Sure, but billionaire money can often also be the result of other things being forcibly taken from society. You're not looking for gifts, you're looking for them to pay the actual cost for what they've obtained.
Examples include: Your data, subsidies from your tax dollars to create asymmetric markets, common things like water quality or environment, or legal asymmetry that allows for rent-seeking.
That's sorta the crux of the matter - paying into society isn't a "gift" it's a debt. We all live together and support each other and nobody needs to get showered with glamour for doing their part according to their ability.
I don't want Billionaire to feel forced to give "true gifts" through social pressures or otherwise - I'd prefer if their wealth was properly utilized through a just level of taxation.
I've wondered about this. Would it be possible to have an income/asset tax such that it introduces a wealth cap of some amount which can never be reached?
For example, the limit could be $30,000,000 so if you're making more than that in pretax income, your income would be $29,999,999.999 etc. with the fractional cent increasing so people could still compete on a scoreboard.
Also, it seems like one of the biggest arguments against capping wealth is that it would disincentive innovation. But just about every person who became billionaires through innovation never had that intention to begin with. I firmly believe Jeff Bezos would still be running Amazon if he had a wealth cap. Mark Zuckerberg would still be running Facebook. No?
An explicit wealth cap seems unnecessary so long as there are appropriately punishing taxes on wealth retention - If there was, say, a 5% wealth tax above 5 or 10 million then Gates & Bezos both would never be able to sustain their fortunes but they would remain fabulously wealthy.
Their wealth is not a pile of cash or a number in a bank account, it's ownership of the companies they founded. Every year, they would be forced to hand 5% of their shares over to the federal government. If such a tax were implemented 15 years ago, all Fortune 500 companies today would be controlled by congress and Donald Trump. Also both SpaceX and Tesla would have almost certainly gone bankrupt in late 2008 as Musk would not have had the wealth to support both of them.
An annoying side effect of extreme wealth is they have a lot of money to spend finding ways around taxes. If any country ever does move to a hard wealth limit I imagine there will be a lot of rich people suddenly getting sweetheart deals on 'renting' all the things they used to own from fly by night offshore companies or something.
Are the metrics for this described somewhere? I find the top two surprising. From their numbers, Dorsey has donated $1B (26% of his current $3.8B net worth), while Gates has donated $36B (36% of his current net worth).
So....Gates has donated more as a share of his net worth and SIGNIFICANTLY more in raw numbers. What justifies putting Dorsey ahead of him?
Also I noted that Brin (only one I clicked on) is in last place/#29 at $0 this month. So (and to find out was the reason I clicked) this is 'how much have these 29 billionaires donated this month'; not 'who are the top billionaire donors, all listed are big donors'.
This almost seems like a metric chosen specifically to get Dorsey on top since he recently made a single massive donation while people like Gates have contributed a much larger amount over a much longer period of time.
Yeah, %net worth would be more meaningful, but I still think monthly is odd. Why should it look bad if you donate nothing for 11 months and then drop a big one, because that's what you do every Christmas or something.
Assuming accurate monthly data is even available, I think a 12mo moving average would make more sense. In addition to the %net worth you suggest.
Just above the billionaire cards it says: Top Donors This Month. So Dorsey donating this month likely put him at the front.
I totally skimmed right past that and didn't read it either because there's no filter for overall or any other period. Perfect example of design flaw that a designer would argue is the user's fault cause "ITS RIGHT THERE!"
I'd really like to talk to any designer that endorsed this site because there are three titles - One top-title (annoyingly in all-small) one caption title in title case (Well done on it's own but quite conflicted against the all-small over-title) and then an additional sub-title that is, unaccountably, placed after a social media callout... in other words placed in a position after the thing everyone ignores... Also it's in all-caps because having your titles in three different capitalizations and utilizing capitalizations in the opposite order of general assumption is just what we like doing to not make the user think. At least they didn't use three separate font faces, but I feel like that might just be by chance.
Specifically I'd consider the main title to be: "billionaire board" the title caption to be "These are the world's most powerful people. Let's track their impact & inspire them to do more good, starting with COVID-19." and the subtitle "Top donors this month" - on further reading it looks like this might work a lot better if the subtitle was considered a content title in the case where there were multiple content blocks each with a separate ranking or grouping that needs description.
Agreed. And looking at Koch donations... he's only "donating" to his own companies:
> Koch Industry's Molex is transforming its production line to help produce Sense's Biodetection new COVID-19 test that produces result in less than 10 minutes.
I wouldn't ever classify this guy as doing something "good", unless good is coincidentally beneficial to him.
