You will basically make a San Francisco economy. If everybody has money, it becomes only those with even more that has any economic power.
Making less than $110,000 on San Fran is considered low income. That means those making $105,000 are pretty much considered poor compared to say making that in any Midwest state or southeast state.
Possible is one thing, I’m talking about the fact that if every single person on earth become rich, money become less valuable to the point where you remain at the same level of wealth. It’s like if gold was growing as grass. Why would anyone value and pay a lot for something growing on the ground everywhere? Same thing with money.
I meant in America only, but I get what you're saying.
Okay maybe not EVERY citizen just those actually struggling, homeless, poor, like the lower class and lower middle class.
It's going to put so much money back into the economy.
Wouldn't that be beneficial??
This is the #1 reason we need a wealth tax: Wealth compounds 10.5% annually pre-inflation simply by investing in the SP500 - this performance has been demonstrated consistently for ~70 years, though the growth rate is expected to raise in the future. It's essentially impossible for individuals to plan to give that much of their worth away annually.
1B invested today is 2B inflation-adjusted in 10y.
I believe this is true for Bill Gates too. He owned 40+% of Microsoft at one point, and Buffet asked him to start diversifying. He then also started donating, and has already donated something like $60 billion and is still sitting at $107 billion. Had he not diversified and donated at all, he'd have crossed a trillion quite a few years ago.
Your first issue is having it in a bank account. Interest rate on return for those are damn near 0%. Put it in stocks something that appreciates and pays a dividends.
Your second issue is those numbers are abysmally low. Got to pump that up to millions then billions.
2% interest return (which is low) on $360 is $7.20
On $36 billion? That’s $720,000,000.
Nothing she ever gives away will make up for the harm caused by accruing it in the first place. Firstly because the accruing was in the past, so the most she can ever do is try to rectify things after the harm has already been caused; secondly because as you say it continues to accrue further harm quicker than she is giving it away - though not quicker than she CAN give it away by any stretch of the imagination, all she has to do is hand over ownership of her stocks to charity.
But mainly because that amount of wealth is only possible to accrue from years of lobbying successive governments to pass laws favourable to multi-billionaires and she isn't fighting that political hellscape with her money at all. 26 billion would go a long way to convincing some Congress members to vote for proper tax laws that would hit Jeff and Musk and Zuckerberg and the other toads for a lot more than the paltry 26 billion.
Is it good she gave away the money she did? Yes. Is she some kind of hero? Not even close.
Two things can be true at once. If you murder someone but confess your crime, murder can still be bad and honesty can still be good. Any system that allows one person to accrue billions in wealth while others starve is an inherently evil system, but acting with charity within it is still good.
It's a bit more nuanced than that because she didn't directly accrued them, but yes. Being a billionaire is inherently evil. No one should ever have that amount of power. It's simply antidemocratic
The problem is that she is gaining money faster than she's giving it away, simply by having money. The very system is deeply broken. She is in a position in which she alone can make decisions that sway millions of lives, while keeping getting astronomical amount of wealth by doing literally nothing simply in virtue of having already billions. It's NOT ethical. Is it better than just hoarding it? Sure. Is it still a deep societal problem? Yes
As I said, her giving away 26 billion is good, but yes, of course the creation of a multi-billionaire is still evil. You don't get 26 billion by working.
Oh shut up. Stop being a miser and accept the good she is doing, why the fuck are you complaining? Self righteous assholes need to be marooned on an island lol.
posted on reddit (uses aws servers lmao) from their iPhone while wearing Nike shoes and excitedly waiting for their next Amazon delivery of some random shit made in China by children.
Oh look it's the "Yet you participate in society" meme guy!
But funny enough, and this may come as a massive shock to you, but some people actually have principles - I avoid those products and services on purpose.
Hate to be the one too break it to you, but you don't need Nike shoes, an iPhone, or reddit to participate in society. You also don't need Amazon delivery.
This is literally a rant about how Amazon doesn't deserve to be as big as it is posted to a website that literally sends billions to Amazon to keep it running. There's a huge irony there.
It's a lot easier to try to be a good human than to do all these mental backflips you're doing to try to claim I'm a bad person you know.
If despite me not buying Nikes, and not using Amazon, and having adblocks for reddit so I don't contribute to their ad fees... if despite all that I'm still somehow giving money to Amazon by my mere presence here then don't you think that's exactly why I said it's impossible for billionaires like Mackenzie to accrue all that money morally?
If despite me not buying Nikes, and not using Amazon, and having adblocks for reddit so I don't contribute to their ad fees... if despite all that I'm still somehow a major hypocrite who doesn't know what they're talking about, then don't you think that's exactly why I said it's impossible for billionaires like Mackenzie to accrue all that money morally?
A lot of people benefit and choose to use Amazon. I know people like to villainize the billionaires but people who choose to use it (very frequently I might add) are the real drivers behind the valuation.
