So I just read Bill Gates’ 1976 Open Letter To Hobbyists, in which he whines about not making more money from his software. You know, instead of being proud of making software that people wanted to use. And then the bastard went on and made proprietary licences for software the industry standard, holding back innovation and freedom for decades. What a douche canoe.
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.
Bill Gates spent a lot of his pro years running a bad company quite well, and exploiting a dominant position in the market that any soulless biz guy would love to have.
He seemed to get a conscience around the time he stopped running the show, and seems to be different while not regretting his behavior in that phase.
I think we can decide he was a bit of a cock back then, while still noting he’s done some good work since. We are nuanced enough, right?
He’s still the same self-serving prick, just that he’s trying to buy himself some karma whilst channeling his riches through his own foundations.
The Behind The Bastards postcast episode would suggest otherwise
I love that show. When you compare him to other billionaires he’s not the worst. I think Jeff bezos does more harm. He has an episode too
God you hit the nail on the head, and why I’m getting very annoyed here on Lemmy. People refuse to have nuanced takes and just comment incessantly about how people are evil and doing anything makes you a bad person. Turns out people are nuance, and we can judge them as such. You can say he did some terrible things to make Microsoft successful while also saying he has done some very good things with his fortune. It is not black and white.
People are nuanced, billionaires aren’t just people, they’re a distillate of oppression. The amount of wealth and power people like Gates have is perverse, obscene, and unsustainable. With power comes responsibility, if that responsibility feels unfair, give up the power, he could decide to drop everything and feed the hungry.
Lemmy is dogmatic yes, and sometimes that’s really fucking annoying but billionaires aren’t people like you and me, they are disgustingly greedy to the point it is abusive to not just individuals but millions of people.
Dude got divorced because his wife found out about his involvement with Epstein.
Some things aren’t nuanced at all. Some crimes and shittiness cannot be made up for.
Some of the charity is self-serving, e.g. eradicating diseases means he’s less likely to catch them (and really any billionaire not funnelling funds to pandemic prevention etc. is being moronic), and founding charter schools on land he owns so over the life of the school they pay more in rent for the lease than they cost to build is just a tax dodge. Most billionaires are just so evil that they won’t spend money on themselves if other people who aren’t paying also benefit, so in comparison, Gates’ better ability to judge what’s in his interests makes him look good.
Its not black and white to you but people have different values so him throwing billions of dollars at charity does not effect his choice to buy up farm land and potentially ruin innovation in the computing space.
These are not my opinions just saying why someone would act like it is black and white
Your take is more nuanced than most I see here and I appreciate that, see the other comment as a prime example.
I suppose I did see “ABAB” so I suppose you would be talking about those comments and I agree that is infuriating
Can you imagine what Microsoft was like in 1976?
I read his memoir “Source Code”. He has had a fascinating life and I still don’t understand how such a geeky person turns into cold blooded business as he does. There are still a lot of other billionaire I would shit on before Gates and I really respect his pledge to give away his wealth and his work with charity, but yeah well, I guess he has pretty awful sides still.
I really respect his pledge to give away his wealth
Even if it is just a scam?
I mean - if he at least shows some motivation to do it, then it is still better than the many billionaire that simple don’t try to give a shit.
Or his PR firm suggested it would be effective, which it has been.
Sure.
fake charity that benefits him in other ways.
there is zero altruistic motive in anything he does.That is simply not true. I might be that some of it benefits him partly or fully, but saying that nothing of all his projects does anything other than benefit him is something easily falsifiable.
Pretty sure the charity actually does decent work
But yeah, it’s basically a way to clear his name in the history records
What makes you think a help l geeky person isn’t cold blooded?
We all know that every billionaire is a horrible person. They can’t be anything else.
You don’t get to a billionnwithout exploiting people along the way.
People or natural ressources. Even if it’s on stock trade, someone had to create that worth - and those who created it, didn’t get it…
ABAB
And in retrospect it’s too bad more people didn’t steal from Microsoft so that it failed as a business.
Link.
Bill Gates’ 1976 Open Letter To Hobbyists
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobbyists_ocr.pdf
He sold his first software before it was even finished to his own unuversity.
He saved Apple to avoid an antitrust trial.
It’s just business right?
He didn’t even write that software, he had to buy it from someone else because his own version sucked.
He sold his first software before it was even finished to his own unuversity.
What drives me crazy is when I hear this fact being cited as a positive thing that makes him a role model.
It is a very good sales person. But he didn’t understood how could the network (or Internet) change the world, even with his Windows monopole. He had Encarta and lost it, without reusing it, to Wikipedia.