I don't like rankings like this. I'm not saying all of them, but at least a few made their money off of the backs of others, being ruthless in business, etc. How gracious of them to give money to people they hurt in the first place. I'm glad they are doing good, but let's not pretend they were completely altruistic.
Also, a number of these people donated money years ago to avoid taxes, and the money was invested and growing. Its good we have it, but the "we gave away all this money" is an insignificant impact to them for multiple reasons.
Admittedly, you're probably right. I don't know the personal conquests of Dorsey or Buffet, so part of me was hoping at least a little bit that they weren't as ruthless as the others.
What? I can think of several off the top of my head.
J. K. Rowling became a billionaire by writing the Harry Potter books. Oprah Winfrey became a billionaire through her brand as a talented talk show host. Michael Jordan became a billionaire thanks to his basketball skills. None of those are even remotely exploitative.
In the examples you have cited, all of those people were paid for their labor. In the cases of Winfrey and especially Jordan, many of those people were paid extremely well for their labor.
If you consider voluntary association and compensation for labor exploitative, then I'm not sure what to say to you.
By your standard, anyone who participates in the economy is making money off the backs of others. My mother is now happily retired on the savings she accumulated working as a nurse. She couldn't have done that without all the people working at drug manufacturers, EMR companies, or health insurance providers. Did she make money off the backs of the hospital lab techs? Did she exploit the ER security guards? After all without those people, she wouldn't have made it.
>a number of these people donated money years ago to avoid taxes
This isn't how taxes work. If you donate money then you've only reduced your taxable principal.
You "avoid taxes" in the sense that it's as if you never made that money. You don't magically reduce your burden any further than that.
People won't take your otherwise fine point seriously if you include this commonly made error.
You have described what is called a "self-dealing" transaction in non-profit law (or more technically, an excess benefit or private inurement transaction). These transactions are subject to various tax penalties that apply both to the putative "donor"[1] and to the board members and officers of the non-profit that approved the transaction). Depending on the severity of the self-dealing, the IRS can even strip the non-profit of its 501c3 status or refer the matter to the DoJ for criminal charges.
[1] Note that a 200% penalty rate can apply to uncorrected self-dealing transactions. For the board members and officers, an excise tax of 10% may apply, which the non-profit cannot pay on their behalf.
Except for the fact that they are at least partially in control of the fund either through a DAF or their own charity. You're right they can't spend it on anything they want, but they have the ability to direct in many specific instances with few exceptions. Often if it's their own foundation, to further almost any goal they want. So yeah, they get to not pay taxes on their money and at least spend it partially how they want.
A DAF is just donating to a charity with an extra step, so let's put that aside.
They can't further "any" goal they want, it must be a charitable goal. Bill Gates can't take money from the B&M Foundation to buy himself a yacht. I don't really see what your point is. Anyone that donates money is avoiding taxes to spend money on something they want, where "something they want" is a charitable goal.
By running a charity and notably donating to it those people can get clout though and further raise themselves in the eyes of their peers while not paying very much for it. Additionally they can get some other soft benefits from the charity like hosting events with money they paid no taxes on, or, if they're Trump, just buying things they want with their charity fraudulently.
My original point was that a benefactor that stays within moral and written rules is not avoiding taxes, as
kemiller2002 suggested. Breaking those rules is tangential to that point.
It's a common mistake that bothers me because it often is used to dismiss (or even demonize) what is, in the majority of cases, an altruistic act.
My point is that it's not necessarily an altruistic act. It's giving someone the choice of either paying the government or sheltering the money to be used within a limited set of circumstances at another time. Yes, in most cases they are putting in more money than they would pay in taxes, but they are maximizing their ability to influence a charitable instance at some point in time in the future. Also, you notice in that list it has their names? They could have made anonymous donations, but they didn't. They benefit from it, just not in a direct monetary sense. Cynical? Yes. True? In a number of cases also yes.
I would add that charitable donations can often be accompanied by strong obligations that hampers the efficiency of that aide - if a donation is made that requires none of the benefits to the homeless goes to people with a past history of drug use then resources need to be diverted to investigate the recipients and ensure that the accounting works out. Sometimes these obligations are burdensome enough that organizations will stop servicing portions of the population altogether or even refund a donation.
Chartiable donations can also come with requirements around evangelism which I personally find aborrent and, as has otherwise been pointed out, yes it's an absolute reduction in take home but abuse of the system is rife and the income reduction mechanic makes this really attractive to some folks if they're hit with a particularly hard year.
In Canada I've actually been pleased to discover that your retirement is mechanically a charity - investing into an RRSP (registered retirement savings plan) counts as a direct income reduction which can mean that swing years when options may be cashed out or other windfalls happen - can be put profitably towards your own future well being while also ensuring you don't become a burden later in life.
