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Compare and contrast with Jeff Bezos: "The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel.

Compare and contrast with Jeff Bezos: "The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel." A stunning failure of imagination.

oceanman888 8y ago
What would you do with that much money then? Pepole like Jeff Bezos and Elon musk probably find charity ognizaiton's efficiency not to their liking. If you can change the world once? why not twice. I personally feel like educating young leaders a good choice.
- trumped 8y ago
  Better batteries and better solar panels would be nice... not sure how much it would cost though... Tesla improved the form factor of solar panels, but maybe not so much the efficiency or cost.
thefounder 8y ago
If his space travel project works out it won't be a such bad thing for humanity. Some like to give it to charity, others like to do stuff that couldn't otherwise. What makes you think that x charity would create more value than its space program? Personally, to live a humble life is not very inspiring or interesting to me. I would spare a part of my fortune for something like the Nobel prize though.
- lev99 8y ago
  > Personally, to live a humble life is not very inspiring or interesting to me. Personally, Blue Origin has not done work that inspires me. Specifically Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft seems to be reaching for the wrong benchmarks. They claim to enter space, and they do, but going straight up and down isn't nearly as valuable as orbital rockets. Blue Origin's timeline for entering orbit puts them years after Nasa's SLS, meaning they will be third to market for US based orbital launches, while competing with a large number of international competitors. New Shepard, Blue Origin's best success story, has less thrust than a North Korean ICBM. Many charities are doing more impressive and inspiring work than Blue Origin.
  - thefounder 8y ago
    >> Personally, Blue Origin has not done work that inspires me. Perhaps you should give it some time. Knowing that a private citizen can start a space programs is exciting enough for me. More exciting than donating my wealth before I die. Good people get employed there for good salaries so if they want to donate to charity they can do so. It looks like a good distribution of wealth regardless if the space program works out or not. Simply donating to a charity doesn't guarantee good results either. If would be up to me I would invest in biotech but I don't see space tech a waste of money either.
    - oblio 8y ago
      > Knowing that a private citizen can start a space programs is exciting enough for me. While I agree with the feeling, I should point out that "private citizen" Jeff Bezos is worth more than 130 out of 190 or so countries out there. You and I are not in the same league as Bezos or his kind. Actually, are you also a billionaire? :)
    - lev99 8y ago
      > Knowing that a private citizen can start a space programs is exciting enough for me. I interpret SpaceX and Blue Origin as signs that nation states are decreasing in power relative to corporations. Many executives in very large cooperations probably hold more power than the average congressman.
  - JackCh 8y ago
    >Blue Origin's timeline for entering orbit puts them years after Nasa's SLS, meaning they will be third to market for US based orbital launches Discounting Orbital ATK and ULA?
  - whazor 8y ago
    They are probably investing in employees, facilities, software infrastructure, and knowledge. It is smarter to start with a feasible project and start improving from there, then building something too big which you might not be able to launch successfully.
nostrademons 8y ago
Donating $130B to Henry Street Settlement would probably destroy them. When you have that much money, you don't care about deploying it efficiently, you just want to deploy it. You often can't deploy it efficiently without distorting markets. Rather than more stuff getting done, everything just gets done less efficiently, with everyone along the value chain becoming a highly-paid consultant of dubious value. It really is a lot easier to deploy $10M in capital than $100B. $10M means that organizations that do good work and otherwise couldn't exist now can exist. $100B just means that everyone working in an area tangentially related to the benefactor's interests takes home fat salaries. (My wife manages about $180M for a foundation, which is just about the sweet spot: enough to fund several organizations that wouldn't otherwise exist, but not enough to distort markets or incentivize people towards bureaucracy.)
- jv22222 8y ago
  > A stunning failure of imagination. I think the OP meant that $130B could be given to a lot of good causes in small chunks rather than all 130B to one small org.
  - adventured 8y ago
    Bezos isn't giving all of his wealth to space. He has been clear about that, stating over and over again in interviews that he plans to also donate to social causes in the US where he can have a near-term impact. He's 54 years old and has gained $104 billion in new paper wealth in the last three years. I'd rather he get his philanthropy right - assuming the wealth sticks around at all, given Amazon's valuation - instead of hurrying and dumping billions into poor decisions that accomplish little. If he perhaps has 30 years to give tens of billions to social charity efforts, then patience and prudence is called for.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    It can't, really, without creating the bureaucracy that leads to all that waste in the first place. $130B is 13,000 $10M chunks. No single person can find, vet, decide upon, and measure progress for 13,000 small organizations. That means you have to hire a staff to manage and give away the money. A staff means that a.) it's not your imagination that matters b.) money is allocated via horse-trading among the people who have been hired to manage the money and c.) suddenly you have a strong incentive for potential recipients to game the system and focus on making things look good for donors rather than providing the services to the ultimate beneficiaries. Organizations that previously were all about the mission become focused on the money, because there's a lot of it available and they're competing with lots of other organizations for it.
WalterBright 8y ago
Failure? Space travel will be the salvation of mankind.
- jamiegreen 8y ago
  Maybe. Or we could, you know, try to take better care of what we have already?
  - sgt 8y ago
    You know, in a sense we're already taking better care of what we have already. There's less poverty than ever before, as an example. I think the major concern right now for humanity is that of global warming. We're definitely not taking care of our planet right now, and long term it's probably the most important challenge we've ever encountered. Being multi-planetary is linked to that - not as a plan B but imagine how much it will boost scientific research. Any kind of outside earth research may benefit Earth in the end. Fighting poverty and hunger is of course noble efforts too (and they have worked). They can perfectly co-exist with space exploration.
    - wilsonnb 8y ago
