Not bad: http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/1/9831554/mark-zuckerberg-charity-45-billion
So he's going to build a rocket to Mars? :w00t: /tim
I think giving his money to me would be a great way to advance humanity.
Quote from: dps on December 01, 2015, 06:33:53 PM
I think giving his money to me would be a great way to advance humanity.
-1
Zuckerberg later announces that his annual salary is now $1 billion.
Btw, does this mean that Zuckerberg will be skipping out on paying billions of dollars in capital gains tax?
Quote from: Phillip V on December 01, 2015, 07:04:59 PM
Btw, does this mean that Zuckerberg will be skipping out on paying billions of dollars in capital gains tax?
Of course.
The biggest thing Zuck can do to advance humanity is to shut Facebook down permanently. :P
Quote from: MadImmortalMan on December 01, 2015, 07:21:57 PM
The biggest thing Zuck can do to advance humanity is to shut Facebook down permanently. :P
Facebook, for all its disadvantages, has some pretty positive impacts too in spite of what curmudgeons say.
Quote from: Jacob on December 01, 2015, 08:25:22 PM
Quote from: MadImmortalMan on December 01, 2015, 07:21:57 PM
The biggest thing Zuck can do to advance humanity is to shut Facebook down permanently. :P
Facebook, for all its disadvantages, has some pretty positive impacts too in spite of what curmudgeons say.
:yes: I get to see how my grandchildren are doing and share conservative memes starring those wacky tic-tacs.
Quote from: Grinning_Colossus on December 01, 2015, 08:44:38 PM
Quote from: Jacob on December 01, 2015, 08:25:22 PM
Quote from: MadImmortalMan on December 01, 2015, 07:21:57 PM
The biggest thing Zuck can do to advance humanity is to shut Facebook down permanently. :P
Facebook, for all its disadvantages, has some pretty positive impacts too in spite of what curmudgeons say.
:yes: I get to see how my grandchildren are doing and share conservative memes starring those wacky tic-tacs.
TYPE AMEN IF YOU LOVE GOD'S WORD. IGNORE AND GO TO HELL.
That is half of my facebook experience. :yucky:
Major Barbara lives:
QuoteZuckerberg's $45 billion hustle
Facebook mogul seizes Carnegie mantle for grandiosity, self-flattery and self-deception
December 3, 2015 10:30AM ET
by Chris Lehmann @lehmannchris
America has a curious attachment to the idea of gaudy wealth as the ultimate fount of virtue. Sure, there are a handful of saintly figures in our past who thoughtlessly surrendered their narrow margins of material comfort, their family ties, and, in many cases, their lives for the sake of a higher social good. But your Dorothy Days, Joe Hills or Frederick Douglasses never occupy the ultimate pride of place in the pantheon of American do-gooding. No, those figures are the benevolent moguls (aka robber barons) — the market-conquering souls who endow universities, trusts, museums, think tanks and the like. Theirs are the names that get etched in stone, and the busts that command awed obeisance, while wilder-eyed reformers and dissidents are marshaled to the duller stretches of our history textbooks.
This week, 31-year-old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg became the latest blessed billionaire seeking to join these august ranks, with the announcement that he intends to give 99 percent of his Facebook stock, currently valued at $45 billion, to charity. In a post to his own site immodestly framed as a letter from him and his wife Priscilla Chan to their infant daughter Max — and by extension, to the precious human future she symbolizes — the info titan, who began his career by aggregating date-rapish estimations of the relative hotness of female Harvard undergrads, briskly takes on the role of enlightened caretaker of posterity.
Here is his mission statement for humanity (bold in original):
Our hopes for your generation focus on two ideas: advancing human potential and promoting equality.
Advancing human potential is about pushing the boundaries on how great a human life can be.
Can you learn and experience 100 times more than we do today?
Can our generation cure disease so you live much longer and healthier lives?
Can we connect the world so you have access to every idea, person and opportunity?
