People of Lemmy, I dare you to name ONE billionaire that's done anything good.

Sure.

Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation will probably eradicate polio.

Before people jump on the bandwagon about how Gates is evil and problematic, that there are no virtuous billionaires, and a government or an NGO or an equivalent should have been the one to do it... I know. But the question was "name one billionaire that's done anything good," and I think it's pretty difficult to argue that eradicating polio isn't good.

On same tone, Warren Buffet.
He has also donated billions in the same charity and largely lives controversy free.
- The company he’s synonymous with is very much not controversy free
Yeah, dude is asking the wrong question.
Bill gates is not curing polio, it's the doctors and scientists that are doing it.
Bill gates, also the guy who spent loads of time on epsteins island banging children. I guess it evens out /s
- Source on that?
- You do know Gates left day to day operations from Microsoft for like 20 years ago and his foundation has nothing to do with Microsoft?
However, one can posit that the Gates Foundation is creating a market for vaccines that aren't of interest in the industrialized nations.
I'm not sure that subsequent doses are going to be provided as generously as the first ones.
- That's not how vaccines work. The illness is already there, it's not like people get sick after you introduce a vaccine into the system. So the "market" has always been there and every dose administered is great.
- The point of eradication is that once a disease is gone, you don't need to vaccinate against it any more. You've probably never been vaccinated against smallpox, for example.

The submarine dude that got rid of a few more in one go?

That voyage killed a kid too, can't really call it a good act overall
- Suleman Dawood was the youngest passenger on board. He was 19 and therefore an adult capable of making his own decisions.
  https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/23/europe/titan-submersible-victims-intl/index.html
I wish for an explanation pls.
- The OceanGate sub that imploded on the way to the Titanic.
Wasn't anywhere close to being a billionaire.

Didn't one of the Koch brothers die? That was pretty cool.

I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
-quote
Yup rest in piss

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.

Elon Musk got me to stop using Twitter.

He also got me to stop using Reddit after hanging out with their CEO too. What a great guy 👍

Good acts do not make a good person. Plenty of billionaires have done good things, but they don't even come close to outweighing the bad.

I love a quote I read once in a thing about alignment. "If you fix twenty neighbor's roofs, you're Jimmy the Helpful Thatcher. But if you eat the neighbor's daughter, you're Jimmy the Cannibal, and no amount of additional carpentry assistance will change that."
- Traditionally this joke is:
  Bad Scottish Accent Engaged
  I build 200 ships, do they call me Seamus the shipbuilder? Nae.
  I paint 100 houses, do they call me Seamus the Housepainter? Nae.
  But ye fuck one sheep...
A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.
- Give them a cookie and the wall
- True, and they generally get ample praise for the good. The bad has, unfortunately, rewarded them with their billions.
- IDK if it works in this case.
  The people with power over you will inevitably use that logic to demand constant praise.
- The issue is that any philantropy a billionaire does comes from money "earned" through exploitation and is never enough to un-make them a billionaire. Even if they did, it's still a single person taking the resources of millions of people and controlling it themselves to put into their pet projects, in a completely undemocratic manner - so Gates gets to benefit from the looting of Africa and then turn arounf and tell Africans how he will be allocating that stolen loot. Oh, and that man controlling so much policy in various African nations thinks Africa is overpopulated, an extremely racist eugenicist myth.
  The good and bad are not separste things you can judge in isolation, any "good" a billionaire does is only possible by causing disproportionate harm. It is not as though these billionaires are personally doing much of anything, they are simply seizing resources from the public to inefficiently address problems that the public could have managed themselves if they were permitted to control their own lives, if they aren't just doing what Gates does of using donations as money laundering.
Yeah, the wording of OP's question is dumb for this reason. What person on this planet has done literally only evil things? A better question would be more like "What billionaire is genuinely a good person and why?" Personally the size of my list of "overall good" billionaires is a rounding error but at least the thread would be more interesting.
Also they just put money, they don't put ANY actual work.

Mark Cuban is a bit of a wall street asshole, but he’s created a drug company to slash the prices of generic drugs for Americans: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/24/1075344246/mark-cuban-pharmacy#:~:text=Billionaire%20investor%20and%20Dallas%20Mavericks,of%20its%20online%20pharmacy%20Wednesday.

