6 ms·
Just curious, why are most people in 2019 so convinced that Bill Gates is "the worlds greatest guy"? Don't we have plenty of evidence of a long history of shady
by drcode 7y ago
Just curious, why are most people in 2019 so convinced that Bill Gates is "the worlds greatest guy"? Don't we have plenty of evidence of a long history of shady business practices (that really only ended around 1998 when Microsoft lost their stranglehold on the computer industry due to the internet) and isn't it likely that Bill Gates most likely has the world's greatest PR team? Also, do we have any evidence that Bill Gates is a generous guy when he isn't attaching his name to it for self promotion?
I'm sincerely asking these questions: I agree he seems like an OK guy these days... but the rational part of me kinda wonders what evidence we have that he isn't just the product of a giant PR campaign.
- omarchowdhury 7y agoPossibly due to the philanthropic efforts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
- drcode 7y agoYou're missing my point. Other rich people donate anonymously or through a foundation that doesn't have their name on it.
- anchpop 7y ago> Other rich people donate anonymously How do you know?
- dwoozle 7y agoCharities report anonymous donations.
- catalogia 7y agoThere are a lot of museums, historic sites, schools, etc with names of donors on plaques hanging on some wall, and many of them attribute very large donations to "anonymous donor."
- ALittleLight 7y agoMaybe that donor is Bill Gates. Also: it's possible to make an "anonymous" donation and let your friends and family know you're doing it. That way, to the people you know and want to impress you seem both like a generous philanthropist and a humble private person. My point is, it's possible to read any action in a bad light and assign a bad motive to it. In my view giving money to worthwhile causes is good, even if you're doing it to rehabilitate your image or make yourself look good
- lupire 7y agoSeems unlikely since his name is often also on the wall and on nearby walls.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- omarchowdhury 7y ago> You're missing my point. You asked what could be the reason why "are most people in 2019 so convinced that Bill Gates is "the worlds greatest guy?" I'm pointing out it might have something to do with a $50 billion philanthropic organization.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- craigc 7y agoUnpopular opinion: I think a lot of people use charity/philanthropy as a cover to prevent scrutiny against other less than stellar things they have done. See Clinton Foundation, McCain Institute, etc.
- mehrdadn 7y agoCover? That's your response to the Gates Foundation's philanthropy—that it's cover for shady stuff? Really? Whatever did they do that was so horrific compared to everything the foundation has achieved?
- math_and_stuff 7y agoAggressively normalize US companies conceding to Chinese Communist Party censorship and surveillance demands.
- samstave 7y agoI read a really interesting article some years ago how the rich setup charity foundations to hide from taxes. I donate to your foundation some large amount and you do the same. Then employ your family members to run the foundation and pay them a huge salary. I can’t validate this, but I recall the article.
- dredmorbius 7y agoAlfred Nobel: http://www.openculture.com/2019/01/how-alfred-nobel-read-an-obituary-that-called-him-the-merchant-of-death-and-made-amends-by-creating-the-nobel-prize.html http://www.openculture.com/2019/01/how-alfred-nobel-read-an-... The list is long. Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Pew, Kochs, ...
- samstave 7y agoI liked this link from that dead post below https://twitter.com/nickwiger/status/1183086808046829568 https://twitter.com/nickwiger/status/1183086808046829568
- andrepd 7y agoThere's plenty of concrete criticism levelled at his foundation as well. See the wiki page for an good overview, but there are more concerns.
- frabert 7y agoHere is my opinion on the matter: given that that the probability of me interacting personally with Gates is on the order of a rounding error, I don't really care if he's actually a nice guy or if he's the greatest actor in the world, because in the end he's still one of the people who's putting money on making the world a better place, whether it's just for making him look good or not.
- lupire 7y agoThat money also does things like corrupt education with newfangled "business oriented" theories unsupported by evidence, and generally displace scientific consensus with whatever his pet theories are.
- ALittleLight 7y agoI don't know that I've seen anyone say Gates is "The world's greatest guy." He seems intelligent and genuine in interviews and in his writing. He's accomplished big things. He has good taste in books. He's working on worthwhile philanthropical topics. That Gates played hard in the business world doesn't take away from the above. He is who he is. In my view, a good person. If Gates turns out to be involved in Epstein's pedophile ring then of course I'd change my opinion. I deeply hope he wasn't though.