Watch the TV movie from the late 90s “Pirates of Silicon Valley” which pretty much paints both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as really shitty people. I mean just look at what Gates did with the Altair. Said he had an operating system, didn’t have an operating system, and what have you.
Then there’s the whole Xerox Park thing where neither Apple nor Microsoft would be where they’re at today without the engineers at Xerox who were pretty much forced to hand over their stuff because Xerox execs didn’t see value in a GUI and Mouse. Gates and Jobs both were more than happy to go in there and pillage what was developed in order to create Windows and The Macintosh/MacOS
*Xerox PARC. It’s an acronym for Palo Alto Research Center.
Yep I remember that movie, but read Steve Levys Hackers. Gates was always a douch. I also read the letter he wrote. I think it was an opinion piece in a newsletter.
Yeah, that’s a good one, and I also enjoyed Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. Stories like Jobs getting a bonus when Wozniak was able to design a board with fewer chips and then not mentioning the extra money to Woz are perfect examples of how sociopaths like Jobs and Gates have operate. It’s sad that ruthless charlatans like them who exploit the true geniuses and innovators are allowed to accrue so much money and power in our society.
Well yes.
Being a Billionaire should be criminalized
You can be a billionaire if you are willing to pay a million per month as taxes.
That’s a rate of only 1.2% per year, was that your intention ?
It should be classified as a sign of mental illness. If I had half of a billion dollars I wouldn’t work another day in my life and the general public would never hear from me. These fuckers have more money than they could ever spend and still desperately want more.
I kinda compare it to semi truck weigh stations. I found out some time ago that if the math works out that a truck got from one weigh station to another too fast the driver can get a speeding ticket since its assumed they broke the law getting there. Apply that to money. If a person accumulates too much money, it should just be assumed that person broke laws getting it and they should be severly fined (like, most of it).
They’re not assuming anything, they are doing calculus.
I’m a little disappointed this wasn’t a link to the film strip we saw in high school. The cop drawling “Now this here is Rolle’s theorem…” is classic.
Now the only thing I will say is that Bill Gates is giving away much of his fortune and yes it may be to his benefit to a point however other people are actually benefiting from him giving it away. Bill Gates even admits that most of what he did when he was younger was driven out agreed. However he is doing quite a bit to try to change that and make up for that.
His donation pledge was more of a flex because he’s increased his net worth more than he has donated. Also, people who were friends with Epstein should not get to decide where that money goes.
Not to say he’s a good person, but contrary to most billionaires, he
- actually contributed some technical know-how in building his fortune (still, billionaires should not exist)
- did not rape children (as far as we know so far)
Furthermore, he’s long gone from Microsoft, so I think your ire is better directed at Satya Nadella and similar totalitarian elitist pieces of shit
The guy is on the Epstein list and his wife left him because he was too friendly to the guy…
He also fucked over our public education system
Well, not raping children is kind of a low bar. But didn’t he lobby Astra Zeneca not to open source the covid vaccine, because he has a stake there? Humanist my ass. Edit: someone already pointed this out already, I ought to read the thread before posting.
Also largest owner of arable farmland in the US
it is a low bar, but one that a majority of oligarchs fail to clear these days
Melinda Gates divorced him because he was fucking around.
She divorced him because it became clear he was a regular on Epstein’s island.
Unfortunately it does look like he, too, was involved in this kabal. Even though we don’t know for sure, there’s not much point in assuming innocence, even though I won’t consider him a pedo-criminal until I see some more evidence.
nothing unfortunate about him going except for the victims. Fuck his reputation with regular people, let rich people think hes a good guy
She divorced him because he was best friends with Jeffery Epstein. They had DEEP connections
To be clear - while I do consider it likely that it was as the other reply to your comment suggests - I won’t judge a stranger for cheating on their spouse as long as it is consensual and they don’t expose anyone (e.g. their spouse) to a risk of STDs
If it’s explicitly consensual then it’s not cheating because you are not breaking any understood rules of the relationship.
I meant consensual whatever sexual or non sexual act they are cheating with, i.e. not rape or sexual abuse etc. In that case I don’t judge people without knowing what their reasons are for cheating.
His mother was an influential person on the board of directors of several firms. She met with John Opel, who was the IBM chairman, and secured her son’s Microsoft contract with IBM in the 1980s, where it then became dominant and made her a ton of money.
It’s vested interests, and who you know.
His mother came from money, being the daughter of a banker, and the granddaughter of a banker. His father was a lawyer who founded a law firm focused on corporate law and technology law. Given that his mom knew Opel personally, and his dad was a technology lawyer, is it any surprise that Gates’ first contract with IBM was so incredibly friendly to Microsoft’s interests?