For sure! I wanted to make sure someone chimed in on this. I forwarded it to an elderly hospital roommate who was extremely appreciative.
Wrong
- Do you have anything of substance to add here or are you just going to continue replying "wrong" to everyone you disagree with as if your opinion is the absolute arbiter of truth?
- OK I'm sorry maybe I'm letting the autism overflow my brain but seeing you just say "wrong" to technically correct statements that answer the question presented here is just so fucking annoying. Ooooo you got so many upbears from fellow Hexbears who dont want to think but just dunk. Getting very frusterated with this community right now.

A single good thing that a single billionaire has done? The Gates foundation fighting malaria. I think that's good.

Taxing them would do even more good.
- Is the topic of the thread called “Should we tax billionaires” or was it “I dare you to name one good thing a billionaire has done”?
- Tax what though? There's no profit to tax.
- For sure
Sure but, considering they use only 5% of the money they have for all there "good" projects and invest the ither 95% in fossil fuels. The gates Foundation is really only a little good because the law forces them to use min of 5%, to stay tax exempt. So if they didn't have to, would they still do it? I doubt that.

Anything good?

Then all of them. They are human beings, not black holes of pure evil.

I need a source for that.

Paul Allen funded a bunch of scientific and medical research, as well as quite a few museums and other public works around Seattle. He was the largest private donor to the fight against Ebola in Africa.

Sergey Brin is a big Wikimedia contributor, as came out a few years back when their donor list leaked.

also you should check out his card
- It's even got a watermark.
- TRY GETTING A RESERVATION AT DORSIA NOW!!!

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.
- Billionaires don't innovate, it's the engineers/scientists/workers in their payroll.
- Maybe, but they've used their power to set the system up that way, and heavily propagandized against socialized alternatives
- Kickstarter
- how should big sums of money be managed
  By giving them to me.

Most/all of them have done good things. A better question is are there any that have done enough good to outweigh the bad

You conveniently left out the definition of "good" so you can move the goalposts if you don't like the answers you get.

Good is anything that Pixel of Life annoys
Good is never a perfectly internally consistent category, we always have to discuss it. We just don't start with the incorrect preconception that there's such things as universal definitions except as relative claims. "The only universal is the relative" or something like Hegel said.

Elon Musk helped mastodon grow

low fucking bar mate
- Google "what s funny", bruv

There’s a lot. In the late 1800s it started becoming something of a tradition for billionaires to move on to philanthropy after their retirement. J.D. Rockefeller was worth several hundred billion dollars in today’s money. He gave away close to 200 billion of it.

A more modern example that people have brought up is Bill Gates.

Yep, they are trying to buy a spot in heaven.
- So they're ferengi, got it

Here's a list of them that all did one good thing in 2021

...That one guy's stupid submarine provided like a week of entertainment

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? ...😅

That one Koch brother died. The submarine guy too, he was a Standard Oil heir who took at least one other billionaire with him.

Before anyone jumps on me, billionaires suck, without exception, for reasons I don't really need to go into here, you've all heard them a million times over, and whatever good they do does not offset that in the slightest. None of them probably have been or will be a net positive influence in the world.

That said, you can probably pick out a few good things that any individual billionaire has done (and you can absolutely feel free to debate their motivations for doing those things, many of them I'm sure we're done for tax reasons, vanity, etc.)

Some of the old robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie (Carnegie was not technically a billionaire, but if you adjusted his wealth for inflation he would be the richest person today by a pretty comfortable margin) funded a lot of universities, libraries, etc.

Bill Gates has done some good work with vaccines despite his shitty business practices with Microsoft.

Musk is overall a shithead, I don't like him, I don't like his companies, I don't even like his vehicles. That said, I think it's pretty fair to say that Tesla has helped (though he is not solely responsible) to kick open the door for EVs to start gaining wider acceptance and adoption. And SpaceX is doing some exciting stuff, though again I dislike a lot of their methods, disagree with a few of their goals, don't like how they're run as a company, etc. But long-term I think we need to have our eyes to the stars, whether it's for settling on other worlds, mining asteroids, asteroid defense, or if I dare dream it, building a Dyson sphere, or just for scientific advancement for it's own sake, and unfortunately SpaceX is one of the major players in that field now.