      Yes, research into space travel and what not might benefit Earth but not nearly as much as dumping all the money into researching Earth as a primary goal.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Most of the current space industry is focused on things useful on Earth.
        wilsonnb 8y ago
        I got the sense that the comment I was responding to was saying that we might accidentally discover or invent useful things as a byproduct of space travel research. For example, I believe memory foam was originally invented by NASA (or at least by researchers funded by NASA). Memory foam has improved the quality of life of many people including myself (I'm sitting on it right now!) but I don't believe that this is a good justification for researching space travel. Our money would be better spent by cutting out the middle man and directly researching things that will solve problems we know about on Earth. That research will also have unforeseen applications much like research into space travel so we will still get those seemingly random benefits like Viagra being used for erectile dysfunction instead of whatever it was originally invented for. I am simply not a believer that we should be investing money into things like putting humans on other planets. I don't believe that we need to spread out into the universe in case some kind of cosmic event destroys the Earth. I am perfectly okay with humanity going extinct in that case. Sending rovers, satellites, and probes seems like a much better usage of money because they're a lot cheaper than trying to keep a human alive on Mars or any other planet. I am also okay with things like asteroid mining to get more resources to be used on Earth. That has a clear benefit.
shubhamjain 8y ago
I would contend that it's our failure of imagination to think that philanthropy is the only way to help humankind. I wrote about this a while back. [1] While charity sounds great in theory, donating a billion dollars more isn't going to help poor kids in Africa a whole lot, simply because they aren't suffering due to lack of money. It's rather due to corruption, instability of government, and lack of proper law enforcement that can allow them to grow. African nations have cumulatively received $1T in aid till now, how much of it did get translated into actual development? Considering this, an investment in a promising technology sounds like a better deal. [1]: https://shubhamjain.co/2016/10/02/fallacy-of-hating-the-rich/ https://shubhamjain.co/2016/10/02/fallacy-of-hating-the-rich...
- spicymaki 8y ago
  Bill Gates would disagree with that assessment. Infant mortality in Africa is much lower now than it was in the 1990s: https://qz.com/468017/child-mortality-rates-across-sub-saharan-africa-have-fallen-by-over-45-in-the-last-two-decades-and-theyre-still-improving/ https://qz.com/468017/child-mortality-rates-across-sub-sahar... Well targeted evidence-based philanthropy does really work. In addition to the challenges that you mentioned, there is also the hubris of imagining what people need rather than asking and working with them directly.
Cthulhu_ 8y ago
I have been thinking from time to time how people like that can use their money for good. On the one hand I'd say they could create lots of jobs; things that do good but whose intent are not to optimize for profit. Bringing back mom & pop local stores for example. For his own company, increase wages and working conditions. Of course, in that case it's not up to him, it's up to the shareholders and they do optimize for profit. Charity wise, it'd have to be very carefully done. I think Bill Gates is on the right path, but he's still one of the richest people in the world so I don't think he's spending much of his personal fortune in charity - yet. Not in such a way that it impacts his personal fortune, in any case. There's some charities that are bottomless pits though, e.g. aid to Africa as another commenter mentioned. That stuff will only work if you spend so much money, you'd basically buy a country and - forcefully - take over the government. For one, that would cost more money than the richest people in the world have - government scale money, which is still much higher than corporation scale money. Second, that's a pretty dystopian idea, where corporations own countries and armies and such.
charlesdm 8y ago
Nothing wrong with supporting space travel if that's what you're passionate about. Better that than not giving away a penny until you're 75, and then handing it all off to Gates when you're eventually dead. If you have to wait to help people out with your money until you're dead, you're doing something fundamentally wrong in my view. Why not try and make a meaningful social impact during your lifetime? But hey, to each their own.
- MarkMc 8y ago
  > Better that than not giving away a penny until you're 75, and then handing it all off to Gates when you're eventually dead. Doesn't that depends on your rate of return? Imagine two options: (a) give away $1 million now; (b) invest the money and wait until you are 75, then give away $1 billion. Is option (a) necessarily better?
- swalsh 8y ago
  To be fair, Gates is applying economies of scale to donations. He is using theanthropy at industrial scales to solve HUGE problems. They have goals like eliminating WHOLE diseases from parts of the world... and it seems like they're getting results. If you have a large fortune, you could build the organization to try and invest it for benefits. Many do, and if you have a rare cause... there's good value in it. But the alternative is you could give it to gates, and be pretty well assured it will be leveraged for amazing results.
bradleyjg 8y ago
How much of the money this woman tirelessly scrimped and saved for is going to end up in the hands of BigEd and its ever growing armies of deanlets, deanlings, and other assorted non-instructional staff?
leonroy 8y ago
There have been at least 5 major extinction events on this planet. Whilst I believe that taking care of Earth should be our number one priority, is it so wrong if a billionnaire decides to focus on improving our ability to travel into space? Not to belittle the invaluable work ESA or NASA do but the incredible progress SpaceX has made in just the past 15 years speaks to how little development governmental space agencies have made in the field of rocketry over the past 50 years. Doing anything in Space is insanely expensive - I for one am extremely glad we have two lunatics (in Musk and Bezos) willing to lose their shirt over it.
- flashman 8y ago
  > There have been at least 5 major extinction events on this planet. The odds are that number six will be a) caused by humans and b) due to the same economic and industrial systems that concentrate wealth among a few individuals. I never said Bezos was wrong to focus on space travel, just that he lacks imagination for ways he could allocate his capital. Perhaps we should be restructuring our systems to prioritise our planet above the ability of individuals to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
swalsh 8y ago
There are places in the world that don't have clean drinking water. Space is cool, i'm glad we're looking into it... but there are things of true value that amount of wealth can bring to the current world we live in that will help bring some struggling people from zero to one.

