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Interesting opportunity to rethink the model of "make billions and THEN do good by giving it back". It's the underpinning of this whole Gates/Buffet Giving Tree

Interesting opportunity to rethink the model of "make billions and THEN do good by giving it back". It's the underpinning of this whole Gates/Buffet Giving Tree. I love how MacKenzie Scott is just jumping in, giving away the money, make smart choices, pull the bandaid off and get to work. At this pace she'll give away all $60B in 7.5 years, assuming she doesn't speed up. I bet she's aiming for 2 years for 99%, so ~$52B next year. She's not trying to spend the rest of her life as a philanthropist, live beyond the grave, supplement government/tax failings, or have hospitals in her name. To me it's not good enough to make billions and then do good. Do good every moment of every day. Make doing good your work. Or get out of the way.

erhk 5y ago
Tax them.
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  So that the money would be spent on wars in Afghanistan instead?
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Tax them This is an awkward story to message this on, given a greater fraction of her wealth is going to help the needy than does the U.S. government’s.
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    Not that odd, for every Makenzie scott there 100, 1000?, billionaires that aren’t nearly as generous, who hold onto their wealth that the passes to heirs who may have been insulated from society their entire lives - Eg the climate denying Koch brothers. Taxing them is systematically putting the allocation of some of that capital back into hands of society and out of the random draw of good and bad.
    - JoshuaDavid 5y ago
      > Not that odd, for every Makenzie scott there 100, 1000?, billionaires that aren’t nearly as generous, who hold onto their wealth that the passes to heirs There are about 2750 billionaires in the world, 210 of whom have pledged to give away at least half their wealth to charitable causes, so about 12 billionaires who aren't as generous for every Makenzie Scott (assuming that billionaires can't be generous if they haven't signed the giving pledge).
      - dv_dt 5y ago
        Those 2750 control the allocation how much of the capital of the entire world? Another reason we should tax them is that so few should really not be making the decisions for that much capital. That’s not even a good basis for a competitive capitalist system to run, let alone a social system that wants to maintain some baseline level of minimum fair distribution of wealth. Even if you agree with Mackenzie Scott’s allocations, she wasn’t the direct individual who amassed the fortune (though I’m sure she contributed a lot), it’s something of serendipity that she’s in a position to be allocating her portion at all now. It really shouldn’t be this way.
        ggreer 5y ago
        > Another reason we should tax them is that so few should really not be making the decisions for that much capital. Now apply that same logic to the US government. If you divide the federal budget by the number of elected officials, each one controls over $7 billion of income per year. The amount of wealth they control is far higher than all the billionaires in the world combined. In addition, they create laws that are backed by the threat of violence. They also capture wealth through taxes, which if I don't pay, will cause men with guns to come to my home and put me in a cage. I didn't agree to any of this and there's no way I can opt out of it. I'm not worried about billionaires pulling me over and putting me in handcuffs, or telling me who I'm allowed to marry, or what substances I can use in my own home. I'm not worried about billionaires taking my money to fund armies and spending decades invading random countries in the middle east. I'm definitely not worried about billionaires restricting where I can travel or what business transactions I can engage in. If I have to choose between the government controlling more of people's resources or less, I'm picking less.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Perhaps. But the people have control over that money. Deferring control to billionaires on the hope that they will grace us with their efficient money distribution is like hoping for philosopher kings. In practice, democratic control will be more stable.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  World governments spend over $35 trillion annually. Much much more than her total lifetime accumulated net worth. I don't see why letting them spend $35.05 trillion for one year will make the world a better place. I just don't see the logic there.
  - Salgat 5y ago
    The top 10% own 70% of America's wealth, and corporations themselves are taxed quite low. Also, don't dismiss her wealth so easily, $60B is 75% of the annual cost to cover the tuition of every public college student, and that's from a single individual. For perspective, there are over 600 billionaires in this country.
    - missedthecue 5y ago
      All of the billionaires wealth in the nation wouldn't fund federal spending alone for 12 months.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
crazygringo 5y ago
Well if you want to ultimately have the most charitable impact, "make billions and THEN do good by giving it back" can actually do the most good. By an extraordinary magnitude. If you think your $1 million today will become $10 million in 10 years, and then $100 million in another 10 years, and then $1 billion after thirty years total... wouldn't it seem deeply wrong to give away the $1 million today, and throw away the opportunity to do $999 million of good in 30 years? Or from an equivalent perspective, to do $999 million of future harm in exchange for a mere $1 million of good today. Obviously it depends on whether the money will grow, whether who you give to invests it themselves, it's a balancing of risk reward etc. But the idea that you always ought to give charitably now rather than invest and give later seems deeply flawed.
- istingray 5y ago
  I suggest going work on climate solutions. Every $1 of progress today will be worth $100,000 of impact within a decade. You're unlikely to capture that value personally of course, but that's not the point. Why take all the risk of needing to become a billionaire when you could have all the impact just by making hard career choices?