Bezos hasn't done anything too flashy that comes to my mind, and like musk he is also a shithead that I dislike for pretty much the exact same reasons, excuse me for not repeating them, but he does have and donate to quite a few charities.

Again, none of that is enough to offset the shitty things they do, but I'd be surprised if you could find any very rich people who haven't at least donated to a handful of charities.

Chuck Freeney. He basically invented "Duty Free" stores and became a billionaire in the process. Then decided he should die "broke" and created The Atlantic Philanthropies secretly staking it with a little over a third of his wealth. In 2020 he closed the organization because he had given away the vast majority of his net worth. Mostly as grants to universities all over the world. He also may have low-key helped fund the IRA.

He's still got enough to live comfortably, and I'm sure his family is set up nicely.

Funding one of the biggest terrorist organisations of the 20th century doesn't sound like a very good thing to do... Same goes for all the other Americans who gave them money without realising they were (are) pretty much universally hated across all Ireland - much like how most Muslims hate IS
- say it again for those in the back, Lord Mountbatten!
- Comparing the IRA to ISIS is legit disgusting.
- pretty much universally hated across all Ireland
  tell me you aren't irish without telling me you aren't irish
- What the fuck are you talking about, most Irish don't dislike the IRA, what kind of brain-dead take is that? The 1916 IRA are heroes, the British were bombarding Dublin. The black and tans were gunning down civilians, and the IRA were fighting back.
  Now, the PIRA was a lot more disliked by the Irish, but after Bloody Sunday feelings became mixed. A lot of folks were vehemently against the PIRA, a lot were in support, but the vast majority just wanted the bloodshed to end.
  Even then, by % of civilian casualties, the PIRA had a 30% civilian casualty rate, which isn't great. But it's literally better than some of the loyalist paramilitaries which had OVER 50% CIVILIAN CASUALTY RATES.
  You go to County Clare and yell Tiochfaidh ár lá on a Saturday night and see how ""universally hated"" the RA are.
  And you compare them to ISIS? My god.
Wrong
- Just spamming wrong everywhere isn't going to win you any debates nor convince anyone.
Funding the IRA is one of the one things anyone has mentioned here that I might give a pass.

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)

He also helped building the peace palace in the Hague, unfortunately the United States have since declared that they don't respect the jurisdiction of the International court over American citizens, therefore seriously diminishing it's credibility..

What, do you think they just sit around smoking cigars and laughing evilly all day? Its not that they dont do anything good, their evik acts just offset it.

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...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/business/bill-melinda-gates-divorce-epstein.html
- The question was about whether a billionaire had done anything good.
- Paywall, login popup shite. I hate websites like this.
- 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.

the Titan that shipwrecked on the way to the Titanic shipwreck was pretty neat.

Still waiting for bezos to launch himself into the sun tho

Nah, his rockets aren't good enough to do that. He's going to get stuck in orbit and asphyxiate, and we can all watch his rocket burn up on re-entry and point and laugh.

I dont know her name

Jeff bezos ex wife, who has donated a lot of money to charity

MacKenzie
who has donated a lot of money to charity
where did they get that money in the first place? the dollar mines? the grand tree of bills? if the only way to get money is to work for it and dollars don't magically fall from the sky, which I think is a reasonable theory, then it's necessarily true that they stole it from us. not even being glib, that individual person didn't do the labor to get that much money - it's literally impossible, it would take millions of years of work to get billions of dollars at any reasonable wage - they had to take the surplus value of the labor of other people to obtain it.
it's akin to a thief stealing the money of a group of people and then giving a fifth of it back and demanding we bask in the light of their charity
Well, not to diss on giving to charity but two technical arguments against. One is, you are acting as an additional tax on the worker (the source of the surplus) and then redirecting that tax to charity. It's fine but the elected government has democratically selected priorities that they can rarely fund so it is better to just give it to the treasury. And 2, just don't collect this tax in the first place, allowing the worker to spend it on the local economy.
Wrong

Chuck Feeney. He gave away everything to charities.

Edit: it was around 8bn.

So only good billionaire is someone who is not a billionaire.
- In a sense, voluntarily choosing to not be a billionaire is the goodest thing a billionaire could do.
  If they do it right before they die though, that makes it pretty dubious.
Yeah I still find it hard to digest that someone with a conscience actually made that much money in the first place. I'd love to see how he arrived at this decision, and if he could convince others too.

