Of course he should be praised for giving it away, but he's supposedly worth 1.3 billion. I'd be happy to give away 500m if I had 510m or 520m or in his case, 1300m.
Refreshing to see a multimillionaire+ who actually knows the meaning of the word "enough." The world seems to be run by people who don't even know of the word.
I think a fundamental problem is that the non-profit/NGO sector doesn’t have the same caliber of people as the private sector. There’s no Jeff Bezos equivalent working on inner city education. Bill Gates is really the only one who has tackled this, by investing his own time into public health, which I understand has produced real results.
I think there's a case to be made that philanthropy produced the Internet Archive but maybe that's a little different from usual philanthropy since Brewster is very hands on for so long.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Ch...
If we assume you are right about billionaire philanthropy being basically ineffectual (I personally agree) there is a line of reasoning that I find explains why adequately. When systems don't have their incentives structured properly, then quite often the unexpected outcomes are stronger than the predicted outcome. Because the input to the system did not properly account for, or change the incentives which drive the dynamics of the system.
Examples about in healthcare, social programs, education... large SWE companies...
There's so little real pressure for results when you're backed by some billionaire's fortune, the existence of the organization is not threatened by non-performance... there's no free market to survive in, the goal is to lose money... the things you are trying to measure are slow signals or mostly qualitative...
I had assumed that the fee portion of the site was substantial enough to cover all costs, and generate perhaps tens of millions of profit (he's well known for having given away money to media, so obviously there's some profit). But I didn't realize that it made hundreds of millions of dollars.
Are there any articles that break down how this pencils out?
Revenue peaked in 2018 at $1 billion.
Around here it’s (very sadly IMO) been almost completely replaced by Facebook Marketplace, to the extent that people make Facebook accounts just to use Marketplace.
zuzululu•1h ago
but empty words to the american working class
it may be too late, now ppl hate the rich
Varelion•54m ago
That singular image should be the poster of this Epstein era.
WalterBright•42m ago
Musk more amply demonstrated how wealth is created.
zuzululu•40m ago
"Here is a few billion dollar to a non profit company I control but you better not write that in the article" or "I didn't care for social consequences, I was just another player, it was ultimately for you" vibes
it just doesn't have the impact it used to, ironically because then inflation was low and integrity/morality was rewarded as society.
I think Ray Dalio has done a fantastic job of mapping out the trajectory we are on. We've already started seen glimpse of it and I don't think its going to cool down. America and the West in general has growing fatigue with various elements and perhaps the biggest one is that of wealth gap disparity.
Perhaps a snapshot of where we are: The richer you get the more you need access and proximity to those that monopolized violence and pay protection money too. It's not unlike Italy in the 1800s, you need money to purchase and distribute violence to acquire more resources and eventually the gap gets too big, people can't afford bread, and they get bold.
WalterBright•39m ago
zuzululu•33m ago
I don't know how long this asymmetric upside down pyramid structure will hold. Monopoly on violence requires participants to believe in its continuity, any fracture in perception no matter how small, will create an increasingly chaotic redistribution effect.
gottorf•24m ago
In American discourse, there's a ton of talk about inequality from the haves against the have-mores, pushing policy that often times will lead to worse outcomes for the have-nots.
WalterBright•22m ago
Getting rid of the rich is probably a pretty bad idea for the rest of us.