- mlevental 7y ago>That Gates played hard in the business world doesn't take away from the above. i mean doesn't it? this "playing a game well" as a proxy for fairness/justice/merit metaphor as a source of legitimacy i think is strained in business. if you play basketball well and win a championship then you showed merit because the rules are tight - it's very hard to win by another means than being talented (i.e. cheating). the exception that proves the rule is how upset people get when basketball players "flop". business is the one game where the only rule is "don't get caught" so it doesn't seem correct to reason that since he did well he played fair.
- vinniejames 7y agoAnyone who plays sports knows the rule is "don't get caught" there too...
- mlevental 7y agoof course but no one venerates the cheaters (lance armstrong has fallen from grace)
- mjfl 7y agoI feel like we have at least 10 weekly front page articles on "<billionaire> is a terrible person, if I was a billionaire I would use my fortune much more morally" (sure you would). It takes a certain amount of obliviousness then, to go into these comments sections and declare "I don't know why everyone thinks <billionaire> is a great guy!". Are these people self aware? Are they androids?
- monoideism 7y ago> Just curious, why are most people in 2019 so convinced that Bill Gates is "the worlds greatest guy"? Don't we have plenty of evidence of a long history of shady business practices Another idea: maybe Bill Gates, like many of us, is a morally complex person who has done immense good and also done some bad things, some of them possibly very bad.
- blazespin 7y agonah, that makes brains hurt. can't be that.
- parenthesis 7y agoHe can be both a ruthless business man and a generous philanthropist. (I'm not expressing a view on either.) Humans are full of contradictions.
- 609venezia 7y agoI think it's a combination of PR and probably some genuine development as a person. He has been pretty open about being maniacally focused on Microsoft's success in the earlier years, even to the point where he views it as a mistake or at least a mistaken approach. My impression is that Melinda has done a lot to help him soften his edge and do some introspection and grow as a friend, father, and husband. Warren Buffet, too, who has also taken what I think is a pretty impressive trajectory of maturation as a person. So overall I agree with you there is probably some of the titan of industry reforming his reputation kind of thing going on (like Carnegie, Rockefeller et al). But I think there is probably a little more than that going on, as well, and I think that deeper authenticity is probably what gives people hope, although that hope culturally may end up distorted through the infatuation with his power to get to the "world's greatest guy" thing. Which I think he would probably reject, himself, if you asked him.
- rayiner 7y agoWhat did Bill Gates do in the 1990s? Bundle IE with Windows? Pay Dell not to install BeOS? Maybe those are antitrust violations, and bad business conduct, but they’re not inherently immoral. Meanwhile, spending billions and tons of personal time and expertise to solve world problems is inherently moral.
- drcode 7y agoI think strong arming PC manufacturers to stymie the creation of a viable competitor to Microsoft Windows (which in early iterations was really a terrible product, in my opinion, and very hostile to developers) may have hindered the computer revolution by several years- But obviously we can never know the outcome of counterfactuals for sure.
- notyourwork 7y agoLet’s not be so dramatic about a capitalist business decision to strategical maintain their market share. The computer wasn’t stymied and competition still exists.
- mjw1007 7y agoThere was a period of 10 or 15 years or so (up to around 2000) where the de-facto standard microcomputer operating system, supplied by MS, was much worse at using the hardware than it should have been. (In the earlier part it wasn't able to access all the memory without jumping through hoops; throughout the period it wasn't using the available protection mechanisms to isolate processes properly.) This was for business reasons, not because the human race didn't know how to write a better OS. (I don't think this makes Gates an evil person, but I think it does make it fair to say that Microsoft stymied the computer revolution to some extent.)
- erik_seaberg 7y agoIt was an attack on the free market. Concerted effort to prevent better products from being available for sale. We lost a decade of progress, and never even managed to claw back the money.