It's worth reading that entire well-reasoned and well-researched post, but the tl;dr is that many billionaire philanthropists do a lot more good per dollar spent than the government and they get problems solved that government is often incapable of solving.
Plus, a sizeable portion of every tax dollar goes to the military, so tax minimization helps reduce how much goes to the war machine.
Funding the military is, irrationally, politically untouchable in America. Both parties have let the military-industrial complex deeply embed itself into the political process and need to toe the line when it comes to the very powerful defense lobbying groups. That said society at large generally approves to good pay and equipment for troops while being less enthusiastic for military research and stock purchases - this is a bit contradictory since folks want troops in a war to have good stocks but don't approve of spending money on maintaining equipment during peacetime.
The sort of TL;DR here is that America being the world police isn't something the public approves of and I think it'd be more efficient to pursue addressing this point then hanging your hopes on billionaires. The utter fascination and praise of billionaires is an extremely toxic[1] spin off from general American Exceptionalism which has done quite a lot of damage to... well... Americans actually being exceptional.
1. In my opinion - how you view the effect of this on society is entirely an opinion thing.
It's more complicated than that, as far as I understand. If you shift your money into a foundation, under some constructions, you can retain a lot of control over how it's spent, while avoiding taxes. Later you can pass control (and hence effectively wealth) along to your kids, this time avoiding inheritance taxes.
but they get the connections with the charity. That's why any vaguely defined charity that organize "events" for donors should be under a lot of scrutiny. people should check if the charityPR and lobbying dpt is working for the charity, the founder, or both.
I'm okay with scrutiny and oversight as you suggested to prevent fraud from related party transactions, but what's wrong with someone's children getting connections with the charity?
One of the reasons I'm working hard and saving money is to provide my family with better opportunities than I had. To say I'm not allowed to better the lives of my family is to deprive me of rights and freedoms to do what I want with what I create.
Altruism doesn't exist. There are a lot of reasons people do things that are helpful to others, but they're all selfish. Maybe they're trying to assuage guilt; maybe they're doing it for attention; maybe they're doing it to deflect bad PR or engender good PR for their organization; maybe it's a pragmatic financial decision; maybe it's political; maybe it just pumps up their endorphins. No matter what, it's done because they get something out of it.
This doesn't make giving bad. You can be selfish and do a tremendous amount of good for others. There's nothing wrong with feeling good or being socially rewarded for helping. This idea that some forms of giving are "altruistic" and others are schemes or manipulations isn't helpful. Attacking a generous person's character because you suspect their motives are somehow impure for unrelated reasons isn't helpful.
By all means, call people out for their bullshit when their motives are hypocritical and transparent, but don't beatify some and demonize others because of unrelated faults in their character. They're all giving for selfish reasons.
For more on this, I highly recommend Anand Giridharadas's 2018 book "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" on the problems behind billionaire philanthropy.
It feels more and more relevant in a post COVID world.
Sadly the truth is that except inheriting money it's nearly impossible to become a multi billionaire without doing ruthless maybe legal but immoral actions (or having someone do them for your).
E.g. Suckerberg did questionable business tactics to kick out early invester which where the people which enabled him to become successful. After this Facebook under him repeatedly acted in bad faite to gain a competitive advantage even if this meant lying to the government, smaller business being unfairly destroy and even lives being lost.
I'm not sure if he even once put social responsibilities over long term profit. At least it looks that way.
And compared to many other companies this might even be harmless.
Through not that this isn't true for (multi-)millionaires, you can get that while acting morally responsible. It's just harder and you need more luck.
I think a better way to put it is that nobody should have a billion dollars more than another person. The wealth isn't the problem if it's distributed evenly. The problem has always been inequality. It would be a fantastic world where everyone could do anything they wanted and have as much agency over their lives as possible.
> The wealth isn't the problem if it's distributed evenly.
Isn't that what these billionaires are doing? Giving their money away. The more billionaires donate, the closer we get to your world where everyone has as much agency over their lives as possible. (Including the donors, of course.)
Those are rhetorical questions, of course. The answers are no, and no.
If billionaires overall do tend to donate significant portions of their wealth, then the fact that wealth inequality is increasing in spite of that practice is hard evidence that individual charity is an ineffective means of lifting people out of poverty. If the converse is true -- that they aren't donating their wealth -- then that too suggests that something like a state is necessary to force their hand.
In all seriousness, the way wealth inequality is measured wouldn't tell you that in the first place. You'd have to look at consumption inequality, which would include stuff like Larry Ellison's yachts (on the "high inequality" side) and perhaps poor people's final consumption resulting from these donations (on the "low inequality" side).
