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Bill Gates calls Elon Musk’s embrace of far-right politicians abroad ‘insane shit’
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2025
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He's still pushing 'intellectual property' as part of his philanthropy. The creators of the Oxford vaccine wanted to open source it and give it away for free. Gates opposed that and he got his way (partly because of the influence of the Gates Foundation). The delays this caused probably killed millions of extra people in the Global South (not sure if anyone ever did the maths on this).
Not shocking to hear, he’s a scumbag at heart. But now if you say that people will be like “uhhh how can you say that he’s donated so much money”
Then when you point out he’s donated literally 0% of his overall current net worth, his past (and current, apparently) behavior has arguably as much humanity if not more than he has offset, etc you’ll get whataboutism. “What have you done??”
I don’t want philanthropy to be contingent on the whims of billionaires. Gates has done a lot but it still has major issues, there is no real transparency, and it’s still authoritatively controlled because he has a great deal of influence over his foundation. The even bigger issue is that he is by far the exception. Other billionaires donate minimally only to maximize tax benefits and only to issues they have been personally impacted by.
The other day I was with people who were watching a football game. The eagles won and I asked why the owner gets to speak first at the trophy ceremony, let alone at all, given it was the teams effort. This led to a whole discussion but one thing that came up was how he donates so much money to autism research because he has a grandson with autism. This was meant to appeal to me because I have a background working in autism research and I work with people with autism a lot.
all I could think is “how fucked up is it that we have to hope that an obscenely rich person personally experiences the issue for them to decide to bequeath funding?” This inherently means that things with a much higher rate of prevalence, like autism (1 in 36, roughly) or dementia (prevalence varies widely by age range (2% to 13%) but ~10 million cases per year), will get tons of money. But what about far less common things? I’ve worked with people who have extremely rare conditions. Angelmans syndrome, prader willi, chromosomal deletions, (rates of 1-2 per 10,000) or extremely rare things like hellers syndrome (rates of 1-2 per 100,000).
This is why we fund things like NIMH, so that money can be fairly dispersed to ensure that all things are researched. Teams of people research what needs to be researched. This isn’t even just about equity; sometimes researching lesser known disorders leads to discoveries that are applicable in a broader context
But instead we let a few oligarchs hoard money. Most of them don’t bother to fund this stuff at all and they few that do only bother to do so when it’s something personally relevant to them. We have no say in the matter.
The biggest argument against philanthropy is that they get to deduct it from their taxes, so instead of us as a society collectively deciding what to do with that money (provided you had a working democracy, of course), the billionaire gets to decide that. And some of that philanthropy money actually goes to causes that further undermine democracy. Just because something is a charity doesn't mean it does good. You can deduct donations to the federalist society or the heritage foundation, for example.
What bad did the heritage foundation do to you? /s
'Global South' sounds like some right-wing term. LMIC (low middle-income country) is better.
Apart from Australia and New Zealand, the Southern hemisphere houses pretty much just the poorest countries. Poverty also correlates strongly with average temperature, so it increases as you approach the Equator from either side (oil-rich Sultanates included, since the countries are rich but the people are still poor).
For what it's worth, many people here in Brazil use the phrase "global south" as a better alternative to "third world", an expression which no longer makes sense since the fall of the USSR, and I haven't ever seen anyone on the Left here be offended or bothered by it.
The global south is a real thing, look it up.
As a matter of fact, the term replaces "third world" lol
It's a common term, used by the leftiest of lefty think tanks.