Is Bill Gates a Good Billionaire?

billionaires the worst people on the planet monsters who are gobbling up the earth's resources that they can log a high score and the global money leaderboards or are they we on the left often say that there's no such thing as a good billionaire but have any of us actually gone out and checked is it possible that the good these ghouls do outweighs the incalculable exploitation that they use to be able to do it no it isn't and we'll explore why here on good billionaires because to be good at being a billionaire you have to be bad at being a human being hello I'm thought soup and I have lived for more than a billion seconds if I had made a hundred and ten dollars a second since the day I was born I would have about as much money as Bill Gates the world famous computer man who co-founded Microsoft the company who makes Windows and Xbox and owns minecraft William Henry Gates the third yeah you heard me right that's his name is on the surface pun intended a complex person who wears a lot of hats at different times in his life he's been a software trailblazer a CEO a monopolist the villain of the open software movement the richest men on earth and without a doubt one of the world's greatest philanthropists he definitely gives the most money to philanthropic causes and manages the world's second largest charitable foundation the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation growing up in the late 90s and early aughts Bill Gates was seen as a pretty sinister figure dangerously powerful and unthinkably wealthy miser who used his power and influence to stifle competition a corrupt and deeply uncool tyrant whose products held us all for ransom due to their sheer ubiquity sure you could use another operating system you didn't have to use Windows but God knows whether any program you wanted to use was going to be compatible in the past couple decades though his charity work has softened his image considerably according to you gov he is the most well-liked business figure on the planet and it's not hard to see why I think it would be dishonest to pretend as though the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is not doing any good in the world he can't give billions of dollars to charity without at least incidentally doing some good work however I think people greatly overestimate the impact of that can tend to overlook the problems that creates I also think they tend to forget just how exactly gates raise the capital to be able to do that work and the human cost thereof microsoft revolutionized the personal computer but did so through some pretty shady business practices in the 90s Microsoft offered manufacturers discounts on licensing fees if they paid the fees for their products whether or not they contained Microsoft software essentially using their enormous install base to stifle competition Microsoft's bundling of software with its operating system most notably Internet Explorer was ruled to have violated the Sherman Antitrust Act meaning that Microsoft had used its monopolistic power over the market to unfairly push its products over competitors and make their competitors products more difficult to use in the Microsoft saturated PC market to this day Microsoft makes it difficult to uninstall Internet Explorer I'm guessing the first thing that most of you do when you buy a PC is install Chrome or Firefox if you're a big nerd and then you try in vain can I just get rid of Internet Explorer so it's not on my hard drive you cannot or maybe you can but you got to do some registry shit I don't know they make it too hard Microsoft was also known for its contempt of open source software viewing it as a potential threat to their proprietary software they developed the strategy called embrace enhance extinguish sometimes more charitably referred to as embrace and hence innovate whereby they would take a piece of software intended to be used across multiple different environments I had proprietary features that could only be used on Windows and would cause compatibility problems for anyone attempting to run the software in other environments and then use those unique features to disincentivize users from using competitor's software Microsoft also has a history of hiring workers on a permit temp basis meaning that employees who could be working for Microsoft for years are hired as temporary workers in order to avoid paying them benefits even those who managed to get permanent positions report being overworked often leading to burnout Microsoft also employed a system called stack ranking whereby each employee was ranked according to their performance with some being ranked as top performers and others as poor performers this approach meant that someone always had to be labeled a poor performer meaning that there was a never-ending comm petition between employees and a person's compensation could suffer as a result you can imagine how that might create a stressful work environment particularly when one is expected to work as part of a team keep that in mind it's gonna come up again later remember the hololens the cool-looking tech demo where you could play Minecraft on your table well Microsoft signed a four hundred and eighty million dollar contract to put that type of augmented reality into the hands of the United States military so they could use it to blow stuff up like they'd like to do according to the Guardian many of the engineers who worked on building the technology believed it would be used to help architects and engineers build buildings and cars to help teach people how to perform surgery or play the piano to push the boundaries of gaming and connect with the Mars rover our IP under the terms of the army contract however the devices will be used to quote increase lethality by enhancing the ability to detect decide and engage before the enemy now call me old-fashioned but I tend to think we should be trying to decrease lethality where applicable I might go so far as to say that accepting four hundred and eighty million dollars to increase the lethality of weapons for the military makes them war profiteers a sentiment shared by Microsoft Workers for good a group of Microsoft employees who protested this arrangement oh and also Microsoft provides cloud services for ice you know the guy's rounding up immigrants and putting children in concentration camps that ice let's hear how the current CEO of Microsoft Sachin adela justifies this in a letter he published on Microsoft owned LinkedIn I want to be clear Microsoft is not working with the US government on any project related to separating children from their families at the border our current cloud engagement with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement is supporting legacy mail calendar messaging and document management workloads so couple things number one they definitely use those tools you just talked about to organize the separations and detentions that you