I never considered this as a potential measure, but it would be really good to track. Is this something you came up with or has there been any other work done to explore this notion of consumption equality?
This is probably true. But given that we presently live in a world where billionaires do exist I dont think it does any harm to know which ones we can feel appreciative of. At least, that's how I use a list like this.
This list is damning to me. So much greed. Who cares if you donated 36 billion if you are removing 74 billion from circulation at the bottom and sitting on top of your pile like Smaug in the Hobbit.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of how wealth works. Wealth isn't conserved. It's created and destroyed. No billionaire has a pile of money or a bank account with $1 billion in it. Their wealth is in equity in the companies they've founded and run. It's invested- used for productive purposes such as building better software and services. Or scaling the number of Whole Foods delivery staff. Or building contact tracing apps. Even if you're perfectly greedy, hoarding wealth as a pile of cash or gold is a terrible idea. You'll end up with far more money if you invest it.
That's just arbitrary. Is 999 million okay? Or is the threshold different? And if someone's net worth crosses the threshold where should the extra money go?
I'm assuming this isn't factoring in the harm they're doing. How much do Bezos's donations to homeless services offset his union-busting? Is there a formula for that?
Well in Seattle, their homeless charity money is less so far than the money they have spent against the politicians trying to do anything about homelessness besides passively asking for business to "be responsible".
Someone downvoted this. If they disagree they should source it. Amazon spent $1.5m on the city council elections in 2019, I believe about $300k in 2018, and $300-400k in 2017 on the mayoral race. The rate at which they spend on such things is rapidly increasing as the Tax Amazon movement has gradually gained steam.
Meanwhile they are "estimated" to spend "up to" $2m on Mary's place annually, in the future. Let me know when that happens and when their political spending drops down, but I'm skeptical and so far they have spent more on political spending against anyone who suggests taxing them.
Trying to do something about homelessness and actually doing something about homelessness are two different things. Many of the policies that those trying to do something about homelessness in Seattle are trying to implement are similar to those policies that were enacted in San Francisco that made homelessness worse such as rent control.
The left politicians I’m referring to have their hands completely tied by the centrist majority who won’t act on this, and people who profit from high rent turn around, point to the lack of political action they caused, and say it means the politically blocked proposed solutions are “unviable”.
Also you’re just incorrect about rent control. SF has it in a tiny fraction of apartments. Of course rents elsewhere are skyrocketing.
> Also you’re just incorrect about rent control. SF has it in a tiny fraction of apartments.
That's flat out wrong.
"San Francisco has a roughly thirty-five percent homeownership rate. Then 172,000 units of the city's 376,940 housing units are under rent control. (That's about 75 percent of the city's rental stock.)"
I'm surprised that the number is that high and very skeptical of it, but I don't have time to investigate at this exact moment. Regardless, they all have vacancy decontrol, which is a gaping loophole that nullifies the effectiveness of the regulation.
That seems like a fair criticism, this site appears to buy fully bought into the American exceptionalism story. While these folks should be taxed into the ground the wealth and experience they can personally contribute - while overwhelming compared to other individuals - is absolutely dwarfed by the ability of our society at large to address the pandemic. They may be a noticeable part (and I really do appreciate Bill Gates getting out on the media circuit to make it clear to folks that this happened once and it can happen again) but they aren't the solution themselves nor even a significant portion of it.
I'm not sure how they can be considered to be doing much, or any, good, when effectively they are passively siphoning off profits and despite all the "good" they do, as a class they get rapidly richer every year. That has always been a conundrum behind Bill Gates' charity. Of course, it's not really a conundrum. The charity is just tax-advantaged PR or tax-advantaged complementary investment masquerading as goodwill.
Also the idea that a significant amount of billionaire wealth is moved by "inspiration" rather than naked financial calculation is incredibly naive. Unless they somehow lucked into this, they are billionaires for a reason: naked financial calculation.
It's all arbitrary, IMO. Idk if they're "siphoning off profits", since most of their value is in equity and Amazon, for example, isn't historically very profitable.
Getting richer every year in equity value is a strange concept. I think there should be some additional taxes, but we also shouldn't expect taxes to be a real solution.
It is often the case that soft social pressure is the best way to enforce desirable behaviors amongst people.
Within friend groups where there are no formally established laws or codes of conduct, there are certain implicit standards of behavior people are expected to abide by, and part of why they do is because of the threat of social ostracism.
In a broader scope, in ancient societies social ostracism was often used to deal with those who violated the norms of society; in Athens ostracism was an official punishment.
I'm not saying we can or should literally expel billionaires who don't put their liquid wealth towards philanthropy, but far too often we focus on formal, legal means of compelling the super wealthy to part with their money, such as through taxes that are easily avoided.