Compare and contrast with Jeff Bezos: "The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel." A stunning failure of imagination.

oceanman888 8y ago

What would you do with that much money then? Pepole like Jeff Bezos and Elon musk probably find charity ognizaiton's efficiency not to their liking. If you can change the world once? why not twice. I personally feel like educating young leaders a good choice.

trumped 8y ago
Better batteries and better solar panels would be nice... not sure how much it would cost though... Tesla improved the form factor of solar panels, but maybe not so much the efficiency or cost.

thefounder 8y ago

If his space travel project works out it won't be a such bad thing for humanity. Some like to give it to charity, others like to do stuff that couldn't otherwise. What makes you think that x charity would create more value than its space program? Personally, to live a humble life is not very inspiring or interesting to me. I would spare a part of my fortune for something like the Nobel prize though.

lev99 8y ago
> Personally, to live a humble life is not very inspiring or interesting to me. Personally, Blue Origin has not done work that inspires me. Specifically Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft seems to be reaching for the wrong benchmarks. They claim to enter space, and they do, but going straight up and down isn't nearly as valuable as orbital rockets. Blue Origin's timeline for entering orbit puts them years after Nasa's SLS, meaning they will be third to market for US based orbital launches, while competing with a large number of international competitors. New Shepard, Blue Origin's best success story, has less thrust than a North Korean ICBM. Many charities are doing more impressive and inspiring work than Blue Origin.
- thefounder 8y ago
  >> Personally, Blue Origin has not done work that inspires me. Perhaps you should give it some time. Knowing that a private citizen can start a space programs is exciting enough for me. More exciting than donating my wealth before I die. Good people get employed there for good salaries so if they want to donate to charity they can do so. It looks like a good distribution of wealth regardless if the space program works out or not. Simply donating to a charity doesn't guarantee good results either. If would be up to me I would invest in biotech but I don't see space tech a waste of money either.
  - oblio 8y ago
    > Knowing that a private citizen can start a space programs is exciting enough for me. While I agree with the feeling, I should point out that "private citizen" Jeff Bezos is worth more than 130 out of 190 or so countries out there. You and I are not in the same league as Bezos or his kind. Actually, are you also a billionaire? :)
  - lev99 8y ago
    > Knowing that a private citizen can start a space programs is exciting enough for me. I interpret SpaceX and Blue Origin as signs that nation states are decreasing in power relative to corporations. Many executives in very large cooperations probably hold more power than the average congressman.
- JackCh 8y ago
  >Blue Origin's timeline for entering orbit puts them years after Nasa's SLS, meaning they will be third to market for US based orbital launches Discounting Orbital ATK and ULA?
- whazor 8y ago
  They are probably investing in employees, facilities, software infrastructure, and knowledge. It is smarter to start with a feasible project and start improving from there, then building something too big which you might not be able to launch successfully.

