yeah… no shit…

The most lemmy take ever

All billionaires are horrible humans and parasitic to all of humanity

My PC repair teacher hated Gates. The first story he told us about him was about how he essentially obtained DOS for a literal pittance, turned a massive profit on it, and never credited the original creators.

I might've skewed the story over the years of trying to keep it in my memory, but if I did it just goes to show how much I hate Bill Gates.

What?! No. I bet next you are gonna tell me lil Donnie Trump is a pedophile.

Billionaire being a selfish person? Who woulda known? But yes, even though he donates a lot of his wealth, becoming a billionaire is a sign of being a sociopath.

There have been many times when I thought to myself: "Hold on. Can I be absolutely sure that billionaires are scum? Maybe there's a crucial part of the story I'm missing?"

Every single time I just found even more cases of them blatantly lying, manipulating data and taking advantage of everything and everyone around them for personal gain. And every one of those times, it got me more depressed about the current and future state of society and the world in general.

You can try this yourself. I highly recommend it, even though the outcome is obvious. We can very rarely, if ever, be 100% sure about anything, so it's always a good idea to put your beliefs to the test. However, I find it fairly self-evident that anyone seriously arguing in favor of any billionaire has simply never critically examined this topic.

No matter where and how deeply you look, it's just evidence upon evidence upon evidence that they are, in fact, the worst filth that has ever shared the air with us. Though at least this one thing is comming to an end. Soon, we'll be breathing toxic waste while they'll be enjoying clean air in their doomsday bunkers larger than entire neighborhoods.

Obviously Bill Gates is a household name and in the tech community everyone knows who is Steve Ballmer. However not many people know who Paul Allen is even though he was one of the founder of Microsoft at the very start. In 1982 Paul Allen was diagnosed with cancer and Bill and Steve were worried that if Paul died the shares of the company would go to someone else along with control of the company. While Paul was literally getting cancer treatment, Bill and Steve were scheming to dilute the shares of the company to wrestle the control of the company away from Paul. Fortunately for Paul he survived the cancer. It really doesn't put Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer in very good light though. I remember reading about this from Robert X. Cringely's blog about two decades ago and I heard Paul Allen wrote about his version of this story in his memoir before his death.

Edit: I tried to find the original Robert X. Cringely's story from back in 2006 but looks like that link is broken but he did referenced it in 2011 when Paul Allen's book was released.

https://www.cringely.com/2011/03/30/i-told-you-so/

I really don't get how opinions on intellectual property and its "theft" turn 180 whenever AI is mentioned.

And for any of the people saying "he changed".

One of his most recent "philanthropic" ventures was to partner with Nestle (good start) to "modernize and increase yields" of the dairy industries in impoverished countries.

The two organizations then sold modern (likely non-servicable) equipment and entrenched them in corporate supply chain systems geared towards export and making it much harder to trade locally (not sure how that part worked, but was in what I read).

For a grand total of........ 1% increased dairy yields.

Then 3-4 years later they pulled out, leaving heavily indebted farmers without the corporate supply chains and delivery systems they were forced to switch to, and making it very difficult to switch back to the old ways of working, so they can't sell nearly as much locally.

Who do you think will buy up those farms when the farmers go bankrupt and have to sell ar rock bottom prices.

yeah, but on the other hand, he fucked up the entire reduction system in the US.

He is literally in the Epstein List no?

He’s still the same sociopath as always, except now with a savior complex. Giving away all his money, is he? His foundation has been around 25 years and he still has $100b+ net worth. A single individual shouldn’t have that much power, and the fact that he still voluntarily wields it while virtue signaling affirms every negative opinion of him. Even if he were the benevolent billionaire his PR campaign would have us believe he is, such a net worth should be reserved for governments where it’s spread across multiple agencies that have checks and balances and are accountable to voters. I don’t trust any individual with that much power, though I’d trust any random person off the street over anyone ruthless enough to become a billionaire.

He’s missing out on his redemption arc. But I doubt if put in his shoes that anyone would pass up the opportunity he had.