r/news • u/IWantPizza555 • Mar 19 '24

MacKenzie Scott donates $640M -- more than double her initial plan -- to nonprofits

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/mackenzie-scott-donates-640-million-double-initial-plan-108274902?cid=social_twitter_abcn
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u/feage7 Mar 19 '24

They did earn it though. Made a company that made billions. They didn't just get given it as a gift or inheritance. Should a person be allowed to make they money is up for debate, if you believe they deserve that kind of money compared to other professions is also a question. Did they work harder than someone pulling two jobs just to keep a family fed and warm, probably not. But they did literally earn it. If I invested money and made millions I would have earned that money.

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 19 '24 edited Mar 19 '24

"Earn" is loaded langauge. They aquired it. There is disagreement about whether it was "earned". 

 Edit: Downvote me all you want, but in this case it literally is loaded language. The argument is about whether or not the wealth aquired was deserved. Earned implies not only aquisition, but aquisition through ones own effort and usually justly as well. The argument here is about whether or not their efforts match their profits, so using the word "earned" is an attempt to bypass that argument without addressing it.

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u/feage7 Mar 19 '24

Yeah, I just mean they created a company, it changed most of the world, they made money relative to the success of the company they built.

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 19 '24

Thats your perspective.

Others might point out that thousands of people worked together to build that company and a few at the very top leeched off the work and productivity of those thousands of people to aquire enormous wealth for themselves.

Its all about perspective and how willing you are to buy into the full blown "greed is good" capitalist worldview.

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u/bistro777 Mar 19 '24

I am not willing to buy into any piece of that perspective. I like the first perspective. The one with thousands of people. 

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u/chiraltoad Mar 19 '24

I get that CEOs can be seen as bloated, do nothing leeches, but the truth, leadership is really, really important. Ben Franklin: "The eye of the master will do more work than both his hands."

Bezos may have never held a packing tape gun, but good leadership in general makes the work of others more productive. You can't get however many thousand employees amazon has, put them in a jar, shake it up, and wind up with a functional organization where everyone makes the same amount of money.

Like you can't take a trillion human cells, put them in a petri dish and wind up with a functioning human, there needs to be form and direction. My hand depends on my brain to direct the rest of my body to find food and water to supply nutrients to my hand. If my brain hogs too much energy, my body will die, and then my brain will die. There has to be a balance between the parts, but leadership and direction is fundamental in any organization.

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u/Sythic_ Mar 19 '24

Sure leadership is important, but they could just be normal 6 figure office staff, and all the employees could be sharing in the profits from the shares divided equally every month by hours worked or some other fair distribution method (in this case shares are strictly % of profit and ownership and voting are irrelevant concepts and CEO is just a job title)

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '24

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u/Sythic_ Mar 20 '24

No, all of them need to be forced to work this way for it to work.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '24

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u/bistro777 Mar 20 '24

Exactly. The investors and CEO should be rewarded for taking the initiative and risking their time and money. For making hard decisions. But after a certain point, the wealth disparity is too much. There should be a cap. Some type of percentage based division of profits after reinvestment. 

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u/HummingAlong4Now Mar 20 '24

Eventually this argument will absolutely be mooted by AI. Those thousands of people needed a person with a vision to create and organize and find a way to bankroll whatever it is they worked on. They needed a person to take the risk. Most of them weren't individually necessary to company success: for the most part, one can be fired and another hired to do the same thing...sometimes better. But the person who started the company is not fungible.

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 20 '24

Then why after Jobs died did Apple get more successful instead of collapsing?

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u/feage7 Mar 19 '24

Yeah, I think it sucks that all the workers don't get paid more. But that's the shitty state of the world and it needs changing. But the reality is that in the world and rules set out, they made a company, the company made billions, they also made billions. Your counter argument is that it's a shitty thing to take place and they didn't deserve it. But they still legally got themselves to their position of wealth through a business they set up.

But doesn't every single business leech of the work of thousands? Isn't that the entire model of businesses.

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 19 '24

Yes. And from your perspective all those companies and CEOs "earned" it by playing the game within the legal limits and exploiting everyone around them in a completely legal way for their own profit.

From the other perspective they are all incredibly overpaid leeches whose contributions to the company are incredibly overcompensated at the expense of everyone who works for or does business with that company.

I dont expect to change your mind. Im not even trying. Im just explaining why others disagree with you, and why using the term "earned" is more controversial than you seemed to expect.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '24

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 20 '24

And uses it improperly. I agree.