  - jcims 5y ago
    With what, good looks? There is no low hanging fruit in solving the climate situation. Whether the barriers are technological, economical or sociological, they will require massive resources and rabid tenacity to turn in the right direction. Resources that are much simpler to marshall with the agency that billions of dollars provide.
    - istingray 5y ago
      Try https://workonclimate.org/ https://workonclimate.org/
- Jabbles 5y ago
  Many charitable causes are time sensitive. As you say though, it is a balance.
polote 5y ago
> Interesting opportunity to rethink the model of "make billions and THEN do good by giving it back" Well if you want to give back, you need to have something first. As heirs, Scott got money without really (deserving|working for) it. It is not really comparable to Gates and Buttet. > To me it's not good enough to make billions and then do good Everyone is different, some people choose to do that. It is still better than giving nothing
- throwdecro 5y ago
  Making money is not about deserving the money, it's about being good at getting money.
  - gremloni 5y ago
    Yeah but in some respectable, intelligent way. Not just by giving up your poon.
- istingray 5y ago
  I believe you're being downvoted because of the "heirs" mistake. MacKenzie Scott earned her half. Commenting on the "have something first". If you're 20 years old you have 60 years you can give. Gates is a poor man comparatively.
  - polote 5y ago
    I was comparing Scott to heirs. People who got money without being responsible for it. Of course she was the wife of Bezos but how much is she responsible for the success of Amazon compared to another wife ? I don't get how you could do more good with 40years of life with 0 on a bank account vs 1 day of life and 60bn on bank account
    - gregw2 5y ago
      I don't think in this particular case its reasonable to compare her impact on Amazons success to an heir. Jeff Bezos thought quite publicly how superior she was to other potential wives in terms of her resourcefulness which was applied both directly to Amazon in early days and later to Bezos personally. The unfairness of her unearned wealth is not that different from the cofounder or early investor who steps back and retains equity but is not involved in the day to day.
throwawaysea 5y ago
> To me it's not good enough to make billions and then do good. Do good every moment of every day. Make doing good your work. Or get out of the way. Why such an absolutist stance. If I were to follow your advice in the past, I would have had less money to do good with, and my impact would be limited. But because I delayed that, I am able to give more today than before. > I love how MacKenzie Scott is just jumping in, giving away the money, make smart choices, pull the bandaid off and get to work. You don't know that these are smart choices. Giving money away in large sums, with little accountability, to organizations that aren't setup to spend it well, can backfire. Look at some of our government's largest spending efforts or at how cities like SF squander hundreds of millions to see what could happen. Startups are given very limited amounts of funding in investment rounds to maintain that sense of hunger and accountability through incremental investments. It is possible that McKenzie Scott's spending is that, since it is spread across such a large number of grants. But since this is the largest gift many of the recipient organizations have ever received, it remains to be seen how this will play out from an impact perspective.
- luckylion 5y ago
  It heavily depends on how you made that money though, doesn't it? Sure, she can spend billions to e.g. solve the problem that Amazon workers have to pee into bottles to not get fired. But without Amazon, those workers wouldn't have that problem in the first place and wouldn't need saving from the conditions she put them in.
- istingray 5y ago
  It heavily depends on how you model the growth of challenges vs your own personal growth. You're assuming that your own personal wealth grows faster than the problem grew. That is not necessarily true. i.e. climate change won't wait around till you're a billionaire.
mmaunder 5y ago
Agreed. This is impressive in how fast she has ramped up. I’d guess she’s also ok with not every dollar being 100% effective (ok with failures) as a trade off for speed of execution.
- istingray 5y ago
  Part of the flaw with assuming people who are really good at one thing are good at other things applies to philanthropy. Is Bill Gates a good philanthropist? Zuckerberg? What if they're abysmal at it but we don't have anybody to compare to?
gremloni 5y ago
It’s easy to give away money you didn’t do anything to earn. I’m all for it however, society needs all the help it can get and I love the places she’s giving money to.
- weaksauce 5y ago
  > It’s easy to give away money you didn’t do anything to earn. what are you talking about? you think she didn't do anything for the success of amazon? hell she was married to bezos before amazon even started up. What part of that money doesn't she deserve? > In 1993, Scott and Bezos were married, and in 1994, they both left D. E. Shaw, moved to Seattle, and started Amazon. Scott was one of Amazon's first employees, and was heavily involved in Amazon's early days, working on the company's name, business plan, accounts and shipping early orders.[4][9] She also negotiated the company's first freight contract.[9] When Amazon began to succeed,[when?] Scott took a less involved role in the business, preferring to focus on her family and literary career.
EGreg 5y ago
What is her criterion for what to spend it on, does she state it publicly?
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
>To me it's not good enough to make billions and then do good. Do good every moment of every day. Make doing good your work. Or get out of the way. Well said. I wonder whether at this day and age it's even possible for someone without any ancestral wealth to grow from nothing to such massive wealth without exploiting large number of people or environment or both in some manner? In that case doing every day good by common people is lot more valuable.

