Melinda French Gates Says Musk, Thiel and Other Billionaires Are Not Philanthropists

Good for her. I know Mackenzie Bezos gives away billions to worthy causes as well. These two together could make quite an impact on women/human rights

Exactly. Which is why there should be no such thing as a billionaire. Tax laws---from Federal income tax brackets to bankruptcy to zoning to Eminent Domain to write-offs to excess taxation on labor as opposed to investments and dividends to taxpayer-supported private enterprise projects such as sports complexes---corruptly allow such wealth accumulation while requiring zero, not in taxes, not in philanthropy, investment in society as a whole, while allowing the literal purchasing of politicians and Supreme Court justices who will follow orders.

^ Yeah, we really do need to do something about obscene wealth that breeds people like Thiel and Musk who blatantly buy their way into power

We're witnessing a new Gilded Age.

But I should add, at r4, that at least the original Gilded Agers had taste and made enduring contributions to American cultural life.

Oh shut up you hypocrite frau:

Microsoft controlled over 80% of the market, significantly drowning out competitor products and creating an environment of unfair advantage. Courts typically conclude if a company controls at least 70% of the market within an industry that this designates a monopoly power.

Further, since monopolists are price setters and marginal revenue is always less than price within a monopoly, the consumer is ultimately the one to bear the cost.

R6 = fat cunt Elon Musk.

How come he gets richer and all the rest get poorer.

R7 you stupid stupid queen, unlike you I don't cream my pants on any of the corporate overlords.

I am not their serf.

And you people who are getting off on this money grabber's ugly ex frau are pathetic.

She's right, of course, and I hope her message gains some traction.

You would think that somewhere between having made billions and 100s of billions, the idea of philanthropy might kick in. But not for the men she mentions, and for too many others as well.

However great the practicality that may have been behind the philanthropy of the American Robber Barons, whether to whitewash their names, to clear their consciences, to get invited into better social circles, or simply to make it safer to move about in the world, they accomplished something in their philanthropy. There's a legacy of marble buildings, of libraries in every shitty little town, of art collections and parks and natural preserves, and a legacy of far reaching small philanthropy that rather peculiarly American: the friends of the.mus3um, the friends of the library, the friends of the park, the idea that small donations matter too - and so they do when enough people take them up.

I understand money, including its vices, but I'll never understand power. With money eventually there's realization that some sum is enough, and even some fraction of that enough. Beyond that it's about power and sometimes that means amassing money and influence so that others cannot.

Usually the wife of the wealthy men are the ones who push them into philanthropy. Unless of course you are Verst Ladeey.

R4 Gilded age indeed.

"The enormous aggregation of wealth in the technology sector stand before us every day. (Bill Gates, age 65, Microsoft, net worth $130 billion; Sergey Brin, $100 billion and Larry Page, $120 billion both at Google and both age 47; and Mark Zuckerberg, age 38, Facebook, $118 billion). Add to this Jeff Bezos (age 56, Amazon, $113 billion, plus his divorced wife, Mackinzie, $61 billion) and Elon Musk ($157.6 billion, age 49)."

The age of Robber Barons. Hey, what a great name for my son! - DJT

I despise people who are begging for the crumbs from this Robber Barron frau and I despise the frau. I prefer honest robbers who are not pretending to be philanthropists.

[quote] Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has given away nearly $80 billion since it was founded in 2000

Hardly "crumbs," you fucking troll at R14.

Right wing MAGAT Trump cunt.

Philanthropist elitism, so nice.

In other news, water is wet

Bill and Melinda Gates are not quite the image of cuddly, progressive billionaires they’ve worked hard to cultivate. He’s a ruthless monopolist and tax evader who, together with her, used the famous charitable foundation they cochaired to not just avoid paying the government but to funnel that untaxed hoard into corporations their foundation was invested in. The charter school enthusiasts gobbled up so much arable land they became the country’s largest owners of farmland and, true to their vision of trickle-down charity, pushed highly questionable chemical and biotech solutions onto the problem of African hunger.

There is a gravity to wealth, it tends to call more to itself.

R15 braindead idiot, do you even know what right wing means? You serfs sucking corporate cock are right wingers.

