Elon musk he is slowly destroying twitter
As Hedberg said, say what you will about Hitler, he did kill Hitler.
He sacrificed billions for the destruction of twitter. I can respect that. Now do Facebook
… slowly? …😅
I don’t know current ms ceo?
He still allows Windows to exploit people’s data to the fullest
yea but he is better than the previous ones
Still massive, massive room for improvement. Still very much anticompetitive and uses M$’ monopolistic position. Still looks for ways to squash competition. And still wants people locked in to Windows and their products. Case in point, I was hoping VS for Mac is a change of course, and will pave the way to VS for Linux, but I’m proven wrong once again.
Current Agha Khan founded the Agha Khan Development Network which has done a fair amount of good in the developing world.
Agha Khan Development Network
The Aga Khan operates a large horse racing and breeding operation at his estate Aiglemont, in the town of Gouvieux in the Picardy region of France – about 4 kilometres (2+1⁄2 miles) west of the Chantilly Racecourse. In 1977, he paid £1.3 million for the bloodstock owned by Anna Dupré and in 1978, £4.7 million for the bloodstock of Marcel Boussac.[82]
The Aga Khan is an ardent yachtsman. He co-founded the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda in Porto Cervo, Sardinia in 1967. He also commissioned a 164-foot yacht, Alamshar, named after a prized racehorse of his, with a price tag of £200 million. The cost and maintenance are partly covered by chartering. The yacht was advertised as having a top speed of 60 knots, capable of setting a new transatlantic speed record.[citation needed] It reached a speed in excess of 55 knots in its initial trials but despite the claims, it was never intended for transatlantic speed records as it does not have the range.
Forbes describes the Aga Khan as one of the world’s fifteen richest royals, and the most recent estimate of his net worth is $13.3 billion.[13] He is unique among the richest royals in that he does not preside over a geographic territory.[14] He owns hundreds of racehorses, valuable stud farms, an exclusive yacht club on Sardinia,[60] Bell Island in the Bahamas,[61] two Bombardier jets, a £100 million high speed yacht Alamshar, and several estates around the world
In the 1990s, the Aga Khan had a group of US$400 a night Italian luxury hotels, called Ciga. Currently the Aga Khan, through his for-profit AKFED, is the largest shareholder in the Serena Hotels chain.[64] The Aga Khan’s racing horse businesses bring in considerable income.[65] He owns and operates the largest horse racing and breeding operation in France, the French horse auction house, Arqana, Gilltown Stud near Kilcullen in Ireland, and other breeding/stud farms in Europe
He married a Thyssen, yes as in Thyssen Krupp a Nazi collaborating company focused on the war goals and used plenty of forced labour. Honestly I doubt that even what is financed via 10% of much poorer people’s income than his that is done via the AKDN means he is a good guy.
AKFED is part of AKDN. He literally uses poor peoples money to build hotel chains for the rich and ultra rich and also is more interested in his own vanity and consumption than the people.
Irrelevant?
Prompt was: a billionaire who has done anything good, not, a billionaire who has never done anything not good.
Bill gates and Warren Buffet have both argued for higher taxes on the wealthy and have donated millions to solve social problems.
Have they donated to progressive politicians or made their donations to democrats contingent on changing tax policy? Words are wind.
Notch made Minecraft.
He’s been a little shit since then, but at least Minecraft is pretty cool.
I think his actions as a billionaire are more telling.
Minecraft is just a knock off of Infiniminer anyway and Zachtronics are much more deserving of the billions. Love all their games. What else has Notch done?
MacKenzie Scott, Bezos’s ex. She’s given more than $14 billion to charity.
Warren Buffet invented the buffet (I think) and I met my girlfriend at a buffet. She is a paramedic, I lost consciousness because I drank 4 litres of the truffle bechamel (I did the maths and this would have cost the restaurant slightly more money than the admission fee, hence hurting Warren Buffet’s bottom line)
I have billions of Zimbabwe dollars and I picked up litter for 2 hours a few weeks ago. So there’s at least one!
Elon Musk. I know you guys hate him somehow but. HE DID build reusable rockets. HE DID build electric cars. HE DID restore Free Speech even though you guys somehow don’t agree with that because people now can say anything they want and you can’t live in your own little bubble without any criticism anymore (on twitter). And that’s not what left wingers want lol.
Yikes lol
His EMPLOYEES build reusable rockets. His EMPLOYEES built electric cars. Even if he participated in this process he would be on a supporting role. Similar to a janitor on spacex, a guy that maybe enables the real pros to do good stuff. (the janitor may actually be more important than musk tbh)
He did NOT restore free speech on twitter. Many activists a still being silenced every day. He gives their data to authoritarian goverments who have journalists executed. Free speech is about freedom from goverment retaliation and he actively aids goverments in suppressing free speech.
