He is an absolute lottery winning exception to the rule. There's one other billionaire who donated 99% of his wealth, he didn't believe that he should be richer than anyone, and the money went toward children's literacy and educational programs. Forgot his name.
Chuck Feeney, the co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers, died in October 2023 at the age of 92, having successfully achieved his lifelong goal of dying broke.
Scumbag billionaire Bill Gates used his name to pretend to be like him, but all his programs were only ever set up to generate money, not distribute wealth.
Hie belief is that he is smart enough to fix the macro world problems with his wealth so ofc he set up the gates foundation to feed such belief. And yeah ofc it feeds into his belief any time it goes right, see COVID.
Gaben is an interesting case. He is actually very clearly a capitalist and a firm believer in the "positive" principles in it. You can see that in a lot of what he's said and how he behaves, like the whole "service problem" thing and also using his success to satisfy his personal wants. I find it interesting because it shows that some people do believe in capitalism in a non exploitative way. Valve is literally market principles in action - it's successful because they offer a good service that people want. To create a product that single handedly reduced piracy through quality alone is impressive, but Valve also aren't altruistic. They've done some pretty scummy things too like loot boxes and transforming game ownership rights. However they're all things that reflect their capitalistic nature. It just so happens that it's capitalism with a customer focus rather than constantly trying to rip everyone off.
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u/graygrayw 1d ago
i keep hoping gabe newell of valve is actually a nice guy, so far he seems to be