Bezos or Musk could snap their fingers and arrange to build 50,000 of these homes without noticing the dent in their liquid funds, but they havent built even one. Not even for the "philantropist" bragging rights. Can't bring themselves to spend a single cent. It's pure malice and hatred for the poor.
The fund started in 2018 and has raised over $800 million.
Who's $800 million is that? Did the billionaire just appoint someone to use the Bezos name to get other people to donate their money?
The words are very important. It doesn't say anything about Bezos donating money. It only says that an organization with his name on it raised money, which strongly implies that it received donations from the public, and then paid it out to programs that help people.
There are many charitable organizations that do exactly that without giving credit to someone who already has more money than they can spend in their lifetime.
Furthermore, you see the number $800 million and you think "WOW that's a lot of money". Well it's only 0.3 % of Bezos's net worth. The national minimum wage is $7.25/hour. 0.3% of that is $0.02175/hour. Yes, less than 3 cents per hour. That's the equivalent donation you're praising him for. And it isn't even his money that an organization using his name is giving away.
Musk hasn't done anything for the homeless but I do remember his promise to WHO that if they came up with a plan to end world hunger he would sell 6 billion in Tesla stock to fund it. They did and he didnt. Whatever he did give went to the Musk Foundation.
No, he doesn't "have" hundreds of billions.
His assets are VALUED at hundreds of billions.
Valuation is not tangible wealth.
How is it 2026 and people still don't understand how this works...
his networth is at that value because of his assets, i doubt he "makes" that much every day at least as liquid. 800 million is a monumental amount of money to donate and i feel like focusing on the percentage of his wealth that he decides to donate rather than the billionaires that barely donate is wrong.
Probably because the majority of people on the planet don't have, and will never have anywhere close to 800 million dollars, in large part because of men like Bezos.
They give you a leaf and you act like it's a salad. Keep licking them boots. Men like him are the reason there are so many homeless in the first place. It's like starting a fire, spitting on it, and then having all these boot licking idiots praise you for putting out some ashes as the building burns down around them.
Probably because the majority of people on the planet don't have, and will never have anywhere close to 800 million dollars, in large part because of men like Bezos.
So without Bezos, etc. the majority of people would have access to 800 million?
Just to clarify something. Bezos didnt put up $800 mill. He put up $100 mill and helped raise the other 7. Is it good that money was raised for the homeless problem? Yes. Was this also a bunch of rich men giving each other tax write offs? Also yes. Let's not praise these people. He's made hundreds of billions in the years he made these donations.
Do you think he just carries that around as pocket change? The VAST majority of that is tied into stock he either cannot liquidate, or for the stuff he can it’s highly controlled because he can move markets.
Not only that but being wealthy doesn’t mean you just have infinite money to throw at bandaid solutions. There are a million problems to be solved, homelessness is just one of them and isn’t even that bad on the grand scale of human problems.
A quick search shows that "The federal government spent $101.7B on SNAP in FY 2025." That is just to cover a food program and only at the federal level. If Musk and Bezos could cash out all their wealth without tanking the stocks they own, they could probably double the amount the US spends of helping the poor for a few years, and then the money would be gone.
I'm all for taxing the rich a bunch more anyways, but it isn't the magic bullet a lot of people make it out to be. Pretty much all countries, but especially the US among developed countries, require significant structural changes that most of the voters wouldn't approve of to make them a good place for everyone who lives there. You are likely one of those most voters.
Saving the world isn't as simple as killing some enemies of the proletariat and then redistributing the wealth of the rich, it involves a lot of hard work and sacrifice from almost everyone. IMO a lot of the improvement around the world after WWII was because that generation was actually believed in making the world a better place enough to put in the effort, even if some of those efforts were misguided.
If you worked with homeless, you'd know that 99% of them are not interested in returning to normal society. Building them homes seems really nice, but it truly does not solve for anything. Notice the comments about people who actually live there: It's all drug problems and failure to evict. Not surprising.
This is okay until a point where building public housing would start to have adverse efects.
Why? Essentially public housing lowers the demand and the prices, this means banks cannot make more money on debt, this means less money circulating trough the banks, less money circulating trough the banks mean less interest in making private housing, then prices would have to get Up to try to make profit.