I would imagine all the billionaires have done something good at least once.

And a hundred bad things because .
- That wasn't the question.

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 Must did pretty much destroy Twitter?

Hitler was a billionaire and in the end he did kill Hitler.

Fuck Bill Gates apologists in particular

Your source is pro-russia, pro-china, and other authoritarian regimes.
- It's a well-sourced article, get over yourself
- So they're based? Good to know.
- I'm undeniably pro-gulag so thanks for letting me know this source is for me!

I believe all billionaires have done something good. I don't think that makes them good people due to the staggering amount of wealth they withhold from the population.

Doing good things, doesn't make you a good person. Donating millions is nothing when you have billions.

If I had to choose a specific, I'd say Bill Gates. I've never fact checked it but I've heard he set up multiple charities and donates for helping children, seems like a great thing to do.

For all his shortcomings, Forrest Gump put a lot of the money he made from his Apple stocks back into his community.

This query is counterproductively reductive. Every human alive, even the worst of them, has done at least one good thing. Many even do their bad things because they were misled to believe they were doing an overall good.

The point should be that it doesn't matter what good they've done, because the state of being a billionaire necessarily requires one to have done more net bad to the world than good. You could save a million lives by your own hand, but if you're a billionaire, it is a given that you have destroyed far more lives than that. No billionaire's heart was ever weighed by Anubis and judged worthy of the Field of Reeds.

All of them, without exception, end up as greasy streaks on the gleaming teeth of Ammit.

Gabe Newell is the least shitty billionaire I can think of, I'm not sure what he does for philanthropy though but at least it doesn't seem like he tries to influence the country for his benefit.

Oh wow I've never really considered Gabe's wealth, he would be exceedingly wealthy, wouldn't he?
- Google said he's worth just shy of 4 billion.
I love Valve, but I really don't understand why gamers give Steam so much praise. It is a closed platform filled with DRM on which you don't truely own a copy of the game (unlike gog), and on top of that they take a 30% cut of every sales and transactions which is enormous for small studios to pay. Support is poor and the algo/front page distribution of traffic and promotions is a black box.
Don't get me wrong, Gabe seems like a sensible human, and Steam is successful because it offered such a great service to players. But it's been almost 20years now since Steam, and I have not seen Valve slow down the greed. They don't need the money as this point. They don't need 30% of every game sale on PC. This is just as greedy as the other company people hate.

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.

Brian Acton is the only billionaire I can think of that hasn't been a net negative.

Co-founded WhatsApp, which became popular with few employees. Sold the service at a reasonable rate.
Sold the business for a stupid large sum of money, and generously compensated employees as part of the buyout.
Left the buying company, Facebook, rather than do actions he considered unethical, at great personal expense ($800M).

Proceeded to cofound signal, which is an open, and privacy focused messaging system which he has basically bankrolled while it finds financial stability.

He also has been steadily giving away most of his money to charitable causes.

Billionaires are bad because they get that way by exploiting some combination of workers, customers or society.
In the extremely unlikely circumstance where a handful of people make something fairly priced that nearly everybody wants, and then uses the wealth for good, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with being that person.
Selling messaging to a few billion people for $1 a lifetime is a way to do that.

Makes sense that suddenly becoming billionaire with every intention to not remain one by turning into a force of good is arguably one way to be a decent human. In other words, the only good billionaires are those not trying to be, or remain billionaires.
There is also a point where you have to be smart and patient with how you distribute your money, or else you simply risk some other greedy asshole to pocket it.
- Hell, I'll take someone who wants to be a billionaire, as long as they do it without exploitation. It's just that that's nearly impossible to do, since very few people actually individually create a billion dollars worth of value.

ITT: people who can't understand the difference between doing something good and being good.

Of course there are plenty of billionaires who have done good things, and pointing out all the ways they are still a shit person doesn't change that. Shitty people occasionally do good things, even if for shitty reasons.

Not a modern "billionaire", but you can make an argument that Andrew Carnegie spent a lot of his fortune on things that weren't awful.