claim to object to and to even if they didn't this is kind of like saying oh yes you know yeah we do have business ties with Isis but we're not funding terrorism we're just selling them tires now obviously gates didn't make those choices he wasn't working at Microsoft during either of those contracts but as one of their largest shareholders who as far as I can tell has made no public statement condemning these contracts he's complicit and he's making a shitload of money off of them on the day that that LinkedIn letter was released gates was tweeting about how his fellow billionaire Warren Buffett is really good at pinball also I think it goes to show the kind of corporate culture he fostered at Microsoft the way that they dodged responsibility by not being directly involved in the ongoing human rights crisis at the American border no they're just tangentially involved like a little bit well feel free to look away mr. gates you can afterall you have that privilege to simply turn your head in the mirror two eyeballs within it turn with you but all around us the eyeballs see they know your sins your secret vices they cannot choose not to see they see all and when they are done with us we will all see and we will all understand hello and welcome to the eyeball zone here in the eyeball zone we imprison small leftist content creators forever within an ever-expanding and all-consuming iris you know sometimes here on YouTube bigger accounts can overshadow smaller ones sometimes when I cover a topic it means that if a smaller Channel who might have even done a better job can get left behind and I think while discussing a person like Bill Gates that's especially troubling for me because I don't want to reproduce the same kinds of bullying behaviors even unconsciously that Bill Gates used to make his money so while they didn't actually ask me to be eyeballed I don't think let me check on that oh okay August whoops anyway when I saw that another slice had made a video about Bill Gates while I was working on a video about Bill Gates I thought well that's that's pretty unlucky I don't want to contribute to them being overlooked so I'd recommend you check out their video listed in the description it covers a lot of the same stuff I'm talking about here but more in depth in some places and I'm using the qualifier in some places to be generous to myself it but it makes a good comparison piece to this video do you have an explicitly leftist project you'd like to feed to the brain eyeball beasts send me more than one email with pertinent details like your pronouns and maybe you will find yourself trapped here in the eyeball zone but enough about ice let's talk about the ice bucket challenge Bill Gates is a world renowned philanthropist that's why I started this series with him because I imagine if I started with any other billionaire everyone would be screaming at me in the comment section oh yes smartypants what about Billiam Gates he made the amazing toilets for countries that previously had substandard toilets and sanitation may not be glamorous but it is important and please do not mistake my criticism of Bill Gates for criticism of his very good toilet and the importance of Sanitation however despite the good work that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has achieved there are a few problems with their methods and the causes they choose to support the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's generous donations result in a frankly ridiculous access to the seats of power worldwide they contribute 10% of the World Health Organization's yearly operating budget and thus possess a disproportionate authority over the whose priorities likewise in 2013 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the single largest donor to the UN health agency donating more than the US government and while it's good that they're funding these operations it's bad that individual people have such influence over the objectives of these organizations it means that the individual pet projects of Bill and Melinda Gates may receive greater funding than areas that may require it more take for example the Gates Foundation focus on eradicating polio I'm going to quote from no such thing as a free gift to the Gates Foundation in the price of philanthropy by Lyndsey Magoo II Donald Henderson a former who epidemiologist who led the who's successful campaign against smallpox during the 1960s has suggested that polio eradication may be a misplaced pursuit it strips money from other areas of need forcing nations to prioritize polio immunity zation at the expense of vaccination coverage for other diseases Arthur Caplan an eminent bioethicists who himself suffered from polio as a child has also criticized Gates obsession with polio eradication pointing out that government budgets and resources and poorer nations are diverted from far more pressing local problems to try and capture the last marginal cases Sonia Shah an award-winning journalist has pointed out similar problems with eradication campaigns against malaria efforts that quite counter-intuitively have caused money to flood to where it is least needed Shaw has pointed out a paradox of eradication versus control efforts eradicating a disease is in several important respects a goal diametrically opposed to controlling one when public health leaders want to control the disease they devote the majority of their resources to the areas of greatest needs she writes when their goal is eradication then they must spend their resources on areas where eradication is most likely the areas with the least need eradicating a disease means focusing on areas where the disease is close to being eradicated that means pumping money for disease control into areas where categorically that disease is not doing very much damage and while it would be good to eradicate polio in those areas it shouldn't take priority over treating diseases that are less close to eradication and therefore are hurting more people that might be a winning strategy in the board game pandemic it's not so great in real life and I say might be because I've never actually won a game of pandemic pandemic is too hard the Gates Foundation giving towards educational reform has led to similarly disastrous results one of the problems of allowing a few individuals to control how charitable funding is allocated is that they may assume they have better ideas than experts in the field to quote Bill Gates it may surprise you it was certainly surprising to us but the field of Education doesn't know very much at all about effective teaching not some teachers not policymakers know the entire field of education does not understand effective teaching like Gates and his team does to wit Gates has long championed a system called value-added modeling which attempts to track a teacher's individual contribution to his students test scores system suspiciously similar to stack ranking in Microsoft to quote The