Can we harness more clean energy so you can invent things we can't conceive of today while protecting the environment?
Can we cultivate entrepreneurship so you can build any business and solve any challenge to grow peace and prosperity?
Promoting equality is about making sure everyone has access to these opportunities — regardless of the nation, families or circumstances they are born into.
Our society must do this not only for justice or charity, but for the greatness of human progress. . . . .
Can we build inclusive and welcoming communities?
Can we nurture peaceful and understanding relationships between people of all nations?
Can we truly empower everyone — women, children, underrepresented minorities, immigrants and the unconnected?
If our generation makes the right investments, the answer to each of these questions can be yes — and hopefully within your lifetime.
Of course, enhancing human potential and combating inequality are worthy goals, as is the decision to disburse the cash reserves of our mogul class in their general direction. But we do well to heed the means by which our connectivity barons see all this social improvement coming to pass.
After all, in a genuine assault on inequality, the overall business model of Silicon Valley would have to be abandoned entirely, as tech critics such as Jaron Lanier and Evgeny Morozov have noted. By setting up outsized winner-take-all data combines like Facebook and Google, Silicon Valley accelerates key economic trends such as cartelization, income inequality and the gradual dissolution of the middle class — all under the grand enabling fiction of online liberation. Information, it turns out, doesn't so much want to be free as it seeks ever more elaborate ways to conceal its surcharges — while creating, in figures like Zuckerberg, a whole new generation of market monopolists.
More specifically, the measures that Zuckerberg goes on to envision aiding the frontline struggle for human betterment don't actually suit the job at hand all that well. Zuckerberg, in the great tradition of mogul charity-bestowers who came before him, is largely conjuring a world of philanthropic activity in his own maximally flattering image. It's a world in which the "unconnected" are numbered among the world's oppressed masses, and in which it's somehow a self-evident aspiration for a child to "cultivate entrepreneurship" in order to "build any business and solve any challenge to grow peace and prosperity." Likewise, the mandate to "connect the world so you have access to every idea, person and opportunity" may as well have been cribbed from the Facebook VC prospectus, circa 2007.
It gets worse. For of course, the same Internet that has permitted Zuckerberg to amass his billions by monetizing the private data of Facebook users strikes him now as the mainspring of all significant social improvement:
It provides education if you don't live near a good school. It provides health information on how to avoid diseases or raise healthy children if you don't live near a doctor. It provides financial services if you don't live near a bank. It provides access to jobs and opportunities if you don't live in a good economy.
The internet is so important that for every 10 people who gain internet access, about one person is lifted out of poverty and about one new job is created.
This is a core confusion of correlation and causation that should be worrisome in the case of anyone possessing Zuckerberg's world-conquering storehouses of wealth and influence. While a job may crop up here and there among 10 percent of the world's Internet users, there's zero evidence that their clicking habits have produced it. Indeed, it's a dead cinch, for example, that the Internet hasn't lately added to the disastrously shrinking corps of paid musicians and writers, let alone to the ranks of unionized hotel workers or taxi drivers.
This blind tech-adulation has also fueled Zuckerberg's earlier foray into philanthropy — his ballyhooed $100 million donation in 2010 to the Newark public schools, a gesture that doubled as publicity stunt for the anti-teacher's union documentary "Waiting for 'Superman.'" (And yes, part of Zuckerberg's nine-figure outlay went to buy out senior and tenured Newark teachers, thereby eliminating still more union-protected jobs at the behest of an Internet kingpin.)
Just five years after Zuckerberg launched Newark's brave new Facebook status as a capital of education reform, the whole boondoggle collapsed; PR consultants had bled the Newark school district's now-flush budget to the tune of $1,000 per firm per day, for a staggering total of more than $20,000,000 in image-management expenditures. Meanwhile, the city's actually existing families with kids in the schools grew so disenchanted with their new hi-tech overseers that they elected a new mayor, former Newark Central High principal Ras Baraka, to dismantle the whole endeavor and return the school system to some genuine semblance of community control.
