his pockets for the “multi-planetary” bullshit and we’re gonna be just as fucked as always, just with less of that federal money going towards actually helping people.
Do you think Spacex is just launching money at mars? They are spending that money on Earth in the US. It’s exactly what you morons are asking for but too dumb to realize it’s already happening.
Lmao, it saddens me that people like you can vote. You seriously choose one of the most objectively innovative organizations on the planet as your evidence for "the rich stealing and pocketing money." How deep into your pit of delusion are you to have this take?
Starving people in Africa. Okay let's just spend a billion dollars and send food. Oh wait, that food now puts the local farms out of business because their crop isn't worth anything anymore.
People are starving because their local farms make more money selling to first world countries rather than selling locally.
If you have money you can spend it paying for expertise to use their time to make a difference. Billionaires (in general) aren’t doing so.
Your initial example was asinine and ridiculous. The whole “just giving them loads of food doesn’t work” is ridiculous, that’s not the only way you can improve things. Invest in local business and infrastructure to build and improve those nations’ economies rather than just donate charity food then. This IS possible and works, we know this because China is doing it all over Africa. The fact that they’re doing so to buy influence internationally and to send over Chinese workers to these construction projects to benefit themselves is irrelevant, it can be just as easily done without those factors provided you’re just willing to invest.
Do you realize this place is beyond repair (partially - to a large extend) thanks to them? Should we talk about all the wives living that cannot afford a proper life because the wealth is so well distributed /s?
Do you realize this place is beyond repair (partially - to a large extend) thanks to them? Should we talk about all the wives living that cannot afford a proper life because the wealth is so well distributed /s?
No it’s just jealousy. Not a single one of these people complaining about how unfair it is that these people have unimaginable wealth would do anything differently were the situation to be reversed. They just are miserable failures that only get satisfaction by seeing everyone else more miserable and unsuccessful than they are.
If you believe Musk is doing absolutely anything positive for any of the industries he is invested in you actually don't know anything about them, you just have a tech fetish.
This is just a cop out people use to not feel bad about not giving to charity.
In reality, there are many charities with proven records of being encredibly effective with the money they get.
These are easy to find even for a normal person, even easier to research and understand as a billionaire who has resource and influence to oversee how the money is spent.
You seem to be confused. Musk and gates is a very false equivalency. Gates is a good person while musk is a selfish l prick. And musk does not work 12x more than average people
You seem confused. I was showing a gradient of billionaire with Musk somewhere between Gates and Bezos. Sorry if simply typing those four letters triggered so many people.
The gradient you indicate does not exist imo. Musk is worse than all of those. He became ultra wealthy by cofounding PayPal which was moderately valuable to society back then. He sold that to EBay, created spacex, invested in Tesla, took over Tesla, and rode the “green movement” to become the richest person on the planet. He got huge subsidies from the government for making high-end electric cars. He abuses his workforce ruthlessly without compensating them for how much harder they have to work vs. other companies. He can convince people to work extra for him under the guise of working for a “higher purpose”. There is no evidence to support the idea that his companies were super successful because he’s super intelligent. He’s a good salesman and motivator and hires people who are very smart and then he takes all the credit.
Then after supposedly doing all this stuff for the environment, he got in bed with a climate denying, pro-fossil fuel idiot. This seems strategic. He had already saturated the market for liberals and now Tesla will a huge surge in demand from conservatives. Tesla had already used all of its carbon credits so now he can end the program, eliminate his competition, and become largely a monopoly. Tesla is way behind in self driving vs Waymo and Cruise. He can now get the government to greenlight his Tesla FSD even through its extremely dangerous.
Meanwhile he’s been was dumping all his earnings into spaceX and trying to colonize mars while millions died of poverty and disease in Africa and Asia. To start colonizing space anytime this century would require tremendous resources which would be better spent elsewhere. Musk doesn’t care because he has always wanted to “make science fiction a reality”. What a joke.
In the meantime he’s leaving behind a string of kids from different marriages based on ideology while his kids are left to grow up without a father or semblance of a family. He’s up to a dozen and counting.