Washington Post it involves plugging the scores into formulas that supposedly can tell how much a teacher has contributed to the growth a student is making academically VAM which supposedly can factor out every other influence on a child so being hungry has been panned by assessment experts for high-stakes decisions but the education world embraced it during the Obama administration anyway Foundation put these models to the test pumping 575 million dollars into a pilot project only about 215 million of which it it supplied itself the rest being from schools that participated in the project the final report on this project conducted by the random Foundation found that there was no evidence to suggest that the reforms had worked at all and the project was quietly shelved thanks for the 260 million dollars local schools turns out the ideas that we came up with on our own without consulting experts didn't work oops furthermore it's a mistake to assume that the entirety of the Gates Foundation's endowment is spent on the public good or in the interests of public health the model of philanthropy that the Gates Foundation practices means that the foundation functions like a business it makes investments to generate revenue so that that revenue can in theory then pay for the activities of the foundation a large portion of the Foundation's endowment is tied up in Berkshire Hathaway a holdings company led by Warren Buffett the pinball wizard and Bill Gates personal pal quoting again from no such thing as a free gift currently nearly half of the Gates Foundation endowment is invested in Berkshire Hathaway until recently about 5% of the Gates Foundation endowment was invested in McDonald's while over 7% was invested in coca-cola that figure does not include the Foundation's further investments in Berkshire Hathaway because as the book notes Berkshire Hathaway controls a major share of coca-cola investigative reports from the LA Times were the first to report widespread dissatisfaction with the Gates Foundation's endowment investments in companies such as Exxon Mobil pointing out that flares from oil plants much herbing across the Niger Delta are widely believed to have caused epidemics of bronchitis in adults and lowered immunity and children increasing their susceptibility to measles and wait for it polio publically slated in the aftermath of the LA Times expose Bill and Melinda at first announced that they would rethink their investment policies and then retracted that decision for years with the exception of tobacco companies the foundation chose to invest in companies offering strong financial returns regardless of negative health effects so the Gates Foundation is making investments in companies directly responsible for several human rights and health crises across the globe directly contradicting their mandate on the promise that that investment will someday be paid forward to charitable causes but the whole amount is tax-deductible now because they have the intention of using it for charity later that sounds legit this model of deferred charity is also the idea behind gates and Buffett's brainchild The Giving Pledge an agreement between various billionaires to give a considerable amount of their wealth to philanthropic causes hundreds of billionaires have signed a pledge every one from Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk even george lucas inventor of star trek all if pledged to give away the majority of their wealth as to how much they've given it's not clear because the pledge doesn't actually require anyone to do anything and also doesn't dictate what is and is not a philanthropic cause so you know it's kind of like a like a PR campaign where billionaires can just say oh ya know i'm gonna i'm gonna give away my most of my money later and then people will nod and go oh cool ya know well if that's the case then it's probably good for you to have a lot of money because you said you'd give it away later so i guess actually i like i like that you have a lot of money and then about a thousand op-eds get written every time one of these assholes signs the pledge handing them fawning coverage for doing nothing whatsoever so to wrap up well i think it's pretty clear that the Gates Foundation does do good work it's also true that the only reason it's able to pay for that work is because of the shady business dealings and exploitation that allowed gates to amass his fortune in the first place and the war profiteering and collaborating that sustains that fortune now that he has the money he's certainly putting some of it to good use I guess but also diverting funds away from important causes to support his pet issues his unparalleled personal discretion over how the money is spent also causes problems when the solutions he encourages are contrary to the advice of experts in the field furthermore a considerable portion of the money is celebrated for donating his side up investments that are not simply irrelevant to his foundation stated goals but directly contrary to them I'm not going to sit here and pretend like Bill Gates is an evil person with a black heart I don't know the man and from all available evidence it seems like he genuinely believes what he's doing is in the common good and sometimes it is but I don't think the fact that he may occasionally use his money judiciously justifies the fact that he he has all that access to the money in the first place the elephant in the room the thing that people seem to be unwilling to confront when discussing the philanthropy ilysm of billionaires like Gates is that the reason there are so many poor people in the first place the reason that they require charity in the first place is because so much of the available wealth is tied up in the hands of Bill Gates and people like him hey I hope you liked my video on Bill Gates the computer man if you did I would love it if you press the like button to signify that and also if you subscribe to me here on YouTube comm rang the YouTube bell that does YouTube stuff you can also follow me at youtube.com slash scaredy-cats TV that's where I talk about horror movies you can catch me live-streaming every 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on twitch.tv slash thought slime during the making of this video my Windows PC completely shit the bed and died and had to reformat it and and install all my programs again and I can't say for certain that Bill Gates is personally responsible for that but I think it would be irresponsible of me not to at least entertain the possibility that that perhaps he has some sort of spying software that allows him to know when people are speaking poorly of him and he can shut down their computers remotely once again this is all something I genuinely believe could be possible I definitely think that's what happened and if it makes me sound paranoid too bad I'm right also it he might have put a microchip in my brain a little bit well a small one