The great irony here is that the colossal hubris displayed by Zuckerberg and his fellow members of the global knowledge elite bespeaks a giant educational failure in its own right. The myopic, magical-thinking faith in technology as a one-size-fits-all panacea for humanity's ills betrays a willed retreat from engaging with the core material that shape our educational, economic, and personal achievement deficits across the globe. Nicholas Negroponte, the swaggering tech-prophet behind the MIT Media Lab, already made a stab at a version of Zuckerberg's grand connectivity crusade back in the 1990s, with his lavishly funded, widely praised "One Laptop Per Child" initiative. The result was an unqualified bust: Peru, which followed up on actual school performance after Negroponte's millennialist tidal wave of laptops washed over the country's student population, found that educational performance was unchanged.
It's not hard to see why. If you just add laptops, wireless connections or Facebook accounts to unevenly developed societies with yawning inequalities rooted in grotesquely distorted economic and political histories, those bedrock conditions will remain unchanged — and in more than a few cases, worsened. This is, indeed, the whole trouble with the Silicon moguls' pet cause of "effective philanthropy" — their measures of effectiveness have everything to do with the moral vanity of the charitable giver, and nothing to do with the far more unpredictable and unmanageable living conditions of the recipient.
There's a second, instructive irony here as well. The digerati know-it-alls prescribing a new curriculum of world-saving knowledge for humanity evidently have scant familiarity with the history of their own do-gooding impulses. If our present-day info lords had the slightest curiosity about the history of American philanthropy, they'd soon learn the bracing tale of Andrew Carnegie, the 19th century steel titan who also made a point of largesse for the betterment of the world. Indeed, Carnegie laid out the principles of modern charitable giving in his celebrated 1889 tract "The Gospel of Wealth," where he calmly explained that people of great wealth, by the simple logic of natural selection, should also oversee the proper channels of its dispersal.
"The man of wealth," Carnegie preached, serves as "the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could themselves."
"Having declared that his role in the larger evolutionary schema was to make as much money as possible so that he would have the maximum amount to give away, [Carnegie] was obligated to squeeze profits out of his enterprises," Carnegie's biographer David Nasaw notes. "And that required him to pay his workers as little as possible. ... According to figures compiled by the geographer and historian Kenneth Warren, while the value of goods shipped from Carnegie mills increased by some 226 percent [between 1892 and 1899], the percentage of revenues paid out in wages decreased by 67 percent."
It's true that Zuckerberg extracts surplus value more from his user base than his in-house employees, but in structural terms, the similarities here are striking. In each case, the proprietor of a cartelized economic resource — steel in Carnegie's case, data in Zuckerberg's — discovers a sudden aptitude for philanthropic heroism. In each case, they pledge to give away the great bulk of their fortunes to charity — but in each case, they've succeeded largely in making over the recipients of their largesse into their own preferred virtuous image, and casually disregarding all manner of workers and citizens who don't fit the template.
Carnegie never succeeded in carrying out his stated goal of giving away all his wealth before his death — and far from serving as the benevolent and enlightened face of corporate paternalism in his age, he and his company became bywords for the brutal repression of organized labor in the wake of their murderous handling of the 1892 Homestead strike. By the time he died, in 1919, he had become morbidly depressed by the calamity of the First World War — a conflict that, true to form, he thought he could spend out of existence by sponsoring a series of international peace conferences.
This glum epilogue to Carnegie's philanthropic career is what the literary critic Walter Benjamin, cribbing the notion from Hegel, called "the cunning of history" — the idea that not only are the features of the taken-for-granted order of things other than what they appear to be, but can also mutate into their polar opposite. But perhaps Zuckerberg would conclude that Carnegie, too, simply lacked connectivity. With IMs, MOOCs and Oculus Rift — and the epic lack of self-awareness of our history-defying info-elite — this time will surely be different.
