• orca@orcas.enjoying.yachts
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    3 days ago

    The only road to being a billionaire is through exploitation. If you aren’t willing to sacrifice your morals somewhere along the path to get there, your journey to being a billionaire ends. Like it or not, that’s the reality. Gates is no better than the others. He just has better PR. There’s more to being a good member of humanity than giving away money for the tax breaks and PR. Working class folks defending billionaires in 2025 is some goldfish brain type shit.

    • damdy@lemm.ee
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      3 days ago

      I want to like Bill Gates, you’re probably right about PR. Even though I use Linux I still think he’s been a positive for humanity.

    • BussyCat@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      He isnt doing it for the tax break… like think about that logically if he normally spends 10m a year then he pays taxes on that 10m if he sells 100B of stock and donates it he doesn’t have to pay taxes on the amount he donates but still is out the 100B.

      There are degrees of evil, a person who spits on a person is not as bad as someone who kills a person. A billionaire who feels bad as he ages and tries to give that money to charity is not as bad as someone using that money to fund Nazi groups.

      Like I am not saying spitting on people is okay but to lump someone who spits on people with someone who kills a persons as “no better than the others” is wrong and if anything we should be encouraging more billionaires to donate their money as it’s at least better than them hoarding it

      • ferric_carcinization@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        Not sure about Gates in particular, but if you donate to your own charity, then funnel it back, you’re not out of the complete 100B. You also get good PR out of it.

        • BussyCat@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          That charity doesn’t pay him a salary, the worst you could say it does is pay for hotels/airfare/food (that I am not even sure if the gates foundation does for him) but even if it did it would be a fraction of the money like when I say a fraction I mean less than 0.0001% so like paying a tax rate of 99.9999%. You keep talking about PR but what is the PR for? Because again you could get much better PR for an absolute fraction of the price.

          Like for the same reason no billionaires should exist because a billion dollars is unfathomable a billion dollars could pay for so much stuff that funneling it through a legit charity is just not worth it.

          I have personally got a grant approved by the gates foundation to help fund clean water in El Salvador which is why I am taking this somewhat personally. Like you can talk shit about bill gates but there is no way that he is just as bad as other billionaires like musk