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Views: 162,380

Rating: 4.892673 out of 5

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Id: ZSnXI93lY-0

Length: 20min 7sec (1207 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I appreciate the description:

You might think you know the answer, and you're correct. He is not. There can't be one. Come on, this is basic stuff guys.

Edit: the closing line is also great:

The elephant in the room, the thing that people seem to be unwilling to confront when discussing the philanthro-capitalism of billionaires like Gates, is that the reason there are so many poor people in the first place, the reason that they require charity in the first place, is because so much of the available wealth is tied up in the hands of Bill Gates, and people like him.

Even if you don't have time for the whole video, I strongly recommend everyone listen to the outro, which starts around 17:13.

[u/Dan_From_Japan]

Bill Gates has said some decent things about wealth and taxes, but his actions and those of his company speak VOLUMES and they tell a different story. Here he is squirming in front of an interviewer and denying the facts presented to him.

[u/fascist_mods_fuckoff]

I appreciate that Slimer spent a good deal of time talking about how much control billionaires retain over the funds in these charitable foundations. At the end of the day it really is just a matter of them keeping some of their money hoard in a different wallet. And then of course reaping massive tax benefits and getting great publicity for doing so. These ghouls live for a) imposing their will on others and b) gambling on the stock market. Charitable foundations allow them to continue to use their money for both goals while basically just sacrificing a little liquidity - which, given the vastness of their hoards, they don't really need anyways.

[u/arcangleous]

While I am going to watch the video, even before I do:

No.

There are no good billionaire. You cannot achieve that level of wealth without sacrifice empathy and causing pain to other people.

[u/thisismybrutality]

An Immigrant gets killed and no one bats an eye , you joke about killing a racist , narcistic, lgbt +Phobe , that Walked over dead bodys to become a billionaire and people lose their minds.

[u/Ziggie1o1]

Pretty basic, but I think this video is pretty perfect for left-curious liberals who might feel a vague unease about people having that much money but have a hard time articulating why. Idk if it’ll convince those who have fully bought into the cult of wealth though.

[u/pillowpossum]

A good billionaire? Is that an oxymoron?

[u/Anti_Gendou]

Better than some others perhaps, but there's a reason I don't like having billionaires in general. I don't want to be beholden to the chance that a billionaire will put his money to use helping people or the complete opposite.

[u/stillnoob0]

No