Chris Lehmann is an editor for BookForum and The Baffler and a columnist for In These Times. He was the deputy editor of The Washington Post Book World from 2000 to 2004.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.
The might be the most douchebaggery article I've ever read the first couple paragraphs of....
Andrew Carnegie had shady labor practices so therefore GIVING AWAY YOUR MONEY IS EVUL!!!!111
Once a laptop scheme failed in Peru so therefore TECHNOLOGY CAN NEVER SOLVE PROBLEMS.
Very convincing.
Weird
Executive summary?
Quote from: DGuller on December 04, 2015, 01:07:39 PM
Executive summary?
When rich people do nice things it's still evil.
I didn't read the whole thing.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 04, 2015, 02:16:49 PM
Quote from: DGuller on December 04, 2015, 01:07:39 PM
Executive summary?
When rich people do nice things it's still evil.
I didn't read the whole thing.
Me neither, the blood on my eyes got too thick to see through about quarter of the way in.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 04, 2015, 02:16:49 PM
Quote from: DGuller on December 04, 2015, 01:07:39 PM
Executive summary?
When rich people do nice things it's still evil.
I didn't read the whole thing.
It is because of Andrew Carnegie. Before him philanthropy was ok.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 01, 2015, 07:12:40 PM
Quote from: Phillip V on December 01, 2015, 07:04:59 PM
Btw, does this mean that Zuckerberg will be skipping out on paying billions of dollars in capital gains tax?
Of course.
Actually, the way he is structuring this venture he won't avoid it. The new entity is going to be a standard corporation to avoid the restrictions placed upon non-profits.
Quote from: Valmy on December 04, 2015, 02:25:55 PM
It is because of Andrew Carnegie. Before him philanthropy was ok.
I imagine you are being facetious, but I disagree anyway. Carnegie's philanthropy was definitely OK. This article is part and parcel of the current class war against fat cats and billionaires.
Quote from: Baron von Schtinkenbutt on December 04, 2015, 02:31:50 PM
Actually, the way he is structuring this venture he won't avoid it. The new entity is going to be a standard corporation to avoid the restrictions placed upon non-profits.
OK. But presumably he would still get the write off when he disburses money from his privately owned for profit corporation.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 04, 2015, 02:38:03 PM
Quote from: Valmy on December 04, 2015, 02:25:55 PM
It is because of Andrew Carnegie. Before him philanthropy was ok.
I imagine you are being facetious, but I disagree anyway. Carnegie's philanthropy was definitely OK. This article is part and parcel of the current class war against fat cats and billionaires.
I just did not get the connection between how Carnegie being mean to workers has anything to do with Zuckerberg :lol:
What do those two guys have in common besides both having loads of cash to give away? And the author really bends over backwards to find anything to portray Zuckerberg as a monster. Facebook got rich STEALING IDENTITY and he got his start FACILITATING DATE-RAPE. RAPE CULTURE BILLIONAIRE!!
Yeah it was pretty ridiculous.
Quote from: Valmy on December 04, 2015, 02:44:53 PM
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 04, 2015, 02:38:03 PM
Quote from: Valmy on December 04, 2015, 02:25:55 PM
It is because of Andrew Carnegie. Before him philanthropy was ok.
I imagine you are being facetious, but I disagree anyway. Carnegie's philanthropy was definitely OK. This article is part and parcel of the current class war against fat cats and billionaires.
I just did not get the connection between how Carnegie being mean to workers has anything to do with Zuckerberg :lol:
What do those two guys have in common besides both having loads of cash to give away? And the author really bends over backwards to find anything to portray Zuckerberg as a monster. Facebook got rich STEALING IDENTITY and he got his start FACILITATING DATE-RAPE. RAPE CULTURE BILLIONAIRE!!
Yeah it was pretty ridiculous.