In addition, IBM was under pressure at that point because it was being sued for antitrust violations by the US government. That limited how aggressive it could be in new contracts without drawing extra attention. In other words, the antitrust effort from the US government took power away from IBM and allowed for new companies to flourish. Then about 20 years later, Microsoft was sued for its own illegal use of its monopoly (a trial at which Bill Gates lied on the stand, and where Microsoft falsified evidence), and this work to limit the reach of Microsoft allowed for the Internet to flourish and led directly to the rise of companies like Google and Amazon. It’s now time for another round of antitrust to allow more companies to flourish – only hopefully this time the antitrust efforts don’t fade out and are aggressively pursued year after year so we don’t get more shitty monopolies making things awful.
Hear hear. I had real hopes for Lina Khan during Biden’s term, but that seemed to have petered out to nothing. Let’s see if something happens once the monster is out of power
Yeah, I read that he was a nepo baby. Also, people say “But he dropped out of university to start Microsoft.”
He dropped out of fucking Harvard. His life was easy as piss from the get-go.
Is everyone at Harvard a nepo baby or has definitely had an easy life? I don’t understand your argument.
Yes, aside from a few scholarship kids, the Ivy League schools, and especially Harvard and Yale, were specifically built and continue to this day to be schools for the children of the elite.
It’s a reasonable assumption that a family that could send their child to Harvard in the 70s was very well off already.
Also, the only reason they were successful at all was his mom was on the IBM board and got IBM to support their shit.
You may want to check your sources on that. If I remember correctly, his mother knew someone on the board, through her work with the United Way.
AstraZenica COVID vaccine was going to be opensource but he used with weight as a donor to pressure the university to sell it to a firm he had ownership instead
No, I don’t think that’s accurate. Oxford Unkversity was going to waive their rights to the vaccine, and Gates pressured them to instead partner with Astra-Zeneca. But to my knowledge Gates never profited from that deal. Now, was there still some shady backroom dealing going on? Very possibly.
who cares if he didnt profit? “I convinced this man to make money off of the sick and he did it and profited off of a global contamination, but at least I also didnt get a kickback right? He was just gonna give it away the fuckin idiot!”
such a swell dude. totally not a shitbag human
I read about that, yeah. All hail Mammon; money above all. Sometimes I think wealth changes something in a person’s brain, like psychologically or neurologically. It’s as if they get so detached from reality that they lose all empathy and sense of community. I’ve heard the term ‘affluenza’ used as a joke, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense as a legitimate thing.
It takes a certain kind of personality to even become a billionaire. You don’t become a billionaire by being kind and ethical
I think there’s research to that effect.
Well, it would make sense. Rich people have always creeped me out, just instinctively.
I’m sure the threshold varies, but I would back research that attempts to pinpoint or at least narrow down what amount of wealth starts to change your brain chemistry for the worse.
Its any position of power in my experience. People get power, justifying in their mind that they and people like them should be in power. Even games about being in charge run into that problem. Maintaining power becomes a major part of the game at some part.
That’s a good point, as illustrated by things like the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Also the issue of you need to be a deranged psychopath to get wealthy in the first place.
There’s plenty of wealthy people who aren’t psychopaths, but they are all broken in some way. Usually it’s because capitalism has completely alienated them from our natural communal instincts and taught them that the individual is god. Many are capable of empathy, they just choose to do the selfish thing because they’ve been told their entire lives that “taking care of number one” is a virtue.
Of course, the impacts of their behavior are the same as if they were psychopaths, so this isn’t me excusing them. But it’s important to know what capitalism does to people and how it requires us to ignore our natural instincts, because the wealthy (the ones capable of empathy, anyways) are the same as the rest of us, only luckier.
as someone who recently escaped the labor trap (that is what capitalists call it…wages are suppressed for a reason…), the shift from needing to work and not is…profound.
no wonder so many rich cunts are batshit psychopaths, nobody born into $ can ever truly know this feeling of relief (and the resulting stress, just from your brain leaving “survival mode”…hierarchy of needs stuff, then realizing just how fucked everything is, how powerless you still are even as new-rich to change anything…)
There is a viable alternative to the problems raised by Bill Gates in his irate letter to computer hobbyists concerning “ripping off” software. When software is free, or so inexpensive that it’s easier to pay for it than to duplicate it, then it won’t be “stolen”.
—Jim Warren, July 1976
Sometimes it’s about the effort of paying than the actual cost.
Of course, with Microsoft it’s both.
Or the service. Software that goes out of its way to ensure you paid, and poses limitations on the paying customer. Like always-online DRM for video games.
Very well put. I cannot stand the entitlement in the original letter.