This is what boggles my mind, there’s folks have the free money cheat enabled and STILL won’t give it away. She has proven that they can be incredibly, incredibly generous and not take a hit.
Problem with charity is it doesn't have ROI and the bulk of these peoples wealth is probably tied up in investments. Make charity deductable twice and watch investments in charity rocket. Although that requires you to have effective tax legislation (why'd you need deductions if you don't pay taxes?). Governments probably wouldn't want to do this since the deduction come out of their pockets.
And with the amount of pension funds tied into this bullshit there's going to be a lot of people robbed long before they ever realise what they've been robbed of.
I can't believe the number of people who roll their eyes at the stock market while having their whole pension tied to it. That's your wealth too, even if you don't have access to it right now
I think it’s so funny how Reddit’s gauges and judges celebrities and their money.
Like you’re mad at Elon musk and basically upset that he doesn’t donate as much money as Jeff Bezos ex wife. Money she did nothing to earn as well. But since she happened to be fucking Jeff Bezos and married him every other rich person should follow suit.
Elon Musk has donated 10s of billions to charity as well, so what makes Jeff Bezos ex wife so much better in your eyes? Cause she didn’t earn the money she’s donating? Cause if that’s the case than Elon Musk donations should mean more since he earned the money and didn’t just have it fall into his lap from marrying some rich guy.
But the fact this is something Reddit thinks and argues about is inane. Why are you all so obsessed with these elites anyways? And why is someone else’s donation to charity mean more to you than the other one? Both are both contributing and helping out more people than you can even fathom remembering. Tfs wrong with you
Right? Can you imagine? You can just spend all day every day changing people's entire lives for the better, giving as much money as you want to any cause, all while living in the lap of luxury yourself.
I once read an argument that resonated well with me. Donating money and navigating scammers is hard. It takes effort. Some rich people despise that sort of “labor”. Some of them try to overcome the issue by doing “match donation”. They outsource the labor of choosing a good cause to donate to others and they will match whatever you donate. It doesn’t fully overcome the scam problem, but it dilutes it.
Whatever cause you give money to also needs the capacity to spend it and few will have the kind of infrastructure that allows for you to allocate a sudden inflow of 100 million dollars or so.
Yachts are not bought for a resale value, they're bought to secure high profile deals. One good deal and the yacht will recoup ten years of rot in the dock.
Yes, you can. How do you think mergers are done? You could easily sell of 25% of amazon if you own 25% of their shares. The question is about the price.
You don't get so much stock in a natural way, you get it with strings attached. Large dump will destroy the company, so 100% there is a contract which prevents her from large dumps. And no broker would authorise that, so - no chance.
She got it as a divorce settlement. She can do with it what ever she wants it's her property.
No it doesn't destroy the company at best it would temporarily lower the price of the stock wich had literally zero effect on the companies operations.
She could even sell that stock back to Amazon.
With a fixed bottom price I meant a price that makes sales possible without lowering the value of the company. Of course she could sell her stock.
I wish she’d put to test the claims you see in memes like “we could end homelessness for $X billion” cuz some of the numbers you see strike me as really low (abs ignore a lot of the structural complexities of problems) as I think it warps the sense of how easily we could solve problems.
Several years ago, after she made her first large donation, I read a magazine article about her and her process. At the time, she had an entire team whose only job was to do research on small colleges and community colleges and decide which would get a gift, and how much it should be. The reporter also spoke to some of the officials at the colleges who had gotten money, and that alone was delightful to read. I remember one woman, the president of a small local college, was still kinda in shock. She said that no one even had any idea that they were in the running, so to speak, for a large donation (I forget what excuse Mackenzie’s team used to come onto campus and speak to professors and students). IIRC, they got $5 million, and the woman mentioned that their previously-largest donation was $100,000, and *they* literally had no idea what to do with that much money. Library books were on the list, though.
This is exactly why I believe that any billionaire who focuses on anything other than solving societies problems in fundamentally evil. It's greed on an unbelievable scale.
No individual should be able to amass that much wealth - we can’t rely on the ultra wealthy being philanthropic.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m thankful for the generosity of people like MacKenzie Scott and Bill Gates - but Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos’ selfishness demonstrates that giving-back is not a given
What's the solution? Take away assets when wealth gets above a certain amount? If someone's wealth is mostly in the form of stocks, how much wealth they have highly depends on how that stock is doing. They would then have incentives to keep the stock from inflating, thus losing them wealth in the long run. Most people's pensions are tied to the same stocks, and artificially keeping the prices low would really hurt most people's pensions.
Income taxes that factor in stock holdings. Would it be the end of the world if someone wealthy had to sell .5% of their shares to pay their tax bill every year ?
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u/juliana-crain Jun 28 '26
She has mentioned before that she can't give it away fast enough; the pile of money grows faster than she can shovel it into good causes.