nostrademons 8y ago

Donating $130B to Henry Street Settlement would probably destroy them. When you have that much money, you don't care about deploying it efficiently, you just want to deploy it. You often can't deploy it efficiently without distorting markets. Rather than more stuff getting done, everything just gets done less efficiently, with everyone along the value chain becoming a highly-paid consultant of dubious value. It really is a lot easier to deploy $10M in capital than $100B. $10M means that organizations that do good work and otherwise couldn't exist now can exist. $100B just means that everyone working in an area tangentially related to the benefactor's interests takes home fat salaries. (My wife manages about $180M for a foundation, which is just about the sweet spot: enough to fund several organizations that wouldn't otherwise exist, but not enough to distort markets or incentivize people towards bureaucracy.)

jv22222 8y ago
> A stunning failure of imagination. I think the OP meant that $130B could be given to a lot of good causes in small chunks rather than all 130B to one small org.
- adventured 8y ago
  Bezos isn't giving all of his wealth to space. He has been clear about that, stating over and over again in interviews that he plans to also donate to social causes in the US where he can have a near-term impact. He's 54 years old and has gained $104 billion in new paper wealth in the last three years. I'd rather he get his philanthropy right - assuming the wealth sticks around at all, given Amazon's valuation - instead of hurrying and dumping billions into poor decisions that accomplish little. If he perhaps has 30 years to give tens of billions to social charity efforts, then patience and prudence is called for.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  It can't, really, without creating the bureaucracy that leads to all that waste in the first place. $130B is 13,000 $10M chunks. No single person can find, vet, decide upon, and measure progress for 13,000 small organizations. That means you have to hire a staff to manage and give away the money. A staff means that a.) it's not your imagination that matters b.) money is allocated via horse-trading among the people who have been hired to manage the money and c.) suddenly you have a strong incentive for potential recipients to game the system and focus on making things look good for donors rather than providing the services to the ultimate beneficiaries. Organizations that previously were all about the mission become focused on the money, because there's a lot of it available and they're competing with lots of other organizations for it.

WalterBright 8y ago

Failure? Space travel will be the salvation of mankind.

jamiegreen 8y ago
Maybe. Or we could, you know, try to take better care of what we have already?
- sgt 8y ago
  You know, in a sense we're already taking better care of what we have already. There's less poverty than ever before, as an example. I think the major concern right now for humanity is that of global warming. We're definitely not taking care of our planet right now, and long term it's probably the most important challenge we've ever encountered. Being multi-planetary is linked to that - not as a plan B but imagine how much it will boost scientific research. Any kind of outside earth research may benefit Earth in the end. Fighting poverty and hunger is of course noble efforts too (and they have worked). They can perfectly co-exist with space exploration.
  - wilsonnb 8y ago
    Yes, research into space travel and what not might benefit Earth but not nearly as much as dumping all the money into researching Earth as a primary goal.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Most of the current space industry is focused on things useful on Earth.
      - wilsonnb 8y ago
        I got the sense that the comment I was responding to was saying that we might accidentally discover or invent useful things as a byproduct of space travel research. For example, I believe memory foam was originally invented by NASA (or at least by researchers funded by NASA). Memory foam has improved the quality of life of many people including myself (I'm sitting on it right now!) but I don't believe that this is a good justification for researching space travel. Our money would be better spent by cutting out the middle man and directly researching things that will solve problems we know about on Earth. That research will also have unforeseen applications much like research into space travel so we will still get those seemingly random benefits like Viagra being used for erectile dysfunction instead of whatever it was originally invented for. I am simply not a believer that we should be investing money into things like putting humans on other planets. I don't believe that we need to spread out into the universe in case some kind of cosmic event destroys the Earth. I am perfectly okay with humanity going extinct in that case. Sending rovers, satellites, and probes seems like a much better usage of money because they're a lot cheaper than trying to keep a human alive on Mars or any other planet. I am also okay with things like asteroid mining to get more resources to be used on Earth. That has a clear benefit.