I really appreciated the author throwing that right into the beginning of his article. Saved me some time.
Quote from: Admiral Yi on December 04, 2015, 02:41:18 PM
Quote from: Baron von Schtinkenbutt on December 04, 2015, 02:31:50 PM
Actually, the way he is structuring this venture he won't avoid it. The new entity is going to be a standard corporation to avoid the restrictions placed upon non-profits.
OK. But presumably he would still get the write off when he disburses money from his privately owned for profit corporation.
Only if the money goes to tax-deductible purposes. The point of structuring this as an LLC is to not have investments restricted to certain purposes.
Plus, he doesn't need to form a corporation if all he wants to do is disburse his money.
Quote from: Valmy on December 04, 2015, 02:44:53 PM
I just did not get the connection between how Carnegie being mean to workers has anything to do with Zuckerberg :lol:
The author's primary concern is obviously income inequality. The connections that he uses to tie this to Zuckerberg, (Andrew Carnegie, loss of union jobs due to Uber and Air BNB, early retirement for senior teachers in Newark) are all tenuous; but without Zuckerberg to pillory it's unlikely this editorial would receive much notice. It would be yet another screed about income inequality on Al-Jazeera.
QuoteWhat do those two guys have in common besides both having loads of cash to give away? And the author really bends over backwards to find anything to portray Zuckerberg as a monster. Facebook got rich STEALING IDENTITY and he got his start FACILITATING DATE-RAPE. RAPE CULTURE BILLIONAIRE!!
Yeah it was pretty ridiculous.
That was the part that reminded me of Major Barbara. Zuckerberg's charity is funded with
tainted money.
What a retard.
Why doesn't he do what rich people are supposed to do, invest money and create wealth and jobs while they get richer and invest more money and create even more wealth and jobs?
Quote from: Siege on December 05, 2015, 11:04:17 PM
What a retard.
Why doesn't he do what rich people are supposed to do, invest money and create wealth and jobs while they get richer and invest more money and create even more wealth and jobs?
D+
Quote from: Siege on December 05, 2015, 11:04:17 PM
What a retard.
Why doesn't he do what rich people are supposed to do, invest money and create wealth and jobs while they get richer and invest more money and create even more wealth and jobs?
He is investing money but in technology and research. Fuck dude I thought you were on my side here. What happened to the singularity? Now you are obsessed with piddly low tech economic bullshit?
Quote from: Siege on December 05, 2015, 11:04:17 PM
What a retard.
Why doesn't he do what rich people are supposed to do, invest money and create wealth and jobs while they get richer and invest more money and create even more wealth and jobs?
China has enough investment, Siege. Stop trying to give them American stuff.
Quote from: Siege on December 05, 2015, 11:04:17 PM
What a retard.
Why doesn't he do what rich people are supposed to do, invest money and create wealth and jobs while they get richer and invest more money and create even more wealth and jobs?
Sounds like that's what he is doing by avoiding this being a real charity.
What is it, the Human Fund?
The article criticising this is ridiculous but so is the claim that he donated the money to charity. I don't know enough about US tax law to comment but moving family money to a "foundation" or a similar organisation of sorts is a good method to optimise your tax structure and avoid inheritance taxes in most Western jurisdictions.
He is not an evil man for doing that (except perhaps by having Facebook spend millions of dollars each year on lobbying so politicians in Washington continue to turn blind eye to such loopholes) but neither he is necessarily Mother Theresa - there is not enough evidence yet.
Quote from: Tonitrus on December 06, 2015, 07:38:31 AM
What is it, the Human Fund?
It very well may be something like that so I'd reserve my judgement and won't declare him Messiah just yet.
Quote from: Martinus on December 06, 2015, 08:08:20 AM
Quote from: Tonitrus on December 06, 2015, 07:38:31 AM
What is it, the Human Fund?
It very well may be something like that so I'd reserve my judgement and won't declare him Messiah just yet.