Social pressure put upon the super wealthy using tools like this could be more effective than people expect. There is the threat of social ostracism, but also the reward of social approval granted to the patrons of philanthropy.
I think informal social pressures are just as fallible as formal legal systems, a billionaire can donate everything to philanthropy where the philanthropy is controlled entirely by them - effectively subverting the point of philanthropy
> but far too often we focus on formal, legal means of compelling the super wealthy to part with their money, such as through taxes that are easily avoided.
Taxes are easily avoided only because they're designed to be easily avoidable. Simplifying[1] the tax code costs a lot of political capital due to entrenched interests but is technically trivial - ask a seven year old to design a fair tax system and it'd be less of a trainwreck than ours.
Deductible expenses need to be significantly curtailed and capped and alternative minimums could be introduced to be a stop-gap against any loop holes that were missed. Then you just start playing whack-a-mole with various tax credits to cut out targeted and unjust programs like child-credits and mortgage relief.
1. Actually doing this, not just granting a bunch of money to corporations like the GOP did.
Public's perception of Warren Buffet is really puzzling to me. He seems to largely escape the scorn for billionaires, even looked at as a 'good guy'. Whats his secret?
We seem to hold CEO of coke more culpable for filling oceans with plastic than coke's shareholders like buffet who profit more from it than the CEO. Really bizarre phenomenon.
I think some of it is that he doesn't really live like a billionaire in a lot of respects, takes anti-wealth political positions (he's an opponent of California's Prop 13, for example pointing out that he pays less in property taxes for his Malibu estate than people with much more modest properties in California), is explicitly not forming a money-based dynasty in his family (he has given his kids "just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing") and intends to give away his fortune to charity. There's a pretty good summary of his views and actions in the Wikipedia article on him.
He's always been a friendly looking man, stays out of the limelight for the most part although his reputation precedes him, and gets off scott free for the simple fact that most of the public has no idea what berkshire hathaway invests in, or is really.
For example it has Jeff Bezos donating 10 billion to a new 'Bezos Earth Fund'.
However it hasn't yet issued any grants so as of today, he has merely moved money from one place he controls to another one I assume he still controls.
Interesting site but they frequently use those donations for tax purposes and moving money around in particular ways to get it back (outside of just taxes).
Since the angle this website introduces itself with is:
"These are the world's most powerful people. Let's track their impact & inspire them to do more good"
This doesn't seem like a good motivator, because doing something for the sake of reputation doesn't directly incentivize solving a problem in an effective way.
And w.r.t. the title of the post, it seems like there are a few steps critical steps being omitted in the relationship between money donated and "doing good". For instance, not all organizations are as effective as others; if the motivator is to increase the $ count of donation, then what's the point in thinking about "doing good"?
Can I be ranked as "doing the most good" by contributing more money than anyone else in the list, while still doing measurable damage to parts of society that aren't being included in the metric?
See, if this website were neutral -- if it just showed the damn numbers without injecting it with an arbitrary value judgement, this would have been great. Instead, this serves to create anxiety to those who view it to do something for the wrong reasons.
The more I think about this, the more banal this site seems to me. I'd appreciate being pointed out if I'm missing something, but otherwise this website tells me more about the mindset of the authors than anything else.
This is the v1 of the site and I'm looking to improve it.
- How can I make it more neutral?
- Is it sometimes worthwhile to simply accelerate the deployment of capital? Can you combine the two incentives?
My mindset, to be clear, is that we want more people to strive to be like Bill Gates with their wealth. Even determining who that is right now is extraordinarily difficult. Making the data public is step #1, and then figuring out how to help them leverage philanthropy effectively is step #2.
Just show the numbers. If there's something you'd like to show what the numbers mean, then be careful about explaining that. Make clear distinctions between metrics and goals. Think about all the metrics you think will tell you that you're approaching a goal; then find all the ways they will break. I already said how your metric-of-choice is broken and cheat-able.
"Is it sometimes worthwhile to simply accelerate the deployment of capital?"
Is this what you believe your role is?
---
"My mindset, to be clear, is that we want more people to strive to be like Bill Gates with their wealth."
You're going to burn yourself out by trying to find human levers to change the world. Some of us will be there to welcome you to the club, but I know some people who haven't made it. I'm not one to say whether you should hop on or jump off that train. Usually, there's something else that's going on in my life that leads me to that kind of mindset.
There are contradictions in our language and value-systems, and it's total bullshit, but we chose to pretend to believe them because that's what you need to do to get in for the ride. Lots of people forget that they are pretending, and some of re-remember it in adulthood or something.
So the difficulty in determining in "who that is" might be one of those contradictions popping up.
