We found out that what they really worshipped all along was money. I’m sure this is self-evident to many, but I was optimistic and naive about it. I saw the good in people that have no good inside them.
One of the chief arguments for low taxes on the 1% is that governments do dumb things with money. Billionaires are more likely to invest it in beneficial research, enterprise, etc.. If left to their own devices and not stripped of their resources, good billionaires will do great things for society. Or so the claim goes.
The problem is, although much potential for good may exist in billionaires, the average billionaire spends next to nothing on philanthropy or research. It's only highly unusual exceptions who do. Next to nothing, even when well invested, accomplishes next to nothing.
If billionaires won't open their purses to support the society that has provided them with opportunity, that's what taxes are for. If billionaires aren't lining up to fund research institutes, that's what tax-funded government research is for.
It sounds like you don’t think allocating capital to new business ventures or supporting the funding of existing businesses counts as supporting society?
Businesses are made up of people, and last I checked all of the things I use on a day to day basis come from companies. Companies seem pretty important.
Why do things like venture funding, which I think a lot of billionaires do engage in directly or indirectly, not count as supporting society?
The market is far from free, big money is near impossible to compete against. In effect, when they pour tens of billions the work that gets done could have been done perhaps with millions.
Take a look at Chinese AI accomplishments and at what point it has been achieved. Granted plagiarism might be reducing some of the costs, but in a free market, things would have been a lot cheaper.
Business ventures use long-term, curiosity driven research and educated workers to produce goods/services as a byproduct of generating profits for their owners.
If the owners are not paying taxes that fund education or long-term research, nor directly funding same, then they're both short-sighted and parasitic.
Just like you are weak, and essentially always incorrect, when you judge others, without substantiation of your statements - as you did above. So, you are no better than the person you replied to above.
And apart from your use of the word "essentially" being essentially redundant, and hence adding nothing of value to your statement, did you know about the word "wrong"? It can easily replace your use of the word "incorrect" (which fancy-pants people tend to use, when simpler equivalent ones exist, probably to impress others), for a saving of a whole four letters - per use! Gee!
A lot (most?) people have good in them for themselves. We've done a pretty good job at making sure the best thing for you also happens to be a pretty good thing for humanity as a whole. For the ultra-wealthy, this is almost never the case.
If I chose to be evil, right now, my life would implode. Now that's not the only thing keeping me from going evil, but it certainly helps. The same is not true for people with the world's biggest safety net and infinite get out of jail free cards.
(Something theologians debate about endlessly and absolutely uselessly. That is all they are good, er, bad, for.)
Yeah, right. Pontificating much? Pathetic.
How do you know he/she is "weak"? No argument provided. And the same for "incorrect".
And who the hell are you to judge them?
Let me apply some of your own judgement "ointment" on you:
>essentially always incorrect.
Your use of the word essentially in that phrase is essentially inessential. :) The meaning is equally well conveyed without that word. IOW, it's fluff, and can be done away with, fluffy kid. (wags wings at you. hi!)
It's sad to think as a high school student reading Wired articles about Google's wonder offices, Don't Be Evil,engineers getting time to work on projects and problems they wanted to work on, my geek friends and I really thought it was a case of the capitalists about to get a hacker/computer culture shake up - they'd penetrated the billionaire class and were going to be different.
A lot of reasons my present day jaded self would call out my younger self for being naive there, but it's still just embarrassing how wrong I was and how quickly the tech community fell in line with standard corporate awfulness. Nothing survives shareholders.
I don't think it's naive. That was in all of Google's marketing, and at the time I think that marketing was broadly true. It's impossible to know how long a good culture will last, certainly a high school kid wouldn't be expected to assume that.
They've become a typical evil BigCo now, but I don't think it's naive for not assuming that that was inevitable, just optimistic.
These companies also attract that sort of person. Most software engineers I've met aren't the "hacker" type. A huge number of them are in it for the mo ey and don't really have a hacker inclination. I feel that it's a culture in danger
Nah people with the "hacker inclination" are just as easy to buy but in other ways. There are people who will solve any interesting problem put in front of them and have a great time doing it without reflecting on why someone put it there or what it will be used for when they're done. Giving them more interesting problems, more autonomy to pursue intellectually stimulating solutions to them, is the reward you can use to keep them building your drone assassination algorithms or whatever.
In fact the overwhelming consensus on this site has long been that skillfully solving problems that are personally interesting to you is at worst morally neutral. I'll bet significant number of the people who work at for example palantir are like this. Curiosity-driven "little eichmanns."
My personal theory is that tech folks are often under-educated -- in the sense that they've specialized so much, that they missed out on a well-rounded human education.
This makes it easy to hijack the "ooh look! shiny/sexy technology" part of their brain, to work on Palantir-type stuff, whereas anyone with a more liberal, broad education would go "wtf! I don't want to help build that!"
I don't think it's entirely wrong as a model but it struggles to explain thiel himself having degrees in philosophy and law. I think there is a certain contempt engineers can have for other domains and ways of knowing that might be closer to the source of this. But I'm not very confident in that explanation either fwiw.
I feel the exact same way about tech today as a 90s kid who embraced personal computing and who was inspired by the histories of Apple, Microsoft, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and other pioneering places. As late as 2014 I thought highly of FAANG and I was proud of the two summer internships I had at Google, which were enjoyable.
Having been disillusioned by the state of the industry, I now teach computer science at a community college, and I get saddened when thinking about the world my students are to enter once they transfer and finish their bachelor’s degrees.
There are still many good companies and good people in our field, but I’m saddened by the rise of tech oligarchs who use tech for dominating people instead of making life better for everyone.
I think when you get to a high-enough level of running a company, you figure out ways to turn off your empathy, and ignore your principles.