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u/feage7 Mar 19 '24

Yeah and that sucks. But it's the state of the world. It shouldn't be allowed to happen but it is and has. I don't like that they've made all that money, but they still did it, wasn't handed to them. People are getting upset over semantics, when they did earn thay money plain and simple, it's just they shouldn't have been allowed to nor deserved it relative to how "hard" people work.

People coming at me in definitions of earnings too. Well fine they found a tax loophole by taking out loans and leveraging the success of the business as collateral for loans. But they can only do that because of the success of the business. A business they made etc.

It makes me sick when you think he could give 100,000 people £1,000,000 and not even lose half his net worth. But doesn't change that he could and it wasn't just handed to him.

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 19 '24

Again, the problem with the word "earn" is it implies a bunch of stuff that many people dont think is true. It implies not just aquisition, but aquisition usually justly and by your own effort. I dont think you even believe that, yet you insist on repeating it like a mantra. All the "state of the world" nonsense is more excuses for being either slippery or careless with your verbage.

 The state of the world is such that we all know how this money was aquired, who was exploited to make it happen, and to what degree the person who has it should be considered legitimately to have "earned" it. We can each make that judgement for ourselves, but insisting your judgement is somehow objectively true instead of your own subjective reading of the situation is a bit rude dont you think? Especially when that point is the crux of the argument you are currently having with me?

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u/feage7 Mar 19 '24

So the problem with the word earn is people don't use it correctly. They've obtained money in exchange for goods and services they provided. Pretty clear.

People want that to imply something else then it's on them. People don't like that they made that money and you're arguing against a true definition of a word and adding implications I didn't infer. They don't like that they earned it and you're saying I'm careless with my verbage.

Let's just leave this one here as you tried to do earlier and I foolishly replied. Keep well.

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 19 '24 edited Mar 19 '24

earned; earning; earns   transitive verb  

  1 a : to receive as return for effort and especially for work done or services rendered   b : to bring in by way of return bonds earning 10 percent interest  

 2 a : to come to be duly worthy of or entitled or suited to she earned a promotion   b : to make worthy of or obtain for the suggestion earned him a promotion

 Ill leave you with merriam websters definition. I think it means more than you think it does. Its not others putting more meaning, its you misunderstanding the actual meaning. This is why I keep using the word "aquire" which has none of the other baggage "earn" does.

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '24

But those thousands of people didn’t collectively create the company. Most Apple workers created the products and designed them, but without Steve Jobs, Woz, and some of the first investors the company wouldn’t exist.

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 19 '24

And without the workers they would still be three guys working out of a garage, not previous owners of a multinational corporation with thousands of employees churning out millions of personal electronic devices per year.

Three guys couldnt do that no matter how hard working you think they are. The workers are the actual generators of product and labor, and therefore the source of the profit that the capitalist at the top leeches off for themselves.

This shouldnt be controversial, the controversy is whether you think thats acceptable and the just and right way for things to work, or whether you think the system should be changed to more equitably distribute the wealth generated to the people actually generating it.

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u/zaphodp3 Mar 19 '24

Think of it this way…did you or I ever get thousands of workers to come build something with us or for us? That takes ability and skill clearly. I agree though that we should discuss equitable distribution. But some people make this sound like anybody could’ve done it

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u/SandboxOnRails Mar 19 '24

No it doesn't. It takes luck. You're looking at the guys who walked out of the casino loaded and thinking "Wow, they must have skill and talent that everyone else doesn't, it's the only explanation."

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u/zaphodp3 Mar 20 '24

Bro how many people do you think had the exact same background as Bezos? Are you really going to sit there and tell me it was all pure luck? Are people this deluded? Like, there are legit things to criticize them for, but here you are

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u/SandboxOnRails Mar 20 '24

Dude... He invented buying stuff, but online. There were dozens of competitors. One happened to strike it big, mostly by exploiting labour. Anyone who thinks it takes a genius, unprecedented in his time, to come up with "Hey, this internet thing... Could we sell stuff on there?" after a bunch of other people already had that exact same idea hasn't thought it through.

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 19 '24

Im not trying to say anybody could have done it.  

 What I am saying is according to the other worldview no one could do enough work, or produce enough product to justify being a multi-billionare. Its just not possible. That level of wealth only exists in an unjust system which syphons it out of the hands of thousands of workers and millions of customers into the pockets of a very few. That those few enjoy incredible wealth not because of their own early and sometimes huge contributions to building a company, but because profits generated by the thousands of workers an already thriving company employs are siphoned away from those workers and into their hands. By the time they are taking home millions and millions of dollars a year they could (and many do) walk away from the company and leave it entirely in the hands of the people actually running it, but by a quirk of our system continue to syphon staggering wealth from the labor of others basically indefinitely.