Carnegie is probably the "best" billionaire in modern history. You can't go to a town in America without seeing some park or public building that was built with his money. I wish more 1% actually followed the Gospel of Wealth.
- Not just America - my home town in New Zealand had a Carnegie library. I live in Scotland now, where his birthplace is a museum. https://www.carnegiebirthplace.com/ His money is still funding various trusts in the UK.

Some posts mention people giving away billions in their later life. That sounds great.

However, you need to ask yourself how much of their obscene wealth was created by screwing someone else over? Essentially nobody can get so rich without taking money out of the pockets of other people. You can't just generate money out of thin air.

is this a psyop? surely its a psyop

youd probably have a hard time naming one billionaire that hasnt done anything good

theyre still a shit thing to have, practically never got the money they have by being a good person and shouldnt exist in the same world as homeless people, starvation or massively underfunded public projects

You haven't looked beyond the surface of Gates philanthropy. His involvement diverts focus away from critically acclaimedneeded work in these regions for his pet projects - the science doesn't dictate the focus, the whims of the billionaires do.

Osama bin laden did 9 11

Wasn't a billionaire.
- I tougth he was. Then i guess there arent any good ones after all.

Philanthropy is just a tax break and PR move.

And a way of manipulating world politics.

What? They're greedy humans who are doing things that have terrible consequences out of selfishness, not mustache twirling cartoon villains out to destroy the world for destruction's sake. I'm sure every single billionaire in the world has done something good at some point. That doesn't justify the kind of wealth disparity that makes their existence possible though.

Wrong
- How is what they said wrong lmao. They literally acknowledge that doing individual good things doesn't justify the wealth disparity. Every word of what they said is 100% accurate. The worst humans do individually good things sometimes and the title of the thread is NOT about the net good or bad the person did. I don't think you read the title of the thread. I think you're just dunk/upbear thirsty. I hate this element of hexbear sometimes.

David Koch died, which is a very good thing he did for humanity.

Bit of a gimme, though, isn't it?

Jeffrey Epstein, when he killed himself, probably.

Pretty sure he didn’t kill himself any more than Prince Andrew doesn’t sweat.
Tfw you're hanging out in a cell getting ready to testify against a bunch of super-powerful people, in a prison that's prevented every attempted suicide in decades, after having made repeated statements that you have absolutely no intention of killing yourself, and then suddenly both the guards leave to go take a nap, and at that exact time, you notice that the multiple cameras watching your cell all randomly glitch off at the same time, so at that moment you decide to kill yourself using a method that's indistinguishable from being murdered
- To be fair, both guards were tired from doing a bunch fo online shopping suddenly for no obvious reason
Thus ensuring Trump's compromat would not get revealed. Suuuure he killed himself...

MacKenzie Scott, Bezos's ex. She's given more than $14 billion to charity.

Trick question.

The billionaires who do good don’t want their names attached to their deeds because that defeats the purpose. The point of altruism is you don’t want credit.

(Seriously there aren’t many, though, because if you’re hoarding money, you’re a horrible person.)

Jack Dorsey bought me lunch once.

Do you mean net good (more good than bad) or is a good thing like "established public libraries" acceptable even if he also oppressed workers and stifled unions and bought government officials and stuff?

How many libraries is enough libraries to offset it though? That's the question. 5 libraries? Probably not. 10000 libraries? ...🤷
10 billion libraries? Now you're oppressing people in a whole new way. That's more than one library per person. Surely not scalable.
- Well that's why I asked OP if this is "net" calculation (good - bad) or if just the good counts.
  By my evaluation I don't think any billionaire (or equivalent using PPP calculations) has ever or could ever do enough "good" to overwrite the "bad" they have to do to accumulate that much wealth, unless they literally spend it all on improving people's lives including getting down in the trenches themselves.

In these comments: People who think someone can accumulate obscene personal wealth and then give a small percentage away makes them good. But if someone dares suggest taxing that obscene wealth they are a monster.

