People of Lemmy, I dare you to name ONE billionaire that's done anything good.

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.

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.

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

Mark Cuban is a bit of a wall street asshole, but he’s created a drug company to slash the prices of generic drugs for Americans: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/24/1075344246/mark-cuban-pharmacy#:~:text=Billionaire investor and Dallas Mavericks,of its online pharmacy Wednesday.

Didn't one of the Koch brothers die? That was pretty cool.

The submarine dude that got rid of a few more in one go?

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.

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

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.

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

Elon Musk helped mastodon grow

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.

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.

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.

Whats with Bill Gates?

Elon musk he is slowly destroying twitter

What, do you think they just sit around smoking cigars and laughing evilly all day? Its not that they dont do anything good, their evik acts just offset it.

Chuck Freeney. He basically invented "Duty Free" stores and became a billionaire in the process. Then decided he should die "broke" and created The Atlantic Philanthropies secretly staking it with a little over a third of his wealth. In 2020 he closed the organization because he had given away the vast majority of his net worth. Mostly as grants to universities all over the world. He also may have low-key helped fund the IRA.

He's still got enough to live comfortably, and I'm sure his family is set up nicely.

I would imagine all the billionaires have done something good at least once.

I dont know her name

Jeff bezos ex wife, who has donated a lot of money to charity

Chuck Feeney. He gave away everything to charities.

Edit: it was around 8bn.

Elon Must did pretty much destroy Twitter?

I have billions of Zimbabwe dollars and I picked up litter for 2 hours a few weeks ago. So there's at least one!

I believe all billionaires have done something good. I don't think that makes them good people due to the staggering amount of wealth they withhold from the population.

Doing good things, doesn't make you a good person. Donating millions is nothing when you have billions.

If I had to choose a specific, I'd say Bill Gates. I've never fact checked it but I've heard he set up multiple charities and donates for helping children, seems like a great thing to do.

Gabe Newell is the least shitty billionaire I can think of, I'm not sure what he does for philanthropy though but at least it doesn't seem like he tries to influence the country for his benefit.

Bill gates and Warren Buffet have both argued for higher taxes on the wealthy and have donated millions to solve social problems.

This query is counterproductively reductive. Every human alive, even the worst of them, has done at least one good thing. Many even do their bad things because they were misled to believe they were doing an overall good.

The point should be that it doesn't matter what good they've done, because the state of being a billionaire necessarily requires one to have done more net bad to the world than good. You could save a million lives by your own hand, but if you're a billionaire, it is a given that you have destroyed far more lives than that. No billionaire's heart was ever weighed by Anubis and judged worthy of the Field of Reeds.

All of them, without exception, end up as greasy streaks on the gleaming teeth of Ammit.

Not a modern "billionaire", but you can make an argument that Andrew Carnegie spent a lot of his fortune on things that weren't awful.

ITT: people who can't understand the difference between doing something good and being good.

Of course there are plenty of billionaires who have done good things, and pointing out all the ways they are still a shit person doesn't change that. Shitty people occasionally do good things, even if for shitty reasons.

You haven't looked beyond the surface of Gates philanthropy. His involvement diverts focus away from critically acclaimedneeded work in these regions for his pet projects - the science doesn't dictate the focus, the whims of the billionaires do.

is this a psyop? surely its a psyop

youd probably have a hard time naming one billionaire that hasnt done anything good

theyre still a shit thing to have, practically never got the money they have by being a good person and shouldnt exist in the same world as homeless people, starvation or massively underfunded public projects

Philanthropy is just a tax break and PR move.

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David Koch died, which is a very good thing he did for humanity.

His foundations pioneered developments in medical research and were instrumental in the near-eradication of hookworm and yellow fever in the United States. John D. Rockefeller

Markus Persson made a pretty cool game you may have heard of.

In these comments: People who think someone can accumulate obscene personal wealth and then give a small percentage away makes them good. But if someone dares suggest taxing that obscene wealth they are a monster.

Jack Dorsey bought me lunch once.

Trick question.

The billionaires who do good don’t want their names attached to their deeds because that defeats the purpose. The point of altruism is you don’t want credit.

(Seriously there aren’t many, though, because if you’re hoarding money, you’re a horrible person.)

They've all done at least one good thing that's a insanely low bar that's very subjective. Name one that isn't more good than harm in the world? They don't exist.

The problem isn't a billionaire that's done anything good, the problem is a billionaire who has done more good things than bad.

Those don't exist.

There's no amount of good you can do to make up for the amount of exploitation you had to do in order to get to be a billionaire.

It doesn't mean that a billionaire can't do anything good. It just means the world would still be better off without them.

Millburn Pennybags or Uncle Pennybags gave you $200 every time you passed go.

Mike Cannon-Brookes (co-founded Atlassian) has set up a 1.5b green fund to invest in green energy projects

Easy, Bill Gates.

I'm not saying he's a good person, or that everything he does is good, but you asked me to name a billionaire that's done anything good, and Gates has done quite a few good things.

MacKenzie Scott

My two cents:

1. The current problem is rather that relatively many rich people are trying to do good things. The vast amount of private donations and privately funded NGOs, etc., have a strong influence within traditional, often national, political and governmental processes. This has had good and bad consequences and has been done with good and not so good intentions. Even if all consequences were good, the question remains to what extent we object to the fact that the choices of where to put money have been made by individuals and not arrived at through democratic processes, which can also lead to good or bad consequences.

2. It is unfortunate that "effective altruism" has become the trendy moral framework for many wealthy individuals, especially within Silicon Valley, to make decisions about where they put their money and how. Effective altruism is a questionable moral theory because it is primarily about the question of "how" to act and less about why. The theory suggests no underlying value system. As a result, it remains a values-free form of consequentialism, unlike, say, utilitarianism, a form of consequentialism that does propose an underlying value, namely happiness - and thus happiness maximization as a goal. Moreover, "effective" is a vague term, which also remains relatively free to fill in.

The free-fillability of effective altruism combined with the inherently individual choices of, well, individuals, currently creates friction between wealthy individuals and democratically elected bodies.

This is imho the current issue we need to think about, regardless of any "goodness" of consequences. Where do the responsibilities, rights, duties, freedoms and liabilities of wealthy individuals start, lie and end with respect to those of democratically elected governments, other representatives of the people, and, of course, 'regular' citizens.

Anything? That seems like an easy goal to score on. Maybe you mean "done good overall"?

What? They're greedy humans who are doing things that have terrible consequences out of selfishness, not mustache twirling cartoon villains out to destroy the world for destruction's sake. I'm sure every single billionaire in the world has done something good at some point. That doesn't justify the kind of wealth disparity that makes their existence possible though.

Do you mean net good (more good than bad) or is a good thing like "established public libraries" acceptable even if he also oppressed workers and stifled unions and bought government officials and stuff?

Current Agha Khan founded the Agha Khan Development Network which has done a fair amount of good in the developing world.

Bill Gates. (Has donated money to charity and founded one himself).

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Bruce Wayne.

J.K. Rowling, amongst others, have given away so much money that they've lost their billionaire status.

Give me a billion dollars and I'll donate some to the ravioli foundation.

Jeffrey Epstein, when he killed himself, probably.