- kerng 7y agoI don't think he is seen as the worlds greatest guy, but typically he is seen as positive. Big part of it is probably him admitting his bad behavior when building Microsoft (the business). He matured as a person. But more importantly, the fact that he know tries to actively do good things. Look at other super rich, and what they do in comparison...
- drcode 7y agoReally? I think if you forced "people on the street" to formulate a list the 5 greatest living people, I bet 80% of them would have "Bill Gates" on that list.
- eanzenberg 7y agoGood marketing and PR changed his image.
- mehrdadn 7y agoHow often do you see bad guys create something comparable to the Gates Foundation?
- drcode 7y agoRockefeller, Carnegie, Barnum, Kraft, Walton, Koch?
- mehrdadn 7y agoI... can't believe my eyes. If you find what Koch or his foundations have achieved to be similar to what Gates or his foundations have achieved, I feel like you really need to re-calibrate what you call good and what you call bad.
- catalogia 7y agoThey do a great deal more than giving money to republicans and republican things you know... however I am not saying you should like them because of that. I won't enumerate those things because I don't want to encourage anybody to like them, but if you doubt me you can look up the details yourself easily enough.
- mehrdadn 7y agoThanks for making a complete strawman of my argument. Nobody said 100% everything the Koch foundations have ever done has been terrible. But I sure as hell see a world of a difference between an entity that does entirely good things and one that does terrible things half the time. List me all the terrible things the Gates Foundation did that you think make it comparable to, idk, the Charles Koch Foundation. I'm reading the latter donated $25M to UNCF, which would be great except even in that case, "the UNCF's involvement with the Charles Koch Foundation was 'a betrayal of everything the UNCF stands for' because the Koch brothers were 'the single most prominent funders of efforts to prevent African-Americans from voting'." Yeah, because I definitely see the Gates Foundation being accused of undermining its own causes and driving away its supporters as a result.
- Razengan 7y agoHe used to be reviled enough during the 1990s to receive literal pies in the face. [0] He has done some good of course, but some people tend to see anyone "giving away money" == faultless saint. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK6SS8CXYZo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK6SS8CXYZo
- onetimemanytime 7y ago>> He used to be reviled enough during the 1990s to receive literal pies in the face. [0] all it takes is one person to do that.
- Razengan 7y agoIf you read the news or forums at any frequency during that time, you'd recall that Gates was the Tall Poppy back then, before Steve Jobs became successful enough for his haters to adopt Gates as the hero figure against Jobs.
- differentView 7y agoPerhaps it's partially an overcorrection of his previous reputation and an inevitable comparison to the low bar that Steve Jobs set in his personal life. The thinking being that Gates was a nasty shark in business that was ruthless but at least he wasn't as bad as Jobs in abandoning his daughter.
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y agoWhat evils has he committed that outweigh the good that he has done for computing and humanity?
- mindgam3 7y agoGates was massively successful in using philanthropy to burnish his image and somehow become seen as a role model for anything related to ethics. It’s like people forgot the whole antitrust/crushing an entire industry with shady practices thing. Gates never acted ethically in business. Billions of dollars in donations don’t change the fact that his association with Epstein is perfectly in character for him.
- asveikau 7y ago> that really only ended around 1998 when Microsoft lost their stranglehold on the computer industry due to the internet In 1998 internet explorer was the dominant browser and many websites refused to load on anything else. That condition persisted for several years thereafter. I think the antitrust probe was probably the turning point you're noticing.
- smsm42 7y ago> why are most people in 2019 so convinced that Bill Gates is "the worlds greatest guy" I literally never encountered a person who was convinced that. Neither I heard about anybody being convinced so. You seem to be fighting a straw man of your own building. We all know about Gates' dealings in Microsoft and his other faults. No need to preach to this particular choir. > do we have any evidence that Bill Gates is a generous guy when he isn't attaching his name to it for self promotion? I think when a person gives away as much, we can excuse him for wanting his name on it. But when you will be giving away your billions, you are free to do it completely anonymously and in secret, that's fine too.
- hnFolksAreWeird 7y agoI never heard of him being called the world's greatest guy. But to reduce humans(mostly celebrities) into such simple and abstract things(both the argument you're making and the one you are against) sometimes amuses me.