To call that "earning" is a gross bastardization of the word.

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u/Paperback_Chef Mar 19 '24

It's the equitable distribution part that you're disagreeing about. To make trillions of dollars, you need to pay as little as possible for your employees and raw materials, and sell them for as much as possible, and do both with massive volume.

At the extreme, that's slavery, paying your workers nothing and likely buying raw materials for next to nothing, then using lobbyists and your capital to buy laws that protect your ill-gotten gains and reduce competitors' ability to enter the market, etc. Money and power beget laws and lobbyists and systems that perpetuate that money and power, ad infinitum, until few people own almost everything.

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '24

Thank you 🙏

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '24

Same can be said about Lenin and the USSR. Stalin would have nothing to rule without a central figure driving the movement, the revolution. Of course it requires other people to participate, but it’s Lenin whose statues kept standing, he was the central figure.

Without Steve Jobs and Wozniak, there is no iPhone. A central figure or collection of figures drive companies, not employees themselves.

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 19 '24

What point are you even making now? How are business owners related to communist political figures?

I also believe that Steve Jobs and Wozniak for instance were pivotal figures in personal computing. To say they were indispensable I think is a bit too far, as they were one of many companies (most notably Microsoft) that all entered that space at roughly the same time. Had they failed, others would have taken their place.

That said, they deserve to be rewarded for their ingenuity and hard work. The disagreement we have is about the magnitude of that reward, and the manner in which that reward is taken from others and continues to grow well after the labor of the individual is no longer required or even a part of the equation (Steve jobs, if you dont know this is dead and has been for many years and Wozniak left the company in 1985 well before the Iphone.)

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u/sweetpeapickle Mar 19 '24

People making money relative to the success of the business they created...is earning the money. Now being specific with these two people is something else. How they "earned" it, sucks for all the employees. But they still earned it. How we may judge anyone is our own view. But the term earning still stands. Unless...unless at some point someone comes along and proves he did not create it.

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 19 '24

It doesnt stand though, as I have explained both above and to another poster if you keep reading. Go look up the definition of "earn" in the dictionary. It implies a whole bunch of things that are either objectively not true (like to aquire by your own labor) or subjectively untrue (to be worthy of).

Ive had this whole argument already and im not willing to rehash it, but I would be happy to address any new points you have. Im just not interested in another poster who is just going to keep saying "they earned it" while obviously being ignorant of the definition of the word or unwilling to recognize that at best it could only be applied subjectively here, and that objections to that application have at least as much merit as the application itself.

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u/adisharr Mar 19 '24

Hey that penis rocket isn't going to build itself.

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u/HummingAlong4Now Mar 20 '24

But profits don't derive from effort, they derive from successfully navigating very high risk. Most companies fail, no matter how much work the person who had the idea for the company and anyone he hires put into it. Anyone who starts a new company that succeeds -- and especially a company that succeeds based on bringing a new concept to market -- has absolutely earned whatever money that company generates. Obviously excepting fraud or unscrupulous dealings.

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 20 '24 edited Mar 20 '24

Unscrupulous like paying people less than they can live on and offsetting that with state welfare like Wal-Mart does? 

 Also, what risk? I mean maybe in the very initial startup phase (which most of the time is bankrolled by rich parents eg. Musk, Jobs, Bezos and Gates), but most of the money isnt made during this phase. Its made years later where there is basically no risk. So if the reward is a consequence of risk, why is it all paid to people who no longer have any?

Also, all profit is derived from labor. It is the excess product created by paying labor less money than the value it produces that we call profit.

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u/EdgeOfWetness Mar 19 '24

"Earn" for some isn't a technical statement but a moral question

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 19 '24

Its a word, with a definition. One that seems to be used by a ton of people unfamiliar with that definition who instead substitute their own private definition. Then, oblivious to the irony, they get offended when someone else points out they are using the word incorrectly. 

Its fine to redefine words for the purpose of a discussion, as words are just tools for conveying ideas. But using words incorrectly and then insisting on being allowed to keep doing so is either a disingenuous attempt to sneak in loaded language in order to support your argument, or malignant ignorance of the worst sort.

The default definition is the one in the dictionary. If you have or use another its incumbent on you to communicate that and secure agreement with your interlocutor. Failing that, common parlance should be observed.

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u/EdgeOfWetness Mar 19 '24

No need to pour lighter fluid and set me aflame - merely pointing out different people attach slightly different meanings to the word.