The rockets were really reusable without huge work anyway
His employees built reusable rockets. His employees were not even the first to create electric cars, and he’s not even the founder of Tesla. He did NOT restore free speech anywhere. People that were hating on him still got banned iirc (I might be wrong). All he did was create a payment service with his friend (PayPal), used the money to buy an electric car company (Tesla), hired people to build satellites and rockets for him (SpaceX), and decided to buy a dying social media company to revive it (Twitter), failing miserably in the process.
Link to prove Twitter failure:
https://en.shiftdelete.net/twitter-x-loses-over-30-of-users-in-two-months/
https://www.gizmochina.com/2023/09/10/twitter-downloads-dropped-30-post-rebranding-to-x/
Link for twitter bans (People that were sharing his location):
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/17/business/elon-musk-twitter-ban-reverse-conditions/index.html
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.
Can we as a society organize and innovate without billionaires? Even China changed their economy to make them possible.
Right now, writers are on strike. Hollywood workers could invest their time, make movies, and get paid afterwards. But instead, it takes people with money to do the funding.
How should big sums of money be managed? Bureaucrats work to a certain extend but hardly innovate. Which structure could ask a million people to invest a thousand dollars each and offer ethical profits?
China needed them because they wanted money from the west. If they hadn’t we would have done a cold war to them long ago and they might not have been strong enough to handle it. Because they had some billionairs we took it easy on them for a while and now they are strong enough to resist our coup attempts. So it wasn’t that the oligarchs class is good for anything. They just needed to be part of our system for self defence.
Engineers, scientists and workers need an environment that allows them to innovate. How can we create such an environment without billionaires? Somebody mentioned kickstarter. What is missing that small investors make billionaires irrelevant?
Does it have to be exclusive? Society right now can own means of production. Cooperatives, joined-stock cooperations or foundations could be used to hold ownership and the fruits of labor could be shared.
If the majority is not willing to organize labor right now, who could take over the role of billionaires without abusing their position of power?
who could take over the role of billionaires without abusing their position of power?
The billionaires abuse their power. The problem of an abusive manager being totally solved is an irrational height to set the bar at.
Why are billionaires not acceptable if abusive managers are acceptable?
What you are looking for is a “manager”, which doesn’t need to be a billionaire and, in fact, usually is not.
Who selects and controls the managers? Who motivates people to invest their income to pay the managers?
A million people have to pool $1000 each to create the equivalent of a billionaire. It could be possible yet it doesn’t happen.
The trick is that billionaires cannot consume their entire wealth. Thus the economy has free money that looks for opportunities.
I hate stumbling upon libertarians.
Taxes. Next question.
The trick is that billionaires cannot consume their entire wealth. Thus the economy has free money that looks for opportunities.
This is hopelessly naive. Most of what they do with all that extra money is incestuous money laundering and regulatory capture. There’s no reason to give unaccountable individuals such an absurd level of societal power when it’s not like they “innovated” their wealth from thin air. Take it from the people they otherwise would take it from via, for example, a tax system and you can produce something accountable that can be changed freely by society and won’t buy twitter to force us to read its tweets.
Society already pays many taxes and changing the spending doesn’t happen freely by society.
Politics have their own disadvantages and billionaires are a complementary way to allocate resources.
That society can be locked into Twitter shows that taxes shouldn’t be the only source of capital. Every democracy could have created a Twitter clone many years ago as basic infrastructure.
Like Norway’s wealth fund, many countries could have invested in companies to generate profits and reduce taxes. Instead there are deficits. Politicians rely on society for sustainability whereas billionaires have to identify and improve sustainable forms of income.
If neither politicians nor billionaires should invest, what would be a good way to identify the people who should?
Let’s imagine that this is not a joke. What do you need to get going besides the money?
Kickstarter
Maybe, but they’ve used their power to set the system up that way, and heavily propagandized against socialized alternatives
If you had free counter-propaganda resources, how would you structure a socialist alternative and what would you tell the population?
Wrong
As a wrestling fan, what giddy described is pretty much true. For a billionaire, Tony is “nice” (too nice, because his niceness has lead to a toxic backstage environment, though he did finally fire CM Punk so thats nice). Like sure it doesn’t outweight the exploitation inherent in being a billionaire, but Tony is indeed a “nice guy” and does go out of his way to do nice things for his employees. Also gives them health insurance in an industry where thats not the standard and such.
And the question was “a billionaire who done anything good” not “a billionaire who’s overally contribution to the world is good”. Giddy answered the question correctly. Sorry to autism you with pedantry but like, I have to insist on some technically accurateness here.
Like honestly, did you even know who Tony was before this post or did you just respond wrong because you were going to do that to anyone who said any billionaire did something good? Are you actually knowledgeable about this subject?
I’m not saying he doesnt get the wall in a revolution or anything. But the post asked “Did anything good”, and he did. he did good things for his employees.
Elon Musk
Popularized electric cars, funded the design for re-usable space rockets and gave people on the rural areas aswell as Ukrainian soldiers internet access.
The flood of downvotes now demonstrates how all this is ignored because people hate him nevertheless.
It still has been and continues to be invaluable for their war effort. You can go ask any Ukrainian.