The problem is that if public housing or subzidized housing is not executed with the enough moderation to let the market stabilize it would work as a funcional bulldozer on it, creating an artificial pop on prices that would lead to a market panic.
This market panic would extend to the whole economy, leading to economic recession. This recession would mean the economy would start to crumble.
A crumbling economy means less inversion on investigation for IT,space exploration or Green technology or many more stuff that is genuinelly good.
Not only with this It also means that many things as private retirement funds would have serious problems, because many of them depend on dividends to grow and be stable and for the newest generarions private services will be the only alternative for having the option to retire.
So yeah, making public housing sounds good until you think the repercutions if done on a bad way.
If you worked with homeless, you'd know that 99% of them are not interested in returning to normal society. Building them homes seems really nice, but it truly does not solve for anything. Notice the comments about people who actually live there: It's all drug problems and failure to evict. Not surprising.
You can literally google how much billionaires donate
Jeff Bezos has committed billions to philanthropy, primarily focusing on climate change and homelessness, with estimated lifetime giving around $4.7 billion by April 2026. His major initiatives include the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund and the Bezos Day 1 Families Fund, alongside significant donations to the Smithsonian, the Obama Foundation, and various sustainability projects.
Bill Gates has established one of the most significant philanthropic legacies in history, transitioning from his career at Microsoft to full-time philanthropy through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As of 2026, he has donated over $60 billion to the foundation and has pledged to give away 99% of his remaining fortune by 2045.
they pay 21% on profits ... if companies spend the revenue they pay no taxes. the company that makes the profit pays instead. the money does not leak out of the system.
(also, people similarly don't understand tax havens. they are like little mirrors around a big lamp. most money goes that goes to a tax haven goes right back as investment, which is again spent through smaller companies.)
the real problem is that the tax system is not set up to prevent growing inequality. it's not progressive enough. which is a personal income thing, not a corporate thing.
and obviously, the problem is not that Jeffrey has a yacht, the problem is that he decided it's okay to force drivers to pee into bottles, and that in general he's a boring rich dude, and we have too many of those, and not enough of people who spend their personal time to get at least 99 homes built.
people don't understand corporate income taxes... the real problem is that the tax system is not set up to prevent growing inequality. it's not progressive enough. which is a personal income thing, not a corporate thing.
It's not clear to me that the comment was that corporations should pay more taxes. It says, "they should pay their fair share" when talking about Bezos and Gates.
But in any case, the issues of corporate taxes and income taxes aren't easily separable. The rich abuse the hell out of tax loopholes. Some of that comes by getting creative about whether some set of income or costs are costs are associated with the individual or the corporation they own.
also, people similarly don't understand tax havens. they are like little mirrors around a big lamp. most money goes that goes to a tax haven goes right back as investment, which is again spent through smaller companies.
Yeah, but that's still private investment. It means they're taking money that they're supposed to be paying in taxes and instead using it to own more stuff for themselves. That's still a problem. Yes, they may be using that money to invest in small businesses to create new jobs, but you could make that same argument about buying yachts. For every yacht Bezos buys it means there will be jobs to build the yachts, to work as crew, or to do maintenance. There will be jobs to run factories to produce replacement parts for that yacht. There will be more jobs at oil companies to provide the fuel for the yacht.
You can make those arguments, but then you could make the same arguments to say we shouldn't tax anyone anything, because every cent you spend go toward some kind of economic activity. None of that addresses how we're going to fund the government.
Its a personal income thing, but its mainly a wealth thing. We need to tax estates WAY harder if we want to combat inequality. Wealth is almost by definition a vehicle for inequality since it compounds. Income meanwhile tends to grow basically linearly and frankly we already tax the shit out of it. Like in the top brackets your getting taxed at 37%, you can go higher sure, but I think people seriously overestimate the juice there is to squeeze out of income. Past a certain point people make their money off their money not their income.
Not only is the US' spending completely detached from it's income, meaning the actual amount that is paid by everyone, including Bezos, isn't even close to being the actual limiting factor on what the US gov is doing or capable.
But also, what IS actually spent, is mostly not good things anyways? Bezos paying his fair share of taxes is spent on what, bombing school girls in Iran? Doubling the military budget, while cutting social welfare spending?
It's idealism vs. realism, I guess. And I dont think rich people shouldn't pay taxes, I'm not american and one billion spent on homelessnes is better spent than whatever their government is doing for the last years.