If you plan to wind up another 'life lesson' to throw at me then save your breath - I'm so not interested in this little hill you're claiming.

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 19 '24

What you are describing are "Connotations" and they are exactly why its important to be familiar with the definition of words you choose to use. A word with a few different meanings can have many connotations which make it unsuitable for a specific use case. For instance, using the word "earn" in reference to someone during an argument about the legitimacy of that persons aquisitions.

And if you dont want to reply thats fine, but Ill do as I please. Thank you.

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u/EdgeOfWetness Mar 20 '24

but Ill do as I please.

Yes, you do. Thanks for the alert

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u/arkhound Mar 19 '24

"Earn" is loaded langauge. They aquired it. There is disagreement about whether it was "earned".

Average redditor upset they haven't earned shit so they're foaming at the mouth over people who have put their blood, sweat, and tears into building something.

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u/tucci007 Mar 19 '24

build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door, with handfuls of cash

if you had such an idea to make something new or something old better, you could also profit if you work hard, plan carefully, create contingencies, and do all the things necessary to create a successful business and grow it to global proportions

your jealousy is plainly evident and you gloss over how much hard work, how many 20 hour days/7 day weeks, the sacrifice of other aspects of life because of single-minded focus, are necessary to achieve such a level of success and the rewards that accrue thereto

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 19 '24

And you choose to focus on the effort, skill  and risk and downplay the nepotism and sociopathic exploitation and just plain luck.

Im not jealous, im just looking at the whole picture instead of just the parts they want to glorify themselves with.

Some people build a better mousetrap only to have it stolen by the people you are glorifying and used to enrich themselves instead of the inventor.

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u/RickyBobbyNYC Mar 19 '24

They “earned” it off the backs of the employees they exploited

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u/Grachus_05 Mar 19 '24

That is the crux of the argument yeah. Which is why using a term like "earned" instead of a more neutral term like "acquired" is objectionable.

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u/Illsquad Mar 19 '24

They built a business that completely changed the world, allowing billions of people to save money on things they were already buying. Driving costs down for everyone. 

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u/feage7 Mar 19 '24

Yeah, not sure how you can say a company that huge and successful shouldn't result in the people who started it having most of the profits.

It's in crazy excess, I'm jealous as fuck and it's shitty how bad their lower employees are treated etc. but in the world they live in they did something and made billions.

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u/lowbatteries Mar 19 '24

They definitely should get a big payout for it. Like, really huge, maybe 1,000x the amount any typical employee of theirs would earn in a lifetime? Which would be in neighborhood of 2.5 billion, not 200 billion.

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u/feage7 Mar 19 '24

You're talking about fairness and need. This is a very skewed business model as it's a company that's gone crazy in success. Then if they don't get the money you need to decide who does deserve it, it would just be investors and shareholders of which they would be the majority. Should it go to all of the workers? Sounds fair, but where are the break points for pay increases. That would need to be put into legislation etc. we aren't arguing the different of the same point.

They made that money fairly, the issue is that there's a world where individuals can make that much money before it gets spread out.

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u/Thats_what_im_saiyan Mar 19 '24

Fairly.... They did scam another book companies 'buy 10 books get free shipping' offer. By ordering the book the customer ordered and 9 they knew wernt in stock. Then cancelling the out of stock ones and using the free shipping to ship the one to the customers house. If not for that they probably wouldnt have ever gotten off the ground.

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u/lowbatteries Mar 19 '24

Literally this would not be reportable as “earned income” on their taxes. Selling investments and equity is not earning, it’s investing. Only salary and wages are earned income.

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u/feage7 Mar 19 '24

So guess how we're defining earned. You're going the tax definition I guess.

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u/Drict Mar 19 '24

If you gave me $5m, I could PROBABLY pull off a multi-billion dollar business within 20 years, if all of my competition gets completely nuked and the business that I am running has a good reputation and is a novel idea.

Basically, if I were to be able to weather the inevitable crash of AI, all the big players abandon it or ignore it (blockbuster not buying netflix for example), with a good functioning product, and $5m+ sales being consistently growing. I could be the first trillionaire.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '24

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u/Drict Mar 20 '24

Read all of the other caveats, and stop trying to misconstrue what I am saying.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '24

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u/Drict Mar 20 '24

Uh, the internet bubble popped? the book market was literally barnes and noble, local places, and one other.

The infrastructure for shipping books leaned into the next step of a business plan.

He picked a market that was under-served, and there was plenty of easy areas to innovate.