shubhamjain 8y ago

I would contend that it's our failure of imagination to think that philanthropy is the only way to help humankind. I wrote about this a while back. [1] While charity sounds great in theory, donating a billion dollars more isn't going to help poor kids in Africa a whole lot, simply because they aren't suffering due to lack of money. It's rather due to corruption, instability of government, and lack of proper law enforcement that can allow them to grow. African nations have cumulatively received $1T in aid till now, how much of it did get translated into actual development? Considering this, an investment in a promising technology sounds like a better deal. [1]: https://shubhamjain.co/2016/10/02/fallacy-of-hating-the-rich/ https://shubhamjain.co/2016/10/02/fallacy-of-hating-the-rich...

spicymaki 8y ago
Bill Gates would disagree with that assessment. Infant mortality in Africa is much lower now than it was in the 1990s: https://qz.com/468017/child-mortality-rates-across-sub-saharan-africa-have-fallen-by-over-45-in-the-last-two-decades-and-theyre-still-improving/ https://qz.com/468017/child-mortality-rates-across-sub-sahar... Well targeted evidence-based philanthropy does really work. In addition to the challenges that you mentioned, there is also the hubris of imagining what people need rather than asking and working with them directly.

Cthulhu_ 8y ago

I have been thinking from time to time how people like that can use their money for good. On the one hand I'd say they could create lots of jobs; things that do good but whose intent are not to optimize for profit. Bringing back mom & pop local stores for example. For his own company, increase wages and working conditions. Of course, in that case it's not up to him, it's up to the shareholders and they do optimize for profit. Charity wise, it'd have to be very carefully done. I think Bill Gates is on the right path, but he's still one of the richest people in the world so I don't think he's spending much of his personal fortune in charity - yet. Not in such a way that it impacts his personal fortune, in any case. There's some charities that are bottomless pits though, e.g. aid to Africa as another commenter mentioned. That stuff will only work if you spend so much money, you'd basically buy a country and - forcefully - take over the government. For one, that would cost more money than the richest people in the world have - government scale money, which is still much higher than corporation scale money. Second, that's a pretty dystopian idea, where corporations own countries and armies and such.

charlesdm 8y ago

Nothing wrong with supporting space travel if that's what you're passionate about. Better that than not giving away a penny until you're 75, and then handing it all off to Gates when you're eventually dead. If you have to wait to help people out with your money until you're dead, you're doing something fundamentally wrong in my view. Why not try and make a meaningful social impact during your lifetime? But hey, to each their own.

MarkMc 8y ago
> Better that than not giving away a penny until you're 75, and then handing it all off to Gates when you're eventually dead. Doesn't that depends on your rate of return? Imagine two options: (a) give away $1 million now; (b) invest the money and wait until you are 75, then give away $1 billion. Is option (a) necessarily better?
swalsh 8y ago
To be fair, Gates is applying economies of scale to donations. He is using theanthropy at industrial scales to solve HUGE problems. They have goals like eliminating WHOLE diseases from parts of the world... and it seems like they're getting results. If you have a large fortune, you could build the organization to try and invest it for benefits. Many do, and if you have a rare cause... there's good value in it. But the alternative is you could give it to gates, and be pretty well assured it will be leveraged for amazing results.

bradleyjg 8y ago

How much of the money this woman tirelessly scrimped and saved for is going to end up in the hands of BigEd and its ever growing armies of deanlets, deanlings, and other assorted non-instructional staff?

leonroy 8y ago

There have been at least 5 major extinction events on this planet. Whilst I believe that taking care of Earth should be our number one priority, is it so wrong if a billionnaire decides to focus on improving our ability to travel into space? Not to belittle the invaluable work ESA or NASA do but the incredible progress SpaceX has made in just the past 15 years speaks to how little development governmental space agencies have made in the field of rocketry over the past 50 years. Doing anything in Space is insanely expensive - I for one am extremely glad we have two lunatics (in Musk and Bezos) willing to lose their shirt over it.

flashman 8y ago
> There have been at least 5 major extinction events on this planet. The odds are that number six will be a) caused by humans and b) due to the same economic and industrial systems that concentrate wealth among a few individuals. I never said Bezos was wrong to focus on space travel, just that he lacks imagination for ways he could allocate his capital. Perhaps we should be restructuring our systems to prioritise our planet above the ability of individuals to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

swalsh 8y ago

There are places in the world that don't have clean drinking water. Space is cool, i'm glad we're looking into it... but there are things of true value that amount of wealth can bring to the current world we live in that will help bring some struggling people from zero to one.