"network effects,” which we economists will tell you is a major driver of monopolization. Gates and his tech CEO chums have used that monopolization to summon gigantic profits and to tighten their grip over still-growing portions of the world economy."

"During his company’s manic growth period, Gates emerged as a modern Gilded Age tycoon. "Gates’s number two and CEO successor, Steve Ballmer, maintained this reputation of management by yelling like an ape at employees and sometimes throwing chairs."

"In addition to the network effects, it was Gates’s burning desire to grind his competitors to sand, along with his desire to set the standard that software makers would conform to, that led to Microsoft selling over 90 percent of the PC operating systems of the 1990s and 2000s. That dominance made Gates the world’s richest man for decades on end."

"he golfed with President Bill Clinton, dined with House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and had Vice President Al Gore visit the Redmond Microsoft campus. Like all great capitalists, he enjoyed the company of powerful figures with abutting interests. But his company’s aggressive steps to take over new markets like web browsing forced the Justice Department’s hand."

"The business press has observed how “Twenty years ago, people associated the name Gates with ‘ruthless, predatory’ monopolistic conduct.” However, “after taking a public relations beating during [the Microsoft antitrust] trial’s early going in late 1998, the company started what was described at the time as a ‘charm offensive’ aimed at improving its image . . . Mr. Gates contributed $20.3 billion, or 71 percent of his total contributions to the foundation . . . during the 18 months between the start of the trial and the verdict.” A wealth manager frankly states, “his philanthropy has helped ‘rebrand’ his name.”

As for Gates’s original empire, the Bush administration’s Department of Justice dropped its demand to break up the company, despite a federal court formally ruling that Microsoft had a monopoly on Intel-based PC operating systems, and that it had used illegal monopolization tactics to crush software threats from Netscape, Sun, Apple, and others. So today Gates remains cartoonishly rich, and free to step down from Microsoft’s board on his own terms.

See the speech in "Loot" about billionaires. Best part of an amusing little show. She's right too. Billionaires shouldn't exist.

R23 Hypocrite to the bone. She could have just given away the money, not playing the big shot with shady money her husband made.

The troll in this thread is really invested.

Us culture is strange. The fraus who married important men tend to be obnoxious. I don't say that there are not snobbish rich housewives in Europe, but they don't take themselves so seriously as the Americans.

Hence this 19th century culture of first lady, from days when women had no career of their own. In Europe you hardly know who the president's wife is.

"In Europe you hardly know who the president's wife is. "

Yeah, right 🙄

R27 Macron is probably the only exception. But he is the special case.

Elon Musk claimed he was “fixing the water in any house" in Flint MI with lead contamination above the level the FDA considers safe. In the end he spent less than half a million dollars putting filters on water fountains in a dozen schools. Media then swooned over his generosity with countless headlines claiming Musk “made good on his word” and “brought clean water to Flint’s schoolchildren for the first time in years.”

This is his idea of philanthropy. Claim to fix a community’s water problem, then donate a tiny fraction of money to filters for water fountains in 12 schools. Remember, the school’s water supply is still contaminated except for the water fountain. And no homes were helped in this weeny project.

What kills me is how in-the-bag the media is and has been for Musk for decades. Absolute decades Musk has been lionized not just on social media but in print media and tv as well, constantly banging on about this “visionary genius” who is saving the planet while planning to send people to Mars to colonize it for him (and get the mineral rights to enrich himself).

I know rightwing billionaires run media but the way former journalists are now holding water (heh) for the billionaires is disgusting. It’s like Dear Leader Chairman Mao is running US media.

Complaints aside, would we better off if the Gates hadn't spent the money?

We would have much more avaliable softwares if he haven't usurped and monopolized them, so we would be on the winning side.

Sorry, holders of the "But they had good taste, what with their Biltmores and Carnegie-Mellon stuff and Rockefeller Centers and Guggenheim Museums and aren't we LUCKY to have them?!" opinion.

No.

I mean sure, given the tax laws then extant. But really no, for these monuments to extreme wealth are but Noblesse Oblige in Dickensian times. We can today visit, admire, envy, perhaps even make use of such properties, but I, an actual coal-miner's daughter 🎶, would rather have had that wealth used to improve lives, salaries, working conditions, healthcare, public education, housing, racial equality, etc.

