• Veraticus@lib.lgbtEnglish
    238·
    1 year ago

    Sure.

    Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation will probably eradicate polio.

    Before people jump on the bandwagon about how Gates is evil and problematic, that there are no virtuous billionaires, and a government or an NGO or an equivalent should have been the one to do it… I know. But the question was “name one billionaire that’s done anything good,” and I think it’s pretty difficult to argue that eradicating polio isn’t good.

    • nonearther@lemmy.mlEnglish
      88·
      1 year ago

      On same tone, Warren Buffet.

      He has also donated billions in the same charity and largely lives controversy free.

    • richieadler@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
      12·
      1 year ago

      However, one can posit that the Gates Foundation is creating a market for vaccines that aren’t of interest in the industrialized nations.

      I’m not sure that subsequent doses are going to be provided as generously as the first ones.

      • Vlyn@lemmy.zipEnglish
        75·
        1 year ago

        That’s not how vaccines work. The illness is already there, it’s not like people get sick after you introduce a vaccine into the system. So the “market” has always been there and every dose administered is great.

        • richieadler@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
          4·
          1 year ago

          You don’t understand my point.

          • Sick people receive vaccines for free or very cheap
          • Sick people gets hope of survival to disease, hope which wasn’t previously available.
          • Sick people ask their governments to continue receiving vaccines.
          • People providing vacciones now are charging a lot more to said governments.
          • Profit (which was the whole point, and not any “humanitarian” notions.)

          And the market wasn’t there, because unless there’s some way to create high demand and guaranteed payment in poor countries, there’s no profit in said vaccines (or any medication, for that matter; do you see any multinational farmaceutical companies giving much thought to the creation of medicine to cure Chagas disease? And it’s endemic in many areas of South America. But those are poor areas, so the is no profit there).

          • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            24·
            1 year ago

            The problem with your argument is that the Gates foundation is a non-profit. They aren’t trying to make a profit, they’ve burned through tens of billions of dollars in the past 20 years.

            Are you arguing that countries should just let people die from polio rather than accept humanitarian aid or am I missing something?

          • Vlyn@lemmy.zipEnglish
            12·
            1 year ago

            Sick people receive vaccines for free or very cheap

            Awesome, most vaccines last years or even decades, Covid is an outlier because it mutates so rapidly. But “sick people” makes zero sense, you usually get the vaccine before you get sick. That’s the entire point (except for rabies, where you straight up die if you don’t get the vaccine quick enough).

            Sick people gets hope of survival to disease, hope which wasn’t previously available.

            Also great, they get a chance, instead of lifelong suffering or death.

            Sick people ask their governments to continue receiving vaccines.

            Why would they be sick if they got the vaccine? Makes zero sense. The ones asking at this point would be the unvaccinated. Like a mom wanting to vaccinate her kids, so they don’t get a crippling disease later in life.

            People providing vacciones now are charging a lot more to said governments.

            And then the poor countries simply won’t buy them. Because they straight up can’t afford them. There is a reason they aren’t buying vaccines right now: No money. So if they try to charge a lot of money no one will buy and we’ll end up with the current state (just with thousands more who are immune against the disease, which is still an upside).

            Profit (which was the whole point, and not any “humanitarian” notions.)

            You can’t suck blood from a stone, there is no money, so no profit.

            Every single vaccine dose that goes to poor countries is awesome. That’s it. The alternative to getting the vaccine is to catch the disease unprepared and suffer lifelong complications (or straight up die). There is no upside to not delivering vaccines.

            Are you confusing vaccines with medication? For example the Polio vaccine lasts for 10+ years, “sick people” are not repeat customers for vaccines. The only time you have repeat customers is when you are still applying the vaccine (for example Polio needs 5 doses, but then you’re good).

          • Natanael@slrpnk.net
            6·
            1 year ago

            This is fundamentally incoherent, vaccines are less profitable than treatments / therapies

          • Fleppensteyn@feddit.nl
            3·
            1 year ago

            I thought the foundation’s shady capitalist goals were pretty well known, not sure why you’re downvoted. They are against releasing patent on the covid vaccine, for example, because their goal is for people to profit from it

      • SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz
        29·
        1 year ago

        The point of eradication is that once a disease is gone, you don’t need to vaccinate against it any more. You’ve probably never been vaccinated against smallpox, for example.

      • nonearther@lemmy.mlEnglish
        19·
        1 year ago

        You do know Gates left day to day operations from Microsoft for like 20 years ago and his foundation has nothing to do with Microsoft?

    • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
      5·
      1 year ago

      Bill gates, also the guy who spent loads of time on epsteins island banging children. I guess it evens out /s

  • Anamnesis@lemmy.world
    105·
    1 year ago

    It’s pretty easy to come up with some things billionaires have done that are good. Bill Gates funding cures and prevention of diseases in the third world is one that comes to mind.

    Now, if we’re talking about finding an example of a billionaire whose life is on balance a good thing for humanity…that’s pretty much impossible.

  • Synthead@lemmy.world
    82·
    1 year ago

    A single good thing that a single billionaire has done? The Gates foundation fighting malaria. I think that’s good.

    • Mangoholic@lemmy.ml
      4·
      1 year ago

      Sure but, considering they use only 5% of the money they have for all there “good” projects and invest the ither 95% in fossil fuels. The gates Foundation is really only a little good because the law forces them to use min of 5%, to stay tax exempt. So if they didn’t have to, would they still do it? I doubt that.

  • Squirrel@thelemmy.clubEnglish
    55·
    1 year ago

    Good acts do not make a good person. Plenty of billionaires have done good things, but they don’t even come close to outweighing the bad.

    • Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works
      29·
      1 year ago

      I love a quote I read once in a thing about alignment. “If you fix twenty neighbor’s roofs, you’re Jimmy the Helpful Thatcher. But if you eat the neighbor’s daughter, you’re Jimmy the Cannibal, and no amount of additional carpentry assistance will change that.”

    • quat@lemmy.sdfeu.org
      12·
      1 year ago

      A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.

      • Squirrel@thelemmy.clubEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        True, and they generally get ample praise for the good. The bad has, unfortunately, rewarded them with their billions.

    • darharrison@lemm.ee
      6·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, the wording of OP’s question is dumb for this reason. What person on this planet has done literally only evil things? A better question would be more like “What billionaire is genuinely a good person and why?” Personally the size of my list of “overall good” billionaires is a rounding error but at least the thread would be more interesting.

  • fubo@lemmy.world
    54·
    1 year ago

    Paul Allen funded a bunch of scientific and medical research, as well as quite a few museums and other public works around Seattle. He was the largest private donor to the fight against Ebola in Africa.

    Sergey Brin is a big Wikimedia contributor, as came out a few years back when their donor list leaked.

  • thecrotch@sh.itjust.works
    50·
    1 year ago

    Most/all of them have done good things. A better question is are there any that have done enough good to outweigh the bad

  • Pixel of Life@lemm.ee
    50·
    1 year ago

    You conveniently left out the definition of “good” so you can move the goalposts if you don’t like the answers you get.

  • hoodlem@hoodlem.meEnglish
    42·
    1 year ago

    There’s a lot. In the late 1800s it started becoming something of a tradition for billionaires to move on to philanthropy after their retirement. J.D. Rockefeller was worth several hundred billion dollars in today’s money. He gave away close to 200 billion of it.

    A more modern example that people have brought up is Bill Gates.

  • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
    41·
    1 year ago

    This is probably a slightly misguided idea to go after them as bad people because as soon as they do do something “good” you leave the door open for people to think that perhaps on balance they’re not so bad after all.

    The problem of billionaires being billionaires is itself the chief complaint people should have. It doesn’t matter if they’re Mr Rogers and Santa Claus combined, because they can choose to be so entirely at will and can be selfish assholes too entirely at will. They can also be other things entirely, given they are actually human beings after all they can try to act on best intentions, but like all humans, with great ignorance or with flawed thinking. When you or I do that the consequences can be terrible, but mostly, we’d be unable to come close to the scale of impact these demi gods can leave in their wake, not to mention the “original sins” that allowed them to become billionaires in the first place leaving a legacy of nasty indirect consequences for society at large.

    There’s actually a lot of examples of billionaires philanthropy and as you likely expected to point out when people mentioned that, some of those acts hide less pure intention, but undoubtedly they probably really did do some good and that itself is enough to completely undermine your whole point that they never do anything good. The issue is that, with the sheer vast quantity of concentrated wealth and power they can wield, the society that supports them is bereft of a real voice in how it’s resources are used. So much of the fruits of our labour end up closed off in private coffers and it undermines public institutions like democratic governments because while we may theoretically have a say in what they do, we legally have no say at all in how a billionaire spends his bucks (and I say his intentionally). They might say we oughtn’t since it’s their money and no one typically has a say in what the rest of us do with our money but as with most things, there’s a point of extreme where this logic becomes perverse.

    • trailing9@lemmy.ml
      4·
      1 year ago

      Can we as a society organize and innovate without billionaires? Even China changed their economy to make them possible.

      Right now, writers are on strike. Hollywood workers could invest their time, make movies, and get paid afterwards. But instead, it takes people with money to do the funding.

      How should big sums of money be managed? Bureaucrats work to a certain extend but hardly innovate. Which structure could ask a million people to invest a thousand dollars each and offer ethical profits?

  • Fondots@lemmy.world
    35·
    1 year ago

    Before anyone jumps on me, billionaires suck, without exception, for reasons I don’t really need to go into here, you’ve all heard them a million times over, and whatever good they do does not offset that in the slightest. None of them probably have been or will be a net positive influence in the world.

    That said, you can probably pick out a few good things that any individual billionaire has done (and you can absolutely feel free to debate their motivations for doing those things, many of them I’m sure we’re done for tax reasons, vanity, etc.)

    Some of the old robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie (Carnegie was not technically a billionaire, but if you adjusted his wealth for inflation he would be the richest person today by a pretty comfortable margin) funded a lot of universities, libraries, etc.

    Bill Gates has done some good work with vaccines despite his shitty business practices with Microsoft.

    Musk is overall a shithead, I don’t like him, I don’t like his companies, I don’t even like his vehicles. That said, I think it’s pretty fair to say that Tesla has helped (though he is not solely responsible) to kick open the door for EVs to start gaining wider acceptance and adoption. And SpaceX is doing some exciting stuff, though again I dislike a lot of their methods, disagree with a few of their goals, don’t like how they’re run as a company, etc. But long-term I think we need to have our eyes to the stars, whether it’s for settling on other worlds, mining asteroids, asteroid defense, or if I dare dream it, building a Dyson sphere, or just for scientific advancement for it’s own sake, and unfortunately SpaceX is one of the major players in that field now.

    Bezos hasn’t done anything too flashy that comes to my mind, and like musk he is also a shithead that I dislike for pretty much the exact same reasons, excuse me for not repeating them, but he does have and donate to quite a few charities.

    Again, none of that is enough to offset the shitty things they do, but I’d be surprised if you could find any very rich people who haven’t at least donated to a handful of charities.