this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2024
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It's almost like the Oligarchs of the world are all on the same team.
They’re clearly not all on the same team. Some are decent human beings that choose to use their money for the betterment of humankind.
It’s just that a couple, e.g. Musk, Thiel, David Sachs and others, decided to be huge assholes. They would end democracy any day to become richer and more powerful.
I legitimately don't know any of those good hearted oligarchs, who would you say they are ?
Carnegie chose to do good things with his money, as did Gates and Boros. Now, it’s easy to criticize all three of them for an arbitrary number of bad things they are responsible for. Which is entirely beside the point:
There is obviously a scale of good and bad things oligarchs decide to do with their money. Musk, Thiel, Sachs and the likes are on the “huge asshole” end of that scale. And other oligarchs are not. Assuming Gates was as bad as Musk because somereason fails to see this and ultimately leads to letting the true assholes off the hook.
Gates was (and arguably still is) an enormous asshole and has only recently started spending money on “charity” and PR to improve his public image (similar to Carnegie). That you’re willing to let him off the hook for all of his past evils only shows that spending a tiny fraction of their ill-earned gains on PR will wipe their slate clean and people like you will let them off the hook.
If you let Gates, Carnegie, etc off the hook for their rotten past, expect future generations to let Musk et al. off the hook once they buy back their reputation when they get old.
Top ten Gates "evils"? Just curious 🍿
I’m not going to give you a list, because I have other things to do, but you can read for yourself under Controversies here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates.
I was mostly thinking of the decades of anti-trust and “embrace, extend, extinguish”, as well as his sexual harassment of his employees. But I had forgotten that he was besties with Epstein and his wife divorced him after the extent of his endeavors there came out. So I guess child-raping may be on his list too.
Pretty swell guy.
OK, I read it, same as you because you just listed the only 3 things on the list, and then you embellished the employee abuse as sexual although there are no accusations, and embellished the epstein child raping thing as there is no implications there either. Epstein was extremely politically connected, I hate it too but his circles were huge and not entirely centered around the south Florida human Trafficking between Maralago and his island at a minimum.
But OK, gates is just as bad as Trump and musk
Who brought Trump into this comparison?
You can “win” this argument if you want to. I don’t really care. My issue was with Gates being described as a good hearted oligarch. I’m not trying to rank them or say that Gates is the worst or anything. Rewriting history so that Gates is a good guy is a bit much though.
over charging customers and under paying employees