Reading the article, it sounds like his own version of a Bill Gates-type charity. But it says it won't just be doling money away, but also investing to help sustain itself (not a bad idea, really), and also implies it could be spending money on political/social projects as well.
Quote from: Tonitrus on December 06, 2015, 02:40:52 PM
Quote from: Martinus on December 06, 2015, 08:08:20 AM
Quote from: Tonitrus on December 06, 2015, 07:38:31 AM
What is it, the Human Fund?
It very well may be something like that so I'd reserve my judgement and won't declare him Messiah just yet.
Reading the article, it sounds like his own version of a Bill Gates-type charity. But it says it won't just be doling money away, but also investing to help sustain itself (not a bad idea, really), and also implies it could be spending money on political/social projects as well.
How is any of this different from what a normal company does?
Quote from: Martinus on December 06, 2015, 03:07:59 PM
How is any of this different from what a normal company does?
It isn't, which is why the new entity is going to be an LLC. Zuckerberg is not getting any tax benefits whatsoever from this that he wouldn't get as an individual. He is simply declaring that this new company is going to work towards the public good rather than being for the benefit of its members.
Quote from: Martinus on December 06, 2015, 08:06:20 AM
The article criticising this is ridiculous but so is the claim that he donated the money to charity. I don't know enough about US tax law to comment but moving family money to a "foundation" or a similar organisation of sorts is a good method to optimise your tax structure and avoid inheritance taxes in most Western jurisdictions.
He is not an evil man for doing that (except perhaps by having Facebook spend millions of dollars each year on lobbying so politicians in Washington continue to turn blind eye to such loopholes) but neither he is necessarily Mother Theresa - there is not enough evidence yet.
I take it Marty has not read the thread.
Zuckerberg will gain zero tax benefits from doing this.
Sorry but who in this thread provided any tax analysis of this move? Care to point me to the part I haven't read?
I said I don't know enough about US tax law to comment, but I have seen comments that by making it a share for share deal (instead of selling the shares), Zuckerberg will effectively pay no capital gains taxes on the money he made by holding the shares and seeing their value increase - if true, that's a huge tax benefit. I assume he and his family will retain organizational control over the new company and its resources, so at the end of the day it does not matter if he formally doesn't "own" them - he will retain the same influence on the world by being in control of how such resources are spent.
I also assume that the charter of the company will guarantee such organizational control for Zuckerberg and his descendants (as is the usual practice in such cases) thus allowing for a seamless transfer of such influence without any inheritance taxes being payable. As I said, smart.
It's a huge tax advantage enjoyed by everyone who doesn't sell their shares. You only pay capital gains when you sell at a profit.
Wow Marty, you sure are working mighty hard to avoid giving any credit to the guy at all.
Of course he is smart - duh, we know that. And being smart, he is going to dedicate his money to the causes that he cares about in a smart manner. Again, duh.
But fundamentally, this is a very great thing. The guy is going to see his ridiculous wealth is used for a purpose that he finds noble, and will hopefully have a tangible effect on humanity.
He can do that in good faith, while at the same time doing so in a manner that protects the assets from simply going to the US government. Again...duh.
Quote from: Berkut on December 07, 2015, 09:37:47 AM
Wow Marty, you sure are working mighty hard to avoid giving any credit to the guy at all.
Of course he is smart - duh, we know that. And being smart, he is going to dedicate his money to the causes that he cares about in a smart manner. Again, duh.
But fundamentally, this is a very great thing. The guy is going to see his ridiculous wealth is used for a purpose that he finds noble, and will hopefully have a tangible effect on humanity.
He can do that in good faith, while at the same time doing so in a manner that protects the assets from simply going to the US government. Again...duh.
If Marty was donating 99% of his money to causes he would be giving us a blow by blow commentary so we could all tell him how great he was :P
But Zuckerberg is not going to tax shelter route because he wants to be able to donate to whatever will further his objectives and not be limited to just going to non-profits and charitable organizations since he thinks Tech is the way forward. At least that is my understanding. I imagine some of it will be going to charities so there is that.