If Elon letting them use starlink is not a good thing then why is it a bad thing when he doesn’t let them use it? Could you lay out your argument with a little more detail because I don’t quite follow.
I never claimed he’s a good guy. That’s not what OP was asking
He popularized electric cars while giving his workers horrible working conditions and human rights abuses. I gotta say I like SpaceX, but NASA being underfunded is a problem, because a national space program being dependent on a private company is not good.
Starlink has been good for internet access, the downside is that it’ll become part of the space trash problem in some years.
Elon Musk is still a piece of trash.
Yes, that’s because it is similar to saying “Yeah, but not everything Adolf Hitler has done was bad!”.
Except it’s not, because he didn’t wage war and kill millions of people. I guess being an edgelord douche is the same as being Hitler these days though.
I did not say he is being Hitler. He is just listing some positive aspects and wonders why he gets down voted. It’s just the same procedure, not the a comparison of Musk to Hitler. Both have fanboys and they just have to deal with the public opinion of the guy. It’s not really a surprise about the downvotes, right?
I wasn’t talking about the downvotes. I was talking about your analogy, which I still don’t understand.
Ok so that dude says that musk did positive things (which is debatable but that’s not the point). People vote him down and he is pissed of by this. So he brings that ppl will downvote him, because people generally dislike Elon Musk anyway.
As Germany had to deal with the Nazis a lot of people were subjected to massive propaganda as the Nazis basically controlled all the public information sphere. So what happened was that many/some people read in the newspapers about positive aspects of the Nazi/Hitler rule and they believed.
They later learned (when the 3rd Reich collapsed and the war ended) what a mess the Nazis left behind with millions of deaths and eradicated families. Many people still of course knew what happened but we’re subject to repression or just went along with it. Propaganda still leaves an impression especially considering that many young people back then grew up wrapped in dense propaganda.
Now the analogy is that there were probably positive aspects of the Nazi Regime for some people. Since after the war there is a stereotype about people in discussions about the time saying “yeah, but not everything was bad!”. They might list things like that “Hitler” (the government) build Autobahns (which were invented earlier anyway) or hospitals or something else. Just like a government should care about its people. These people are correctly being punched in the face for saying this, as we all know that in the background the Nazis made half of Europe suffer from their ideology.
The punch in the face would be a downvote here, as Musk is not to be idolized as he is just a manchild with too much money and he does not care about humanity or humankind.
That wasn’t the question
Do you actually think it was cheaper to launch all those satellites than it would be to lay fiber for rural areas?
Almost definitely yeah. Just like skipping landlines and going directly to mobile phones was a lot cheaper in places like Africa.
Whats with Bill Gates?
No he is alright of cours , he spends Milllons on Media to obscure why he keeps the patents …
if you dont think Bill ates is good and awsome , those millions would have been wasted , so please inthe name of the most influencal Patent holder for third World Country illnesses …
he is good , No really! Have you read the papers he pays…
That article is much ado about nothing. He knew Epstein and met him occasionally. So did every other billionaire and politician. Unlike some other of Epstein’s associates, there’s nothing to suggest Gates indulged or was even aware of Epstein’s excesses.
Paywall, login popup shite. I hate websites like this.
The question was about whether a billionaire had done anything good.
Thank you
Agreed - he is somewhere between a shitty husband or a monster, but he definitely has helped rid the world of some bad diseases, and his charities continue to do quite a bit of good around the world.
In the old days, you could just pay the church for absolution; now, you have to rid the world of diseases. SMH
Inflation is everywhere nowadays. In my day you could get absolution for a nickel.
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.
Bruce Wayne.
Own the largest monopoly in Gotham City.
Hoard and trickle up all the wealth.
The severe income inequity foments criminal activity and mass discontent.
Waste the money on private military research.
Run around dressed as a bat beating people to a vegetative state, launching them into medical debt with the police’s unofficial support.
In the comics, the writers regularly show how he is directly involved with the Wayne foundation, which runs social service programs and provides aid for people who need it. More than once he has offered jobs at Waynetech to street thugs that are obviously just down on their luck and need a break.
This was brought up often in the 90s Animated Series as well as the Arkham games… unfortunately the movies rarely make time to show this. The Nolan movies tried, but it didn’t come across very well.
The systemic issues in Gotham are regularly shown to be in spite of the Wayne family, rather than because of them. It’s unrealistic, but hey, it’s fiction
Run around dressed as a bat beating people to a vegetative state
Batman’s no kill policy is definitely not for any kind of moral objection to taking lives, that’s for sure. He brutalizes normal ass people with extreme excessive force on the regular. There’s no chance that none of these people succumb to their injuries soon after. It’s probably just to make himself feel better about it, a cope that allows him to justify it all by saying he didn’t necessarily inflict mortal wounds on purpose.
The new movie actually addresses that by having his parents previously attempt to do “Gotham Renewal,” but it collapses into a corrupt mob slush fund and doesn’t actually help the disadvantaged at all. That’s why he fights with his fists - because they will never collapse into greed like his parents’ attempts at reform and reconstruction did.