Most of us develop a bit of the latter. I have worked for a bunch of questionable companies that kind of go against my values, but deep down I'm a bit of a whore and whether or not I keep to these principles isn't likely to make a huge difference, so I just shut up and cash my paychecks [1].
I would like to think if I became a billionaire, I'd maintain my empathy and would keep my principles because at that point I actually could do something, but I probably wouldn't be able to become a billionaire if I maintained my principles and empathy. Sort of a catch 22, which is why I probably won't be worth any significant amount of money unless there's some kind of Mr Deeds situation and I have a long lost billionaire uncle that I don't know about who dies.
I don't think Tim Cook or Sam Altman are pure sociopaths in any kind of clinical sense. The vast majority of people aren't. I think that they actively taught themselves to value their respective companies instead of fellow humans.
That, and the last two years of layoffs in these tech corporations has shown me that these people are extremely short-sighted.
You can make millions and keep your empathy but I don't think you can be a billionaire unless you're just a voracious unsatiable machine without much empathy to begin with. You can get good at projecting a facade and saying the right things and maybe even actually doing some good in some cases but it's usually just in service of expanding your wealth or power.
This isn't really a bad thing, we just need to make sure that society sets the right incentives to align these individuals properly to maximize prosperity. (e.g, preventing monopolies so value is generated via innovation vs rent seeking)
I agree that you can reach a few million without becoming too evil. Hell, having a decent-paying desk job and putting a good chunk of money into VOO (or something equivalent) has historically been a relatively surefire way of doing that if you're willing to wait a few decades.
I honestly am not entirely convinced that billionaires should be allowed to exist, I kind of think we should start taxing like crazy when personal wealth gets above a certain number. If you're not happy with a billion dollars, you're not going to be happy with a trillion dollars, or a quadrillion, or a quintillion. I think after a certain amount of wealth, your interests aren't really aligned with what's good for society, because the only appeal at that point is seeing a number get bigger. It's not like you're "saving up for something" when you get to that much wealth.
They are provably good at allocating resources (assuming they are generating value via real innovation and not through monopoly/rent-seeking) so you want them doing that.
I'd just progressively tax all luxury goods at like 10,000% so that they are encouraged to continue to invest and build more companies rather than creating socially unproductive empires of empty houses and yachts.
> They are provably good at allocating resources (assuming they are generating value via real innovation and not through monopoly/rent-seeking) so you want them doing that.
I don't actually even agree with that. Microsoft, for example, seems to routinely overhire and then fire large percentages of their employees (edit, correction, said "corporations" before).
I think all they know how to do (I mean this pretty literally) is spend money. They are given money and then they spend that money. Sometimes spending that money leads to growth. Sometimes it leads to having to lay off 20% of the company. The important part is that the money is spent.
> I'd just progressively tax all luxury goods at like 10,000% so that they are encouraged to continue to invest and build more companies rather than creating socially unproductive empires of empty houses and yachts.
I'm not opposed to what you suggested but I'm not 100% sure how you'd define "luxury goods" with any kind of consistency.
The money is generally coming from value generation or value extraction (or rent-seeking). You can create societal incentives to encourage generation and discourage extraction. A patent-troll firm is maybe 90% parasitic to 10% productive. SpaceX is probably closer to the opposite (IMO). People are going to play the game to win but its up to society to decide what that means.
> The money is generally coming from value generation or value extraction.
This is the crux of the matter, a critical assumption. It breaks at many places.
One can make a boat load of money by predicting market movements slightly better. The value produced is not zero, but does not seem proportionate.
The size of the HFT market seems disproportionate to the value they purportedly produce by removing microsecond scale inefficiencies in the market. A bulk of the futures and options market is not from hedging but just gambling, it's not creating value, at least not in any proportionate sense.
This is vacuous as a followup to the original claim - which was that they're provably good at allocating resources to create value (the last part being implied).
"The system is good because it selects the ones who can create value" "No actually they don't create value" "Well, at least we know they're either creating value or destroying it" you see how that doesn't support the original claim at all
What's worse is they can then give it to their children and have an infinite line of oligarchs who don't have to lift a damn finger in life but use the system to keep concentrating wealth the top. We should really eat the rich.
Yeah, and if they put it into an S&P500 fund, they're likely to earn about double that long term, which is even more depressing.
That's kind of what I am getting at; a billion US dollars is basically infinite money. With that much, you can easily get more money than most people will see in their entire lifetimes by literally doing nothing. I do not understand why they want more at that point.
The reason I want more money is so that I can buy more or better stuff than I have right now. More money translates to a tangible thing. As far as I can tell, the only motivation for a billionaire to accrue more money is just to watch a number get larger, and if that is your motivation to do something, then clearly something is wrong with your fucking head. If you're willing to screw over everyone by lobbying to lower taxes solely so you can watch a number grow, then you kind of have to be a sociopath.
I can understand the desire to continue to grow your companies, but no I do not understand the motivation to make more money when you already have more money than God. At that point, the drive to get more money seems like it’s primarily about watching a line go up.
It’s a subtle difference; I understand corporations trying to lower corporate taxes and the like, but there are lots of attempts from billionaires to lower their personal taxes by creating loopholes and bribing congress away from a wealth tax. That’s about personal wealth, and no, I cannot think of other reasons, no matter how dismissively you ask.
I save money to buy a bigger house, or fund my retirement, or to buy a car, but by the time you’re a billionaire you don’t have to worry about any of that. You can buy dozens of nice houses, you can stash away $20 million into a savings account and still be set for retirement, you can buy a new car every week, etc. A billion dollars is infinite money for an individual human, let alone multiple billions. It’s impossible to justify “more”.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/22/upshot/nsf-gr...