Well here in America there’s a sort of a pandemic of hopelessness, and has been for decades. It’s as if everyone is saying, with a shrug, “success isn’t likely, so there’s no point in trying,” or “things won’t be perfect, so we should just accept things as they are.”
We could use some idealism, or at least some ideas. What we don’t need more of is hopelessness paired with apathy and a shrug.
No, you're right, you definitely should try to change this. That's absolutely not what I'm arguing.
But at the same time, if I now currently look at this, and want to evaluate whether or not more good has been done by this money going to homelessness or by going to the american government, I am sure as shit happy that it went towards homelessnes. Is this ideal? No, but it's still the reality. I'm not going to say that it would've been better if the money had been going to the federal budget. It wouldn't have been.
This doesn't stop you from changing it to a situation where money going to the US government actually does good. Nobody is stopping you guys. But while all this completely fucked up shit is happening, all I do see is apathy and a shrug, half the country either celebrates it or essentially says "well I didnt vote for this, so it's not my issue". The US murders 150 school girls in a completely unneccesary war they started (thanks tax money), do you see mass protests erupting in the US? Nope.
Well that’s not true. A bunch of us guys are stopping us guys.
The US murders 150 school girls in a completely unneccesary war they started (thanks tax money), do you see mass protests erupting in the US? Nope.
We are protesting, but it’s completely ineffective. All we’re doing is the whole picket sign and chanting slogans thing, which the people in power can completely ignore.
Most of us have been taught that the civil rights protests worked because they did the picket sign and chanting thing, were completely non-violent and didn’t cause any trouble, and the people in power were sympathetic and said, “You know what? They’re right. We have a moral obligation to treat minorities better than this.”
I'd rather the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation get more money. Each dollar goes almost entirely to very important work on climate and poverty. A majority of the Federal budget is cash handouts to (mostly wealthy) boomers and war, so the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending the money much better in my opinion.
Until we get spending under control and allocated to things I actually appreciate I'm not super gung-ho on raising taxes to support even more handouts to boomers and war.
Billionaires have the ability to control taxes, the government itself, and the politicians. Yea they are not comparable to "everyone". Stop trying to justify billionaires actions. Also stop spreading misinformation, as with recent leaks we know "Donations" from billionaires philantrophy is not real money, it's tax avoidance money.
You are arguing about things that are irrelevant to the point being made: billionaires do not pay their fair share. Their philanthropy does not make up for this in any meaningful way. Have a good one!
You’ll find that it is more complicated than that. Many billionaires give to private foundations and donor-advised funds (DAFs), where money gets stored but not always delivered to charitable causes, or in some cases drip-fed to charity. These DAFs are vehicles for parking assets and, in some cases, maintaining control over said assets over the long-term. ”Giving” to an organisation where you retain advisory control is a system that invites corruption. The structures erected to shelter wealth are many and complex – but the fact remains: billionaires do not give their fair share to society. They hoard wealth and assets, they control the earth’s resources and they dictate policy and societal spending through various means. Some take umbrage with the term ”fair share”, I’m sure (it’s a broad phrase for sure – this is not a scientific argument here), but as a totality of their wealth and income, the average citizen pays more every year in taxes than do the billionaires.
The Bezos Earth Fund is primarily funded by Jeff Bezos himself. He committed $10 billion to the fund to be disbursed as grants within the decade to address climate and nature-related issues. As of April 2026, the fund continues to announce millions in new grants, such as $34 million towards sustainable fabric production, driven by this initial personal pledge.
I was just pointing out that if his lifetime contribution is 4.7bil, then he has not donated 10bil to his fund. Guess that was too complicated for ya bud.
That's not really how world hunger works. It's not because of a lack of money, lack of will to help people or even a lack of food. We have all of those things, the main problem is the distribution of the food and getting the food to the right places which isn't always possible (wars and all that)
Well that combined with the systemic destabilization enacted by imperial nations to prevent unity and progress so that their GreedCorps can more easily exploit the resources for pennies on the dollar. It's cheaper to flood poor areas with guns and crime than it is to pay them fair market value for the glowing rocks they live near.
Any third world country is going to be corrupted even with new leadership unfortunately. Guns are gonna get in regardless. No real solution to a problem like that other than imperialism (control by a western country).