But if he just wanted to protect his money from taxes there are MUCH better ways to do this. Besides wouldn't the main point of Marty's inheritance tax scheme to encourage people to give all their shit away before they die anyway?
I know - it feels like Marty's main beef is that Zuckerberg isn't just donating his billions to the Fed directly! :P
Quote from: Martinus on December 07, 2015, 02:53:31 AM
I said I don't know enough about US tax law to comment, but I have seen comments that by making it a share for share deal (instead of selling the shares), Zuckerberg will effectively pay no capital gains taxes on the money he made by holding the shares and seeing their value increase - if true, that's a huge tax benefit.
I may be wrong, but one cannot do a stock-for-stock deal using shares owned by a person. It can only use shares held by the corporation. Furthermore, the target of the deal would then become part of Facebook, not remain an independent entity. The only way for Zuckerberg to give money to an independent entity from his personal holdings is to sell stock and eat the tax, unless the entity is a 501(c) entity (which this one is not).
From what I understand, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been doing some pretty good things with the Microsoft billions. If Zuckerberg ends up in that range, then that's a pretty good thing IMO.
Quote from: Jacob on December 07, 2015, 01:26:52 PM
From what I understand, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been doing some pretty good things with the Microsoft billions. If Zuckerberg ends up in that range, then that's a pretty good thing IMO.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is fantastic. But it is also a registered charity, and it's goals are somewhat more mainstream and easy to quantify (like its efforts to eradicate malaria and fight HIV).
Quote from: Jacob on December 07, 2015, 01:26:52 PM
From what I understand, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been doing some pretty good things with the Microsoft billions. If Zuckerberg ends up in that range, then that's a pretty good thing IMO.
Indeed.
I think there is a systemic problem in America that is resulted in a gross concentration of wealth in the mega-wealthy. The solution is not to take it away from them, but I cannot help but appreciate when some fraction of them recognize that the best thing they can do with the bulk of it is stuff like this...
Quote from: Berkut on December 07, 2015, 09:37:47 AM
Wow Marty, you sure are working mighty hard to avoid giving any credit to the guy at all.
Of course he is smart - duh, we know that. And being smart, he is going to dedicate his money to the causes that he cares about in a smart manner. Again, duh.
But fundamentally, this is a very great thing. The guy is going to see his ridiculous wealth is used for a purpose that he finds noble, and will hopefully have a tangible effect on humanity.
He can do that in good faith, while at the same time doing so in a manner that protects the assets from simply going to the US government. Again...duh.
That is why I said I reserve my credit until I see what he does with that. My point is not that he is a crook, but that your praises are premature.
Quote from: Jacob on December 07, 2015, 01:26:52 PM
From what I understand, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has been doing some pretty good things with the Microsoft billions. If Zuckerberg ends up in that range, then that's a pretty good thing IMO.
This is a little different though. Zuckerberg is trying to fund technology that changes the world rather than charitable work. It is a little different than the usual philanthropy stuff.
Quote from: Martinus on December 07, 2015, 03:16:40 PM
That is why I said I reserve my credit until I see what he does with that. My point is not that he is a crook, but that your praises are premature.
He has a grand vision he is funding. It may go nowhere. He is not giving food to starving children or anything. It is a little different than the usual 'billionaire gives away all his money' trope. I think his motivation is sincere.
I am just stunned Siege is not for this but instead wishes it was all being spent buying up skyscrapers in Manhattan or buying stocks or whatever. I thought he was for the singularity :mad:
Quote from: Valmy on December 07, 2015, 03:24:50 PM
This is a little different though. Zuckerberg is trying to fund technology that changes the world rather than charitable work. It is a little different than the usual philanthropy stuff.
I guess we'll see how it pans out.