erhk 5y ago

Tax them.

flyinglizard 5y ago
So that the money would be spent on wars in Afghanistan instead?
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> Tax them This is an awkward story to message this on, given a greater fraction of her wealth is going to help the needy than does the U.S. government’s.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  Not that odd, for every Makenzie scott there 100, 1000?, billionaires that aren’t nearly as generous, who hold onto their wealth that the passes to heirs who may have been insulated from society their entire lives - Eg the climate denying Koch brothers. Taxing them is systematically putting the allocation of some of that capital back into hands of society and out of the random draw of good and bad.
  - JoshuaDavid 5y ago
    > Not that odd, for every Makenzie scott there 100, 1000?, billionaires that aren’t nearly as generous, who hold onto their wealth that the passes to heirs There are about 2750 billionaires in the world, 210 of whom have pledged to give away at least half their wealth to charitable causes, so about 12 billionaires who aren't as generous for every Makenzie Scott (assuming that billionaires can't be generous if they haven't signed the giving pledge).
    - dv_dt 5y ago
      Those 2750 control the allocation how much of the capital of the entire world? Another reason we should tax them is that so few should really not be making the decisions for that much capital. That’s not even a good basis for a competitive capitalist system to run, let alone a social system that wants to maintain some baseline level of minimum fair distribution of wealth. Even if you agree with Mackenzie Scott’s allocations, she wasn’t the direct individual who amassed the fortune (though I’m sure she contributed a lot), it’s something of serendipity that she’s in a position to be allocating her portion at all now. It really shouldn’t be this way.
      - ggreer 5y ago
        > Another reason we should tax them is that so few should really not be making the decisions for that much capital. Now apply that same logic to the US government. If you divide the federal budget by the number of elected officials, each one controls over $7 billion of income per year. The amount of wealth they control is far higher than all the billionaires in the world combined. In addition, they create laws that are backed by the threat of violence. They also capture wealth through taxes, which if I don't pay, will cause men with guns to come to my home and put me in a cage. I didn't agree to any of this and there's no way I can opt out of it. I'm not worried about billionaires pulling me over and putting me in handcuffs, or telling me who I'm allowed to marry, or what substances I can use in my own home. I'm not worried about billionaires taking my money to fund armies and spending decades invading random countries in the middle east. I'm definitely not worried about billionaires restricting where I can travel or what business transactions I can engage in. If I have to choose between the government controlling more of people's resources or less, I'm picking less.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  Perhaps. But the people have control over that money. Deferring control to billionaires on the hope that they will grace us with their efficient money distribution is like hoping for philosopher kings. In practice, democratic control will be more stable.
missedthecue 5y ago
World governments spend over $35 trillion annually. Much much more than her total lifetime accumulated net worth. I don't see why letting them spend $35.05 trillion for one year will make the world a better place. I just don't see the logic there.
- Salgat 5y ago
  The top 10% own 70% of America's wealth, and corporations themselves are taxed quite low. Also, don't dismiss her wealth so easily, $60B is 75% of the annual cost to cover the tuition of every public college student, and that's from a single individual. For perspective, there are over 600 billionaires in this country.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    All of the billionaires wealth in the nation wouldn't fund federal spending alone for 12 months.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

crazygringo 5y ago

Well if you want to ultimately have the most charitable impact, "make billions and THEN do good by giving it back" can actually do the most good. By an extraordinary magnitude. If you think your $1 million today will become $10 million in 10 years, and then $100 million in another 10 years, and then $1 billion after thirty years total... wouldn't it seem deeply wrong to give away the $1 million today, and throw away the opportunity to do $999 million of good in 30 years? Or from an equivalent perspective, to do $999 million of future harm in exchange for a mere $1 million of good today. Obviously it depends on whether the money will grow, whether who you give to invests it themselves, it's a balancing of risk reward etc. But the idea that you always ought to give charitably now rather than invest and give later seems deeply flawed.

istingray 5y ago
I suggest going work on climate solutions. Every $1 of progress today will be worth $100,000 of impact within a decade. You're unlikely to capture that value personally of course, but that's not the point. Why take all the risk of needing to become a billionaire when you could have all the impact just by making hard career choices?
- jcims 5y ago
  With what, good looks? There is no low hanging fruit in solving the climate situation. Whether the barriers are technological, economical or sociological, they will require massive resources and rabid tenacity to turn in the right direction. Resources that are much simpler to marshall with the agency that billions of dollars provide.
  - istingray 5y ago
    Try https://workonclimate.org/ https://workonclimate.org/
Jabbles 5y ago
Many charitable causes are time sensitive. As you say though, it is a balance.

