Idk man we just saw a week ago how atrociously Linus used to treat people. Imagine combining that with enough greed to hold onto a billion dollars. Imagine what any of these people would be like if they were the type to ruthlessly exploit others to get rich. I think a billionaire Linus would be worse than Bill Gates. At least Gates is a nice guy.
It is the act of holding onto that much wealth that is immoral, not who is doing it. This is just fantasizing from a painfully neoliberal perspective: OP is imagining the world would be better if the good guys hoarded inconceivable amounts of wealth and exploited the labor of others.
I have a question:
almost every single person that you know as a good guy may have a little but of an uncanny side. at which point does a person not remain an overall good person?
or do we take the person for who he/she is, and use(and learn from)his/her actions as an example, both good and bad ones?
I’m asking primarily because I don’t know an answer to it.
I haven’t met gates and I agree these days he comes across pleasantly, but perhaps you are not old enough to remember stories of what he was like in his 30s and 40s when Microsoft was younger. He was a tyrant and viscously anticompetitive. As a husband my understanding is that he cheated on his wife (not uncommon I know but still hurtful). He might have become a somewhat better person, maybe, but he certainly wasn’t one when he was making his fortune.
I have an unfavourable view of gates despite his philanthropic actions. mainly because of his buying of large farmlands and his opposition to freely licence astra zeneca’s vaccine.
I was thinking more along the lines of “if they had that much money, their projects could’ve received more impact.”
like if free software would become mainstream.
though now I realise that’s an idealistic view and with money, people will become corrupt.
If they received a lot of money from their work and they used it to increase the impact of their projects, they wouldn’t be billionaires. The money would have been spent on the projects. If Linus headed a non-profit that received 10B a year revenue and spent most of it, leaving Linus with 0.5M-1M yearly salary, he wouldn’t be a billionaire and the billions spent on the Linux project would have had a significant impact. If on the other hand he pocketed 1B a year, there would be 1B less for the Linux project. And Linus would have been/become a different person.
I’d strongly disagree there too. Y’know basically the entire internet runs on Linux right? Our global communication system containing the sum of all human knowledge is like 99% Linux servers. And the reason a whole bunch of companies sponsor the hell out of Linux now is because it’s just that good and just that important on a global scale.
That's not necessarily true. My cousin is the nicest person you could meet, he was a programmer who tinkered around with a package delivery tracking system, and Fexex bought him out for almost 2 billion. He became one of our wealthiest citizens overnight. And he's amazing, he doesn't exploit people and he is not a bad person by any definition.
I think the point is that anyone who gets and keeps that much money is not a good person. A billion dollars is more than any person could ever need for themselves. Consider that having a meager 10 million in the bank at a pitiful 2% return of interest would provide $200,000 per year, which is a very comfortable life. Who can justify keeping 100x that? And how can you justify it when a tiny fraction of that would revolutionize thousands of people’s lives?
I don’t think he was ever a billionaire, though he’s certainly done quite well for himself. Since leaving Apple, he has founded several new companies and projects, focusing a lot on education and philanthropy. He was also involved in founding the EFF.
He’s an engineer first and foremost, and several of his projects never achieved mainstream success, partly for being, IMHO, ahead of their time – for example, a programmable universal remote in the 80s, and a GPS-based item tracker in the early 2000s.
As far as I know, he has never been involved in any notable scandals.
There’s a whole bunch of people that deserve to become billionaires a lot more than people in tech and that would have a much better impact on the world if they did. I would much rather have a bunch of billionaire physicists, immunologists, virologists, pediatricians and so on.
But of course, such based individuals will never be billionaires. Specifically because their basedness precludes them from being psychopathic enough to commit the kind of cutthroat, violent exploitation of tens of thousands of workers’ labor inherently necessary to amass such wealth.
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