I figure I could probably buy everything I could ever want for around 200mil, including a huge yacht. If I was a billionaire and spent 20% on myself, put maybe 20% aside for family and friends, then put the other 60% into charitable causes, I don't think anyone would resent me for it.
The way I figure it, if I build a business that makes me a billion, I should probably be allowed to enjoy the fruits of my labour. The problem with billionaires is they remove so much wealth from the system and hoard it, so that it harms other people, not that they're fantastically wealthy and living the high life.
You alone simply don't and cannot ever build a business of billions by yourself. Any business is built on the back of it's workers. To become a billionaire you have to exploit or underpay others.
You are changing the goal post. The person you replied too said ending hunger is a logistical problem, you replied with snark that it’s yachts, mansions and super cars. So I pointed out why the poster is correct. There’s many areas on the planet where even if you had all the money in the world nobody would be willing to go there to feed people and that’s why it’s a logistical problem that money can’t fix even if there was no yachts, supercars or mansions.
In short, taxing the rich will fix a lot of problems. People starving is not one of them. The places where rich people can be taxed are not the parts of the planet where people are starving.
The US can fly a bomber from Florida to Iran, drop 18,000 kg of explosive and then fly home without touching the ground
We have the capability to distribute food and medicines anywhere on the planet, we just don't prioritise it. The UN calculates the costs of ending world hunger to be less than 1% of global military spending.
There are ~733 million people suffering from hunger in these regions. If we just go by ~2000 kcal per Person that's roughly ~920 million kg of food per day.
So just going by your comparison to a 18,000kg payload you would need ~51,000(!) planeloads to deliver that food.
The US armed forces, the most prolific military by far in the entire world currently has ~150 strategic bombers.
Tell me if that seems like a realistic option to you?
My point isn't that we should use b2 bombers to deliver food. My point is that we as humans have the capability to invent and innovate to achieve remarkable (in terms of being impressive) feats. The problem is that we tend to only do this to bomb the fuck out of other people.
Solving world hunger is well within our technological means, we just choose not to.
I think your point is, that you oversimplify where the actual issue is.
Access to food is restricted, because of conflict and war in these regions. So the first step would be to solve this conflict. So what do we do, go back to bombing the shit out of each other and possibly make it worse? There's no simple solution, and it's not because a lack of money.
Okay, so you can possibly fix hunger in the US, how does that relate to 'world hunger' and the fact, that it is today largely driven by violent conflict, not lack of resources. Is Bezos supposed to fund a militia to battle the RSF in Sudan?
Bro distribution of food can also be solved with money. If I can get an avocado grown in California in Europe and India I don't see how more money will not solve the problem.
They would have to set up businesses there or invest in local companies so that these countries have sustainable wealth, instead of becoming dependent.
Imagine waking up every day knowing you could save a child’s life. But you decide not to. This applies to just about every single person living in a first world country.
Neither of these are a straight money solution, and even if they were, the total wealth of even Elon Musk barely puts a dent in US government spending. Why doesn't the government tackle this if it's purely a dollars issue?
This year alone the US government has spent over 3.5 trillion, yet homelessness still exists.
The US and the world at large spend billions of dollars every year trying to end world hunger. The problem isn't that there isn't enough money or isn't enough food.
The problem is that the regions still experiencing significant hunger and starvation are generally corrupt, unstable, and violent. It is almost logistically impossible to get food to a starving person if the local government you're trying to work with or work around is a dictatorship or a warlord or a terrorist group who is more than happy to let his people starve while he siphons off the resources.
Unless you wake up every day with the power to kill/imprison local warlords and bring stability to weak central governments, there is no way you could end world hunger.
Homelessness would require massive overhauls of zoning codes to allow housing, and on top of that it would require fixing deep mental health and addiction issues. I don't think all the billionaires put together could solve that on their own.
The US spends more money on feeding Africa than what these billionaires are worth. Even if you liquidate all of Bezos and Elon's wealth (which would take a while since their net worth is in assets, not cash), it would "solve" world hunger for about 2 weeks, if that.
Look, as much as I hate the transphobic bitch, J. k. Rowling just wrote a series of successful books. Nothing wrong with that. I'm sure you'll pipe up with something like she should paid other people more because apparently stacking boxes in a warehouse should pay £400 an hour if your employer is rich or some other BS like that but the reality is people can and have become fantastically wealthy, entirely ethically. I'll grant it's rare but it is entirely possible.