For anyone interested in this topic I highly recommend the book Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas and his various media appearances and upcoming TV show on Vice as food for thought.
Not impressed in the least. Donating some money is easy if you own more that you can ever spend in a lifetime. Would be way more interested in which billionaires are doing the most harm.
"Which billiaires have donated the most money this month" is a more accurate headline. That any of their donations are good enough to offset the evil of having so much wealth concentrated in the hands of a single person is pretty doubtful, or at best controversial.
I wonder how the ranking would look like if we use the total amount donated in proportion to net worth. (not saying it's not. looks like multiple factors are involved)
A person donating $10 when his/her net worth $20 is different from a person donating the same amount but the net worth of, say, $1000.
Are they though? I don't want to spread baseless hate and I actually respect many of those people. But if someone would calculate total absolute positive and absolute negative for each of then I'm not sure that total would be above zero line. I talking about widespread and increasing economical inequality in all countries since last world war ans each billionaire is partially responsible for this process which I consider more negative than positive. I'm not advocating for some forceful wealth exchange but I think it is possible to at least discuss the issue.
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[ 9.3 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadExamples include: Your data, subsidies from your tax dollars to create asymmetric markets, common things like water quality or environment, or legal asymmetry that allows for rent-seeking.
I don't want Billionaire to feel forced to give "true gifts" through social pressures or otherwise - I'd prefer if their wealth was properly utilized through a just level of taxation.
Why'd you need so many words to say "taken?"
For example, the limit could be $30,000,000 so if you're making more than that in pretax income, your income would be $29,999,999.999 etc. with the fractional cent increasing so people could still compete on a scoreboard.
Also, it seems like one of the biggest arguments against capping wealth is that it would disincentive innovation. But just about every person who became billionaires through innovation never had that intention to begin with. I firmly believe Jeff Bezos would still be running Amazon if he had a wealth cap. Mark Zuckerberg would still be running Facebook. No?
So....Gates has donated more as a share of his net worth and SIGNIFICANTLY more in raw numbers. What justifies putting Dorsey ahead of him?
Is the (admittedly quite small) heading.
Also I noted that Brin (only one I clicked on) is in last place/#29 at $0 this month. So (and to find out was the reason I clicked) this is 'how much have these 29 billionaires donated this month'; not 'who are the top billionaire donors, all listed are big donors'.
Total % of net worth would be the obvious metric, wouldn't it?
Is this only US billionaires? There are 614 billionaires in the US according to Forbes[0], there are only 29 listed here, ~5% of the total.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
Assuming accurate monthly data is even available, I think a 12mo moving average would make more sense. In addition to the %net worth you suggest.
This month Dorsey has donated $1B, Bill Gates has donated $150m (both according to that website).
I totally skimmed right past that and didn't read it either because there's no filter for overall or any other period. Perfect example of design flaw that a designer would argue is the user's fault cause "ITS RIGHT THERE!"
Sorry, which are the three titles?
I see "billionaire board" and "Top donors this month" as two, but what's the third?
Will put the caps in sync!
> Koch Industry's Molex is transforming its production line to help produce Sense's Biodetection new COVID-19 test that produces result in less than 10 minutes.
I wouldn't ever classify this guy as doing something "good", unless good is coincidentally beneficial to him.
A moving average of last 12 months, if you really can get monthly data, would make more sense to me.
Also, a number of these people donated money years ago to avoid taxes, and the money was invested and growing. Its good we have it, but the "we gave away all this money" is an insignificant impact to them for multiple reasons.
No, that's all of them. You don't become a billionaire by being nice and non-exploitative.
J. K. Rowling became a billionaire by writing the Harry Potter books. Oprah Winfrey became a billionaire through her brand as a talented talk show host. Michael Jordan became a billionaire thanks to his basketball skills. None of those are even remotely exploitative.
And the hundreds of marketing people and the editors?
> Oprah Winfrey became a billionaire through her brand as a talented talk show host.
And everyone who makes her shows work?
> Michael Jordan became a billionaire thanks to his basketball skills.
And his coaches and trainers?
Without these people, none of those billionaires would've made it.
In the examples you have cited, all of those people were paid for their labor. In the cases of Winfrey and especially Jordan, many of those people were paid extremely well for their labor.
By your standard, anyone who participates in the economy is making money off the backs of others. My mother is now happily retired on the savings she accumulated working as a nurse. She couldn't have done that without all the people working at drug manufacturers, EMR companies, or health insurance providers. Did she make money off the backs of the hospital lab techs? Did she exploit the ER security guards? After all without those people, she wouldn't have made it.