Not to defend billionaires, but this post sets an incredibly low bar. I imagine that all people, billionaires included, have done something good in their lives.
- Very true.
  I was just trying to draw attention to some of the comments that are defending them. You'd think from some in here that a little smidge of philanthropy in retirement makes it all okay that one person can hoarde enough personal wealth to feed millions.
Are we really seeing people say we shouldn't tax billionaires? I wouldn't say that. But this post is basically rage baiting. Like. Yeah. There definitely have been Billionaires who have given all their money away. Or at least the majority of it. They exist. I get why people think Billionaires shouldn't exist. I'm all for taxing them. I'm all for changing regulations to disallow such a large accumulation of wealth and then hoard it so it can't circulate and do what it's meant to do. But are we really suggesting that the majority of people don't think we should tax Billionaires?
- Yes. Well, some saying we shouldn't tax billionaires more and others saying that the money is better off with one private individual setting up companies and charities, rather than leaving that to governmental entities.
  To me, someone paying only ~25% tax when earning millions per year is obscene.
Reread the title. The question has nothing to do with billionaires being good people.
- Reread my comment. I'm commenting on the content of the comments.

His foundations pioneered developments in medical research and were instrumental in the near-eradication of hookworm and yellow fever in the United States. John D. Rockefeller

Markus Persson made a pretty cool game you may have heard of.

He also started to go crazy after selling Mojang.
Sometimes I wonder if that came from the Money or if it would've happened anyways.
- I suppose money sort of liberates you from social pressure.
- You can shitpost and be multiple kinds of terrible from a different plane of existence with that amount of fuck you money.

Batman?

I was looking for irl billionaires, but this is such a great comment.
- It's not though. He hordes his billions, doesn't do anything to change the systemic issues that create the crime he fights and instead spends all of his time and money fighting the symptoms of the problem rather whilst ignoring the real issues

Any of the billionaires that have already died did one thing good by nature of having died.

Give me a billion dollars and I'll donate some to the ravioli foundation.

They've all done at least one good thing that's a insanely low bar that's very subjective. Name one that isn't more good than harm in the world? They don't exist.

Mike Cannon-Brookes (co-founded Atlassian) has set up a 1.5b green fund to invest in green energy projects

The problem isn't a billionaire that's done anything good, the problem is a billionaire who has done more good things than bad.

Those don't exist.

There's no amount of good you can do to make up for the amount of exploitation you had to do in order to get to be a billionaire.

It doesn't mean that a billionaire can't do anything good. It just means the world would still be better off without them.

What if you make an app or a game and sell it for 2 Billions dollars?
- What if you take a shit, turn around, and find 2 billion dollars in the toilet?

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?

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.
- 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.
- Instead of tackling the systemic issues that cause the problems of gotham city (which he is directly responsible), he decides to beat people up. Kind of tells how shallow minded the writers are.
- 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.
- https://nitter.net/TheBat_Family/status/1316006509923520512

Millburn Pennybags or Uncle Pennybags gave you $200 every time you passed go.

He owed society much more than that, do no.

MacKenzie Scott

She enabled Jeff's rise for far too long.

Michael Kelly caused Blockbuster to go out of business.

A better question might be “name a billionaire that does more good than harm to the world”? Although personally I think that’s an impossibility.

Double dog dare me?

My two cents:

The current problem is rather that relatively many rich people are trying to do good things. The vast amount of private donations and privately funded NGOs, etc., have a strong influence within traditional, often national, political and governmental processes. This has had good and bad consequences and has been done with good and not so good intentions. Even if all consequences were good, the question remains to what extent we object to the fact that the choices of where to put money have been made by individuals and not arrived at through democratic processes, which can also lead to good or bad consequences.
It is unfortunate that "effective altruism" has become the trendy moral framework for many wealthy individuals, especially within Silicon Valley, to make decisions about where they put their money and how. Effective altruism is a questionable moral theory because it is primarily about the question of "how" to act and less about why. The theory suggests no underlying value system. As a result, it remains a values-free form of consequentialism, unlike, say, utilitarianism, a form of consequentialism that does propose an underlying value, namely happiness - and thus happiness maximization as a goal. Moreover, "effective" is a vague term, which also remains relatively free to fill in.

The free-fillability of effective altruism combined with the inherently individual choices of, well, individuals, currently creates friction between wealthy individuals and democratically elected bodies.

This is imho the current issue we need to think about, regardless of any "goodness" of consequences. Where do the responsibilities, rights, duties, freedoms and liabilities of wealthy individuals start, lie and end with respect to those of democratically elected governments, other representatives of the people, and, of course, 'regular' citizens.