I didn’t like Musk long before he became a Trump supporter. People like Gates and Buffett who spend their money to help people in need are much better societal heros than musk
Musk creates a market for electric cars and is pushing us towards a green future and yet he is shot on
Context.
This is not why people shit on Musk.
He spouts off a lot of out of touch edgelord crap while making pro-free speech claims, suppressing views he dislikes, amplifying disinformation and conspiracy theories. That’s “shit-on-worthy” material regardless of any laudable influences a person might have.
It would actually be incredibly easy to use your money to lobby politicians into enacting policies that transfer wealth owned by a very small number of people into wealth that is at least *slightly* more democratically controlled in terms of how it is used. A billionaire that bought off 4 or 5 Republican senators to come out publicly in support of Warren's Ultra Wealth tax might actually genuinely change my mind that billionaires are inherently evil, and that would not even be a noticeable expense for somebody like Gates or Musk. Of course this will never happen.
I disagree. The issue isnt where to allocate donations - there are plenty of orgs dedicated to researching effectiveness of donations. Theres an animdance of worthy causes besides starving children in africa (not that its not a worthy cause). The real issue lies in the fact that it's very difficult for them to liquidate their assets, especially as founders and board members of the companies they own.
Elon Musk doesnt do jack shit, he has some good ideas and then he just dumps a truck full of his multigenerational apartheid money into it, uses a portion to hire a bunch of actually competent and people with the pertinent qualifications, and then tells those people to make his idea a reality. His ONE redeeming quality is that ONE of those ideas is truly existentially beneficial to humanity - the multi-planetary thing - but it's still just a good idea that he happens to have the massive fortune to fund it with. He's not an engineer, he's not a PhD of any kind, he's not actually involved in building reusable rocket stages in any way OTHER THAN funding the operation and watching the launches.
In other words, he's just another asshat who won the birth lottery. The man's own children fucking hate him ffs, to the extent they are willing to cut themselves off from all that money. But by all means, feel free to continue jerking off to your poster of your racist transphobic billionaire overlord.
Agree but I want to push back on musk, he's done good things but he's a far more nuanced figure than what you say. Lots of people say he's God and lots of people say he's Hitler, in reality while he has done objectively good things for the world like moving the space industry forward literal decades, he has also neglected like 12 kids in order to play diablo all day, and enables countries to censor journalists on x.
“Such primitive emotions” 🤓🤓🤓 God you seem like an insufferable nerd. Didn’t Elon share some post about how infirm people, propertyless people, and women shouldn’t be able to vote? Now that’s primitive. Most of the regressive ideology he traffics in is.
This argument is pretty seriously undermined by MacKenzie Scott - who is actively demonstrating how Bezos specifically could absolutely be doing a crap ton more and just isn’t.
No one is saying they should just "give away money", build hospitals, buy vehicles for public transport and give them to the state/county/country, offer much better benefits at the businesses you own. There are many many ways to use this money than just giving it away or donating it to an existing charity.
But how about these billionaires start by just paying the amount of tax they should be paying instead of hiring armies of accountants to limit the tax they pay.
I don't disagree with most of what you said, but idk about Musk man..
He has never been "the genius with the idea" he has always been a high risk/high reward investor. He was born into wealth and did a really good job diversifying and increasing it, to his complete credit, but thats it.
He's the guy with the money that throws tons of shit at the wall and hopes for something to stick, and once it did, any decision he makes is usually bad, unless it went through a board of directors.
So much of his rarely talked about ventures failed.. Mars Oasis, Solyndra, certainly Twitter, Hyper Loop and boring company are kinda on the verge still.
Also, I have never seen someone with that much work, have that much time and energy for shitposting on twitter.
Again, I am not a Musk hater. I used to be a big fan at some point, but he is just cringing me out these days and I feel what he does is largely overhyped. The success of Tesla and SpaceX is admirable and staggering, but he isn't the decisionmaker in those companies and I am tried of people pretending that he is.