polote 5y ago

> Interesting opportunity to rethink the model of "make billions and THEN do good by giving it back" Well if you want to give back, you need to have something first. As heirs, Scott got money without really (deserving|working for) it. It is not really comparable to Gates and Buttet. > To me it's not good enough to make billions and then do good Everyone is different, some people choose to do that. It is still better than giving nothing

throwdecro 5y ago
Making money is not about deserving the money, it's about being good at getting money.
- gremloni 5y ago
  Yeah but in some respectable, intelligent way. Not just by giving up your poon.
istingray 5y ago
I believe you're being downvoted because of the "heirs" mistake. MacKenzie Scott earned her half. Commenting on the "have something first". If you're 20 years old you have 60 years you can give. Gates is a poor man comparatively.
- polote 5y ago
  I was comparing Scott to heirs. People who got money without being responsible for it. Of course she was the wife of Bezos but how much is she responsible for the success of Amazon compared to another wife ? I don't get how you could do more good with 40years of life with 0 on a bank account vs 1 day of life and 60bn on bank account
  - gregw2 5y ago
    I don't think in this particular case its reasonable to compare her impact on Amazons success to an heir. Jeff Bezos thought quite publicly how superior she was to other potential wives in terms of her resourcefulness which was applied both directly to Amazon in early days and later to Bezos personally. The unfairness of her unearned wealth is not that different from the cofounder or early investor who steps back and retains equity but is not involved in the day to day.

throwawaysea 5y ago

> To me it's not good enough to make billions and then do good. Do good every moment of every day. Make doing good your work. Or get out of the way. Why such an absolutist stance. If I were to follow your advice in the past, I would have had less money to do good with, and my impact would be limited. But because I delayed that, I am able to give more today than before. > I love how MacKenzie Scott is just jumping in, giving away the money, make smart choices, pull the bandaid off and get to work. You don't know that these are smart choices. Giving money away in large sums, with little accountability, to organizations that aren't setup to spend it well, can backfire. Look at some of our government's largest spending efforts or at how cities like SF squander hundreds of millions to see what could happen. Startups are given very limited amounts of funding in investment rounds to maintain that sense of hunger and accountability through incremental investments. It is possible that McKenzie Scott's spending is that, since it is spread across such a large number of grants. But since this is the largest gift many of the recipient organizations have ever received, it remains to be seen how this will play out from an impact perspective.

luckylion 5y ago
It heavily depends on how you made that money though, doesn't it? Sure, she can spend billions to e.g. solve the problem that Amazon workers have to pee into bottles to not get fired. But without Amazon, those workers wouldn't have that problem in the first place and wouldn't need saving from the conditions she put them in.
istingray 5y ago
It heavily depends on how you model the growth of challenges vs your own personal growth. You're assuming that your own personal wealth grows faster than the problem grew. That is not necessarily true. i.e. climate change won't wait around till you're a billionaire.

mmaunder 5y ago

Agreed. This is impressive in how fast she has ramped up. I’d guess she’s also ok with not every dollar being 100% effective (ok with failures) as a trade off for speed of execution.

istingray 5y ago
Part of the flaw with assuming people who are really good at one thing are good at other things applies to philanthropy. Is Bill Gates a good philanthropist? Zuckerberg? What if they're abysmal at it but we don't have anybody to compare to?

gremloni 5y ago

It’s easy to give away money you didn’t do anything to earn. I’m all for it however, society needs all the help it can get and I love the places she’s giving money to.

weaksauce 5y ago
> It’s easy to give away money you didn’t do anything to earn. what are you talking about? you think she didn't do anything for the success of amazon? hell she was married to bezos before amazon even started up. What part of that money doesn't she deserve? > In 1993, Scott and Bezos were married, and in 1994, they both left D. E. Shaw, moved to Seattle, and started Amazon. Scott was one of Amazon's first employees, and was heavily involved in Amazon's early days, working on the company's name, business plan, accounts and shipping early orders.[4][9] She also negotiated the company's first freight contract.[9] When Amazon began to succeed,[when?] Scott took a less involved role in the business, preferring to focus on her family and literary career.

EGreg 5y ago

What is her criterion for what to spend it on, does she state it publicly?

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

>To me it's not good enough to make billions and then do good. Do good every moment of every day. Make doing good your work. Or get out of the way. Well said. I wonder whether at this day and age it's even possible for someone without any ancestral wealth to grow from nothing to such massive wealth without exploiting large number of people or environment or both in some manner? In that case doing every day good by common people is lot more valuable.