Anything? That seems like an easy goal to score on. Maybe you mean "done good overall"?

A single good act does not a good man make.

Bill Gates. (Has donated money to charity and founded one himself).

Has donated money to his own charoty to aviod taxes and then did donations to manipulate world politics for his own agenda
There, FTFY
- He donated money before having founded his charity.

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.

J.K. Rowling, amongst others, have given away so much money that they've lost their billionaire status.

Huh that is pretty nice... Wait did they give it away for some heinous TERF shit?
- No, not that I'm aware of

Crassus invented the fire brigade and his head became a stage prop for the Parthians.

Crassus invented the fire brigade
Didn't he routinely order his brigade to do nothing until he managed to acquire the burning property (at increasingly decreased cost as the fire raged) from its owner ?
- Yes, that too. He also was one of the most prominent slave traders of the time and put down the Spartacus revolt.
  Trying to find the silver lining here.

That one brought a couple friends and his billionaire son down and unalived together.

Probably unintentional, but that one moment saved the planet a lot of hurt down the line I'm sure.

Chuck Feeney out here just existing and you having the audacity to suggest that good billionaire's don't exist. 3.7 Billion dollars donated in his lifetime.

a good billionaire cannot possiblly exist. if they did they would donate enough money to lose the title of billionaire
- He did.

Kanye West made "Graduation".

That's not to excuse the gigantic list of awful things he said and did (especially recently), but finding ONE thing a bad person did isn't hard.

After realizing he never made a better album. Kind of cancels it out though...
- I don't know about that, MBDTF was pretty good.

The amount of exploitation and destruction of the environment that it takes to accumulate 1 billion dollars can never be offset by any amount of “good” that is done by money. If I extract resources and a exploit a community and get a billion dollars, then turn around and give every cent back to that community, surplus value will still be lost.

Came to say essentially this but looking at the fact that one person having that much money with all the shit going on is absurd.

Some of them have died already. That is good.

Batman

Tony Khan created AEW and seems to genuinely care about his employees. He put on a private plane this week so the wrestlers could attend the funeral of Bray Wyatt and still make it to Dynamite

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.

Mansa Musa

About the only complaint I have about him is that he still owned slaves.

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

Bill gates and Warren Buffet have both argued for higher taxes on the wealthy and have donated millions to solve social problems.

Chuck Feeney

All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. Romans 3:12

You're right. There's no billionaire who has done good. But there's also no human who has done good either.

Wtf is jesus waiting for it's been 2000 years
- feel like shit rn
- Not yet, he died in his thirties.

How about no? Stop deepthroating billionaires, please.

Elon Musk. Without him, electric cars wouldn't be the almost-mainstream thing they are today. We also would be a decade behind on space launch.

Wrong
- Care to explain ? Everyone knows hes not the founder but without elon Tesla won't be what its today.
Made electric cars 'almost-mainstream'
Launched some spacecraft
Who does this help, exactly? I mean directly?
- Not everything has to have immediate effect to be good in the long run.
  You can argue all day about Tesla and it's controversies, but Tesla basically spearheaded the movement of EVs. They showed the rest of the world how to build proper EVs and charging infrastructure when the traditional car makers were still refusing to move forward. And now western car makers are basically sitting ducks when Chinese EV makers are on the rise to take over the market. Stuff does not have to be perfect right now because tech can improve, and the know-how people built up now can still be used in generations after.
  SpaceX also did not "just launch some spacecraft". They also spearheaded the way for reusable rockets, something that satellites rely on. You cannot deny that their Starlink system helped immensely in places without access to good internet, not only in warzones, but also in rural places where updating internet infrastructure is deemed a waste of money to corpos.
Now name everything bad Elon did!
- You asked to name a billionaire that has done anything good. That is not a good thing in your view then?
Tesla (which he did not start) sells luxury electric cars, exactly the opposite of "mainstream".
I'll give him Space X pushed us forward but Tesla existed without him. His contributions there may have happened anyways.

JK Rowling donated so much money that she's no longer a billionaire!

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.

Oh yeah that internet access that they pulled when Ukraine were engaged with Russia in combat and reliant on.
- It still has been and continues to be invaluable for their war effort. You can go ask any Ukrainian.
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.
- 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.
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.

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.

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.
Yikes lol
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