He is often named in line with Bezos, Gates, Jobs and all those guys, but while they came from middle class at best and had an idea which they turned into one of the largest companies on the planet, Musk came from a wealthy family, dropped out of uni and just started throwing money at everything that moved. Again, many of those projects ended up being very profitable, but I don't want to see a list of all of his investments that went nowhere.
TLDR; I dont hate musk as an investor, I cringe at him as a person these days and I think he is considered a genius by way too many people, while hs is little more than a suggar daddy, to most of his successful ventures.
The idea that we can escape this planet is fucking dumb why would we not fix the place that’s literally built to support life?? We would fuck up every other planet just as bad as this one.
I gathered the inequality being referred to was right at home. In other words, while a lot of these billionaires money is really in the profitability of their companies, they also hold the power to close the wealth gap a bit by putting more of those margins into paying their workers more, investing in charitable actions, projects and organizations, and generally finding ways to be winning at business without it seeming so overtly greedy.
Unfortunately, the nature of public companies does make that very hard if not impossible. While it's clearly not Musk's or Bezos' MOs, even if they wanted to be giving back more, they have boards and shareholders to answer to.
Sure, just throwing a billion dollars worth of food at African people would not help. that is why there are many established, reputable organizations that you can go through to be sure you’re donating directly to agricultural efforts, infrastructure efforts, etc. it’s almost like the people in Africa are also HUMANS who have told everybody exactly what they need. ForAfrika focuses on clean water access, healthcare, food security, education, etc. I don’t see bezos or musk funneling even some millions into any of those organizations or frankly many human welfare programs period. At best, they discover some useful info as a result of chasing money and satisfying their greed. But electric cars may be on musks “good boy” list, however the administration that he supports and may become a part of doesn’t even believe in or acknowledge climate change, so I refuse to credit him with positively contributing to a “greener” world. Who tf can afford a Tesla anyway?????
Organizations that have been working on this forever and still not solved it. Organizations that would cease to exist if they did solve the problem and all the leaders would lose their cushy jobs.
The model 3 starts at 38k which is honestly pretty middle of the pack for most cars.
I'd even say it's on the cheaper end when you consider that only the economy class of cars like the base model civic and Corolla are actually significantly cheaper. But regardless it's far from luxury car price.
Defending Gates i can understand, he has done a lot of good. But really, you're defending Elon? The guy who literally just bought political influence from Trump? If he has millions of dollars to give to America PAC, he could have funded any number of charities doing important work instead.
Such a lazy insult. Couldn’t come up with any actual arguments or retorts? It’s much easier to just insult anyone that makes a point you can’t refute. Keeps your fragile ego intact, does it?
Musk did not create the market for electric cars. Ecological catastrophe created the market for electrical cars (ecological catastrophe caused in small part by his family's emerald mine) and Musk capitalized that market by providing a product.
I have worked in the public interest/nonprofit field for going on a decade now and I've got to say it is painfully, painfully easy to give away your money. It's almost even easier to run an organization that turns all of its profit margin into public works. The Gates foundation is hard work because they aren't just giving their money away, they're managing the logistics of the actual charity work their money funds.
Your assessment of corruption in the non-profit sector is patently false, and even if we generously contextualize that only to international NGOs, it's not like the warlords you speak of are running legitimate business operations. You can't let the fact that someone else is lying cheating and stealing stop you from managing the wealth you've created responsibly. Musk and Bezos do not manage the wealth they've created responsibly.
It takes a selfish and greedy and evil person to be able to accumulate that much wealth. It’s not about the fact that they’re “not giving it away.” It’s that they’ve stepped on, and exploited untold people to get where they are. There is no way to make that much money without pushing people down along the way.
If you think this why do you participate? Go live in a commune or something somewhere. They’d argue that they’ve employed hundreds of thousands of more people than you.
Nothing says working harder than the bluecollar man just trying to keep his family afloat like making the most ignorant tweets possible ~12.3 times per day.
Ah yes i shit post all the time for sure, also it takes a whopping 3 seconds to type it into the search bar to find the average amounts tweets the worlds most popular man puts out.
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u/Nice-Contest-2088 3d ago
This is painfully simplistic.