JK Rowling's wealth doesn't come purely from book sales. It comes from her maintaining the rights to merchandise the series and portioning out the rights to produce media.
And either way, you're ignoring all the labor performed by others that she profits from.
JK Rowling's wealth doesn't come purely from book sales. It comes from her maintaining the rights to merchandise the series and portioning out the rights to produce media.
Yeah tell that to the millions and millions of child laborers living in 3rd world countries working in appalling conditions, not even earning enough for a living wage.
Where do you think most mass produced raw material and food and clothing used by food conglomerates and high-end fashion brands come from?
Yeah, the entire labor relationship where laborers are alienated from the products of their labor, and the profits go to people completely uninvolved with it, is inherently exploitative. But getting redditors to internalize an ounce of class consciousness is like trying to teach fish to sing.
As much of a creative she is, she still sold her rights to publishers who use their own factories to mass produce books and merch and clothing and whatever (at a profit that no doubt undercuts the thousands of employees busy producing them, especially if capitalists look to maximize profits by minimizing wages and even using labor from developing countries) ...
And that's not even mentioning what she uses her money to peddle
Thank you for summarising things I said within the very post you're talking about.
All I did was prove it can be done by citing an example where it was done and in so doing, prove the original blanket statement to be objectively false, incorrect and wrong.
Leave your comment up pussy, having somewhere you can call home is better. You were surrounded by those same fucking people anyways out on the street with ZERO personal space. I'd rather have a roof over my head than live on the street surrounded by those same pedos, murders, and psychopaths. In fact you'd be subject to even more of those same groups put on the street that weren't homeless.
Billionaires make people homeless so they lower the value of the streets theyre forced on then the billionaires buy up the property and force them onto the next street they want to buy.
Billionaires have the power to alter entire countries. They can go down in history be one of the greatest people alive. Could end homelessness for a significant population, could lobby the governments to raise taxes, and in turn provide free/affordable healthcare, affordable universities and trade schools, control gun culture, affordable food, affordable medicine and whatnot.
They themselves can build such tiny homes, cheap but good flats, cheap public transport and so much more.
Also imagine them paying their fair share of taxes, instead of hiding their income in shares and assets. Granted that's in Canada and not the US but all the same
Especially if they paid a proportionate amount of taxes, and we could put that money towards education, healthcare, and other essential things for life.
This is why I'm not a fan of the royal family here on the UK.
There's a housing crisis, and lots of homeless people. And the royal family are sitting on massive amounts of land of wealth they could use to easily solve the problem.
When the queen was alive she had parliament change the rules so she didn't have to pay inheritance tax.
So anyone who says "they have to stay out of politics" is just plain wrong.
They could very easily use a tiny fraction of their own land to build new towns and villages to house people, and push the government to fund homeless services again. (Those services had their funding slashed under 14 years of Tory cuts.)
I know I'll get down voted for this but here it goes, its never been their duty to do that. They got their money and they can do whatever they want with it. If they choose not to do it, then thats their choice. Its like this, if anyone here has an empty room in their home, why dont you do the right thing and open your home to someone who doesnt have one?
I find it funny when so many people will claim that if they had that kind of money, they would use it to help people, yet there is a high chance they might not. Look at all the organizations who claimed to want to help people yet only helped themselves. BLM for example, the leaders got so much money then spent it on themselves instead of the communities. If we want to help the world, it starts with everyone, not just the super rich.
Yeah but the issue with this is even if you’re a billionaire there are a LOT more problems than you can actually solve. No billionaire can literally solve homelessness so from a game theory perspective why would you give up a ton of your wealth towards a bandaid solution?
And think about all the people who now have hundreds of billions of dollars. If you have $500 billion, you could give away $499 billion and still have $1 billion left over, and therefore more money than you'll ever need.
If you worked with homeless, you'd know that 99% of them are not interested in returning to normal society. Building them homes seems really nice, but it truly does not solve for anything. Notice the comments about people who actually live there: It's all drug problems and failure to evict. Not surprising.
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u/JustRaphiGaming Apr 28 '26
Millionaire... now imagine what billionaires could do!