image transcription:
big collage of people captioned, “the only people I wouldn’t have minded being billionaires”
names(and a bit of info, which is not included in the collage) of people in collage(from top left, row-wise):
- Alexandra Elbakyan, creator of Sci-Hub. perhaps the single-most important person in the scientific community regarding access to research papers.
- Linus Torvalds, creator of linux kernel and git, courtesy of which we have GNU/Linux.
- David Revoy, french artist famous for his pepper&carrot, a libre webcomic. inspiration for artists who are into free software movement
- Richard Stallman, arch-hacker who started it all. founded the GNU project, free software movement, Emacs, GCC, GPL, concept of copyleft, among many other things. champions for free software to this day(is undergoing treatment for cancer at the moment).
- Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VLC media player for 2 decades now
- Ian Murdock, founder of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian manifesto. died too soon.
- Alexis Kauffmann, creator of framasoft, a French nonprofit organisation that champions free software. known for providing alternatives to centralised services, notable one being framapad and peertube.
- Aaron Swartz, a brilliant programmer who created RSS, markdown, creative commons, and is known for his involvement in creation of reddit. he also died too soon.
- Bram Moolenaar, creator of vim, a charityware.
on the bottom right is the text reading, “plus the thousands of free software enthusiasts working tirelessly.”
It’s nice to appreciate people who do good things, but keep in mind that the only way people become billionaires is by exploiting people. So I would not want any of these people to be billionaires because it would mean they got that wealth not by doing good things, but by owning ridiculous amounts of capital and exploiting people.
Rant over, sorry.
it’s alright mate. your rant helped me see things in a different light. so thank you.
Well said. Thinking billionaires are assholes because they’re naturally shitty is like thinking they got rich by being naturally hard working.
Take landlords for example. You can be the nicest person in the world. The kind of person who makes friends with the tenant. What do you think happens to you after you’ve evicted a few of your friends?
Systems are a bitch.
Landlords are parasites in any case
I could see someone making something useful and selling it to billions of people at a fair price not being exploitative and also being a billionaire.
I think it’s rare to the point of maybe happening once ever, but I’m not super upset about the behavior of the guy currently bankrolling the signal foundation.
The problem is if you aren’t exploitative then you aren’t being as “efficient” (in a capitalist sense) so you’ll be out-competed. The system is designed to incentivize exploitation. It’s mis-aligned to do anything else.
Oh, the system is totally pushing everyone to try to be the worst person possible.
However, they might not actually be out competed if they’re not being as exploitative as possible. If they’re not charging as much as the market will tolerate they’re being inefficient but in the way costs profit but attracts consumers.
I literally only have one billionaire who might not be a problem, but that’s what they did. $1 for a year of access sold to a few billion people, with something like 50 employees.
It’s why the billionaires who shaft consumers and their workers are so gross. Reducing profit margins doesn’t impact efficiency, it only impacts money in their already overstuffed pockets.
I choose to see this question as “If you could magically just make someone a billionaire, who deserves it,” or more specifically “who would actually do good things with the money if they had a billion dollars.”
As you said, the reason these people aren’t billionaires already is because they haven’t been exploiting others. That being said, there are likely a few people that would use the money to better support a lot of great causes, like the Free Software Foundation, medical research, or climate change action
Ok, so who did Taylor Swift exploit? She literally is just a singer and the whole thing is odd, but it’s more she’s a billionaire because the currency is worthless.
Her ex-boyfriends.
oh no. they had to fuck taylor swift. boo fucking hoo
She didn’t (maybe). Record labels did.
her little private jet already put out more CO^2 this year alone than everyone on lemmy combined
billionaires are shitty people, period.
Paul McCartney is a billionaire. What people did he exploit?
I think Taylor Swift is now worth a billion dollars, despite being the exploited
Simply by having a billion dollars means they have decided to hoard that wealth. They could give away 90% of it, leaving them with $100 million, it wouldn’t impact their quality of life in any way, and still leave them with more wealth than 99.9% of the planet. Imagine the good that $900 million could do if it was put to good use rather than sitting in a bank account as a status symbol - having the capability to do that good with no impact on yourself or your family and choosing not to makes you an immoral person.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist. At all.
I doubt any billionaires have that much money “sitting in a bank”.
Most wealth is non-liquid. For example, if you found a company that becomes massive, and you maintain a controlling share, then you could be a billionaire on paper while having no real money to spend – the only way to turn that into “real” money would be to sell shares in the company, and thus lose control of it. If the company is doing good work, it could be better to retain control and act through the company, by ensuring that it pays employees good wages to do good work for the benefit of society. This is not completely incompatible with profit in theory, though in practice…yeah. I’m not sure if there are any such billionaires in the world today.
The real problem is more fundamental to the economy, in that it fairly consistently rewards bad behavior.
Larry Page basically became a billionaire overnight when Google went public. I don’t recall Page or Google doing anything especially evil or exploitative before that, though their success was certainly built in an unsustainable economic bubble.
If Amazon didn’t treat its employees like shit and poison the entire economy, then Bezos could probably still be a billionaire and I wouldn’t necessarily hold that against him.
“Have” vs “control”
This is bullshit
While I agree with your sentiment, the truth is, none of those billionaires have their billions sitting on their bank account, like I have my couple hundred dollars.
How much money should a person be allowed to have?
I don’t know, but there probably should be a line somewhere. More wealth than 99.9% of the rest of the planet sounds like a good place to start
A lot less than a billion. The exact amount is negotiable.
Let’s reformulate. No single individual gets to a billion dollars of net worth without someone getting fucked over in the process. The very concept of any one individual having a net worth of hundreds of times the one of the next 99.9% is fucking absurd, regardless of what they did. Nobody “deserves” multiple lifetimes worth of wealth while half of the world’s population is living with dollars a day. It would take collectively for this world’s billlionaires, the equivalent of us foregoing buying a gaming PC (in relative terms) to get rid of world hunger, yet they choose not to. So, yes, they are actively fucking people over by having so much wealth in the first place.
How much money should someone be allowed to have?
McCartney and Swift ‘exploit’ tons of people as well. They might flagship their music artist operation themselves and kind of ‘be’ the product (or rather the brand), but there are lots and lots of people involved to make tours and shows possible, recording, production and especially distribution of music and merch involves labour as well.
In addition to that: I don’t think they store all that money on a nice little heap in their backyard. It usually gets invested into some sorts of corporations, be it through the stock market, where it will accrue revenue, that comes as the result of more exploitation.
That being said: the term ‘exploitation’ carries a much more negative connotation than would be beneficial for the conversation. It’s concept of marxist economics, and the term ‘Ausbeutung’ = exploitation was used by Marx himself to describe how capitalists benefit from the surplus that workers produce. I like the term ‘reaping the surplus’ better because it doesn’t carry as much of a negative connotation. The criticism of capitalism shouldn’t barely rely on the fact that surplus is being taken away from the workers, but from the consequences to society and the political system that inevitably follow when that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a minority.