This isn't how taxes work. If you donate money then you've only reduced your taxable principal. You "avoid taxes" in the sense that it's as if you never made that money. You don't magically reduce your burden any further than that.
People won't take your otherwise fine point seriously if you include this commonly made error.
[1] Note that a 200% penalty rate can apply to uncorrected self-dealing transactions. For the board members and officers, an excise tax of 10% may apply, which the non-profit cannot pay on their behalf.
They can't further "any" goal they want, it must be a charitable goal. Bill Gates can't take money from the B&M Foundation to buy himself a yacht. I don't really see what your point is. Anyone that donates money is avoiding taxes to spend money on something they want, where "something they want" is a charitable goal.
It's a common mistake that bothers me because it often is used to dismiss (or even demonize) what is, in the majority of cases, an altruistic act.
Chartiable donations can also come with requirements around evangelism which I personally find aborrent and, as has otherwise been pointed out, yes it's an absolute reduction in take home but abuse of the system is rife and the income reduction mechanic makes this really attractive to some folks if they're hit with a particularly hard year.
In Canada I've actually been pleased to discover that your retirement is mechanically a charity - investing into an RRSP (registered retirement savings plan) counts as a direct income reduction which can mean that swing years when options may be cashed out or other windfalls happen - can be put profitably towards your own future well being while also ensuring you don't become a burden later in life.
It's worth reading that entire well-reasoned and well-researched post, but the tl;dr is that many billionaire philanthropists do a lot more good per dollar spent than the government and they get problems solved that government is often incapable of solving.
Plus, a sizeable portion of every tax dollar goes to the military, so tax minimization helps reduce how much goes to the war machine.
The sort of TL;DR here is that America being the world police isn't something the public approves of and I think it'd be more efficient to pursue addressing this point then hanging your hopes on billionaires. The utter fascination and praise of billionaires is an extremely toxic[1] spin off from general American Exceptionalism which has done quite a lot of damage to... well... Americans actually being exceptional.
1. In my opinion - how you view the effect of this on society is entirely an opinion thing.
One of the reasons I'm working hard and saving money is to provide my family with better opportunities than I had. To say I'm not allowed to better the lives of my family is to deprive me of rights and freedoms to do what I want with what I create.
"Which of our Gracious Lords are doing the moste Good?"
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bal_des_Ardents
This doesn't make giving bad. You can be selfish and do a tremendous amount of good for others. There's nothing wrong with feeling good or being socially rewarded for helping. This idea that some forms of giving are "altruistic" and others are schemes or manipulations isn't helpful. Attacking a generous person's character because you suspect their motives are somehow impure for unrelated reasons isn't helpful.
By all means, call people out for their bullshit when their motives are hypocritical and transparent, but don't beatify some and demonize others because of unrelated faults in their character. They're all giving for selfish reasons.
It feels more and more relevant in a post COVID world.
E.g. Suckerberg did questionable business tactics to kick out early invester which where the people which enabled him to become successful. After this Facebook under him repeatedly acted in bad faite to gain a competitive advantage even if this meant lying to the government, smaller business being unfairly destroy and even lives being lost.
I'm not sure if he even once put social responsibilities over long term profit. At least it looks that way.
And compared to many other companies this might even be harmless.
Through not that this isn't true for (multi-)millionaires, you can get that while acting morally responsible. It's just harder and you need more luck.
Isn't that what these billionaires are doing? Giving their money away. The more billionaires donate, the closer we get to your world where everyone has as much agency over their lives as possible. (Including the donors, of course.)
Those are rhetorical questions, of course. The answers are no, and no.
If billionaires overall do tend to donate significant portions of their wealth, then the fact that wealth inequality is increasing in spite of that practice is hard evidence that individual charity is an ineffective means of lifting people out of poverty. If the converse is true -- that they aren't donating their wealth -- then that too suggests that something like a state is necessary to force their hand.
Meanwhile they are "estimated" to spend "up to" $2m on Mary's place annually, in the future. Let me know when that happens and when their political spending drops down, but I'm skeptical and so far they have spent more on political spending against anyone who suggests taxing them.
Also you’re just incorrect about rent control. SF has it in a tiny fraction of apartments. Of course rents elsewhere are skyrocketing.
That's flat out wrong.
"San Francisco has a roughly thirty-five percent homeownership rate. Then 172,000 units of the city's 376,940 housing units are under rent control. (That's about 75 percent of the city's rental stock.)"
source: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
Please point out a solution from these politicians on the left that won't make things worse.
It's all arbitrary, IMO. Idk if they're "siphoning off profits", since most of their value is in equity and Amazon, for example, isn't historically very profitable.
Getting richer every year in equity value is a strange concept. I think there should be some additional taxes, but we also shouldn't expect taxes to be a real solution.