And the only entity that can fairly accomplish such improvement across the board, the only entity that would not have us peons thankful for the kind whims of strangers,....

Is the government. J/S.

In 1915 the top Federal Individual Income Tax rate was 7%. It eventually rise to more equitable numbers, but JFK lowered it from 91% to 65%, and it's been Katy, bar the door, ever since.

"rose to...."

Well that's the basic tension between market forces and wealth redistribution.

Hard sell in America.

And even Scandanavia has billionaires and philanthropists, so.... maybe not the right hill to die on.

We never had them.

They're all greedy selfish pigs whatever they call themselves. The money they throw at various causes does no good at allMelinda married her creep even after he told her he would fuck around in the marriage on a regular basis and didn't want to hear a peep out of her about it. For 28 years she was a doormat and has suddenly discovered women's rights? Is she still a member of the Flat Earth Society?

Sure, some billionaires are more repulsive than others but when it comes to their power obsessed self-regard it's a distinction without much of a difference. Their philanthropy isn't going to get near the root of our problems, it's not transparent, and it encourages the attitude that charity is a solution to egregious inequality.

Again, better than the dark picture you paint, plus none of the money?

Melinda Gates is one step away from becoming Hillary Clinton and blaming “a vast right wing conspiracy” for Bill Gates’ sexcapades. Bill Gates was a pig when she married him, but for some reason she was able to overlook that. We have a word for women like her, She just negotiated a very good price.

Is she called Melinda "French" Gates because of her skills at French kissing?

[quote] Again, better than the dark picture you paint, plus none of the money?

Who knows, dear, that's the problem. What we do know is philanthropy helps philanthropists:

This might seem an uncontroversially good thing, a mechanism for the wealthy to return some of their wealth to society. It can indeed be a good thing, but the starting point of my analysis is that big philanthropy is an exercise in power – the direction of the private assets of wealthy people toward some public influence. In a democratic society, wherever we see the exercise of power in a public setting, the response it deserves is not gratitude but scrutiny.

The public policies in the United States, and in many other countries, confer enormous privileges on philanthropists. Private foundations are largely unaccountable – no one can be unelected in a foundation, and there are no competitors to put them out of business. They are frequently nontransparent – more than 90 percent of the roughly 100,000 private foundations in the U.S. have no website. And they are donor-directed, and by default exist in perpetuity. Finally, it might seem that philanthropy is just the exercise of the liberty of people to give away their money. But philanthropy is generously tax subsidized, costing the U.S. Treasury more than $50 billion in forgone revenue last year. My book asks, do these policies orient philanthropy toward support of democratic institutions and the pursuit of justice? I argue that our policies fall very short. Too often philanthropy is not just giving.

Musk and Thiel are no more philanthropists than David Koch and Charles Koch are. They give several million dollars to groups like museums or high profile charities to have their name branded somewhere for public image purposes. The money they contribute is a tax write off and is mere pittance to what they earn annually.

mere pittanche!

I agree with those who say that Melinda Gates is utterly shameless by saying that there shouldn't be billionaires, when she has amply benefited from her ex-husband's utterly immoral business practices and enthusiastically participated in the Gates Foundation's shady financing networks that allowed her family to massively increase their wealth at the expense of millions of human beings' suffering.

The Gates family is part of a clientelism network that aims to control the world through totalitarian practices, and use their enormous wealth to ensure outcomes from which they can financially profit. This woman's cynicism and immorality are just as enormous as those of her repulsive ex-husband.

[quote]Who knows, dear, that's the problem.

Does that really make you feel better, great learned man?

[quote]My book asks, do these policies orient philanthropy toward support of democratic institutions and the pursuit of justice? I argue that our policies fall very short. Too often philanthropy is not just giving.

Christ, I thought Josh Kilmer Purcell was a tedious marketer.

I love this woman and how she responded to that useless boil on the ass of humanity

You poor poor serf R48

Go and suck massa missus' clit.

Who cares what billionaires think of each other?