Within friend groups where there are no formally established laws or codes of conduct, there are certain implicit standards of behavior people are expected to abide by, and part of why they do is because of the threat of social ostracism.
In a broader scope, in ancient societies social ostracism was often used to deal with those who violated the norms of society; in Athens ostracism was an official punishment.
I'm not saying we can or should literally expel billionaires who don't put their liquid wealth towards philanthropy, but far too often we focus on formal, legal means of compelling the super wealthy to part with their money, such as through taxes that are easily avoided.
Social pressure put upon the super wealthy using tools like this could be more effective than people expect. There is the threat of social ostracism, but also the reward of social approval granted to the patrons of philanthropy.
Taxes are easily avoided only because they're designed to be easily avoidable. Simplifying[1] the tax code costs a lot of political capital due to entrenched interests but is technically trivial - ask a seven year old to design a fair tax system and it'd be less of a trainwreck than ours.
Deductible expenses need to be significantly curtailed and capped and alternative minimums could be introduced to be a stop-gap against any loop holes that were missed. Then you just start playing whack-a-mole with various tax credits to cut out targeted and unjust programs like child-credits and mortgage relief.
1. Actually doing this, not just granting a bunch of money to corporations like the GOP did.
We seem to hold CEO of coke more culpable for filling oceans with plastic than coke's shareholders like buffet who profit more from it than the CEO. Really bizarre phenomenon.
Perhaps he should - he owns a large stake in Coca cola - one of the largest plastic polluters in the world.
He also is a 'good investor' - ie an actual investor, helping to build conpanies over a long time, rather than a speculator.
Personality - being soft spoken and all that - has probably a big part to play as well.
Coke is killing ppl with coronavirus by causing massive obesity crisis in america.
For example it has Jeff Bezos donating 10 billion to a new 'Bezos Earth Fund'.
However it hasn't yet issued any grants so as of today, he has merely moved money from one place he controls to another one I assume he still controls.
https://billionaireboard.com/billionaires/jack-ma
I see that argument everywhere, but haven't found substantial proof.
"These are the world's most powerful people. Let's track their impact & inspire them to do more good"
This doesn't seem like a good motivator, because doing something for the sake of reputation doesn't directly incentivize solving a problem in an effective way.
And w.r.t. the title of the post, it seems like there are a few steps critical steps being omitted in the relationship between money donated and "doing good". For instance, not all organizations are as effective as others; if the motivator is to increase the $ count of donation, then what's the point in thinking about "doing good"?
Can I be ranked as "doing the most good" by contributing more money than anyone else in the list, while still doing measurable damage to parts of society that aren't being included in the metric?
See, if this website were neutral -- if it just showed the damn numbers without injecting it with an arbitrary value judgement, this would have been great. Instead, this serves to create anxiety to those who view it to do something for the wrong reasons.
The more I think about this, the more banal this site seems to me. I'd appreciate being pointed out if I'm missing something, but otherwise this website tells me more about the mindset of the authors than anything else.
This is the v1 of the site and I'm looking to improve it.
- How can I make it more neutral? - Is it sometimes worthwhile to simply accelerate the deployment of capital? Can you combine the two incentives?
My mindset, to be clear, is that we want more people to strive to be like Bill Gates with their wealth. Even determining who that is right now is extraordinarily difficult. Making the data public is step #1, and then figuring out how to help them leverage philanthropy effectively is step #2.
Just show the numbers. If there's something you'd like to show what the numbers mean, then be careful about explaining that. Make clear distinctions between metrics and goals. Think about all the metrics you think will tell you that you're approaching a goal; then find all the ways they will break. I already said how your metric-of-choice is broken and cheat-able.
"Is it sometimes worthwhile to simply accelerate the deployment of capital?"
Is this what you believe your role is?
---
"My mindset, to be clear, is that we want more people to strive to be like Bill Gates with their wealth."
You're going to burn yourself out by trying to find human levers to change the world. Some of us will be there to welcome you to the club, but I know some people who haven't made it. I'm not one to say whether you should hop on or jump off that train. Usually, there's something else that's going on in my life that leads me to that kind of mindset.
There are contradictions in our language and value-systems, and it's total bullshit, but we chose to pretend to believe them because that's what you need to do to get in for the ride. Lots of people forget that they are pretending, and some of re-remember it in adulthood or something.
So the difficulty in determining in "who that is" might be one of those contradictions popping up.
I think it's a valid thing to make that data public though.
Lmk if you build the site.
Rather than "giving back", maybe these people should stop taking away in the first place.
A person donating $10 when his/her net worth $20 is different from a person donating the same amount but the net worth of, say, $1000.