Asklemmy

Sure.

Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation will probably eradicate polio.

Before people jump on the bandwagon about how Gates is evil and problematic, that there are no virtuous billionaires, and a government or an NGO or an equivalent should have been the one to do it... I know. But the question was "name one billionaire that's done anything good," and I think it's pretty difficult to argue that eradicating polio isn't good.

The submarine dude that got rid of a few more in one go?

Didn't one of the Koch brothers die? That was pretty cool.

It's pretty easy to come up with some things billionaires have done that are good. Bill Gates funding cures and prevention of diseases in the third world is one that comes to mind.

Now, if we're talking about finding an example of a billionaire whose life is on balance a good thing for humanity...that's pretty much impossible.

Elon Musk got me to stop using Twitter.

Good acts do not make a good person. Plenty of billionaires have done good things, but they don't even come close to outweighing the bad.

Mark Cuban is a bit of a wall street asshole, but he’s created a drug company to slash the prices of generic drugs for Americans: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/24/1075344246/mark-cuban-pharmacy#:~:text=Billionaire%20investor%20and%20Dallas%20Mavericks,of%20its%20online%20pharmacy%20Wednesday.

A single good thing that a single billionaire has done? The Gates foundation fighting malaria. I think that's good.

Anything good?

Then all of them. They are human beings, not black holes of pure evil.

Elon Musk:

Destroyed Twitter

Currently engaged in a protracted war to kill all Tesla owners

Destroyed the myth of meritocracy

Grifting the Pentagon for all the money he can and then just not doing what he's paid to

Paul Allen funded a bunch of scientific and medical research, as well as quite a few museums and other public works around Seattle. He was the largest private donor to the fight against Ebola in Africa.

Sergey Brin is a big Wikimedia contributor, as came out a few years back when their donor list leaked.

This is probably a slightly misguided idea to go after them as bad people because as soon as they do do something "good" you leave the door open for people to think that perhaps on balance they're not so bad after all.

The problem of billionaires being billionaires is itself the chief complaint people should have. It doesn't matter if they're Mr Rogers and Santa Claus combined, because they can choose to be so entirely at will and can be selfish assholes too entirely at will. They can also be other things entirely, given they are actually human beings after all they can try to act on best intentions, but like all humans, with great ignorance or with flawed thinking. When you or I do that the consequences can be terrible, but mostly, we'd be unable to come close to the scale of impact these demi gods can leave in their wake, not to mention the "original sins" that allowed them to become billionaires in the first place leaving a legacy of nasty indirect consequences for society at large.

There's actually a lot of examples of billionaires philanthropy and as you likely expected to point out when people mentioned that, some of those acts hide less pure intention, but undoubtedly they probably really did do some good and that itself is enough to completely undermine your whole point that they never do anything good. The issue is that, with the sheer vast quantity of concentrated wealth and power they can wield, the society that supports them is bereft of a real voice in how it's resources are used. So much of the fruits of our labour end up closed off in private coffers and it undermines public institutions like democratic governments because while we may theoretically have a say in what they do, we legally have no say at all in how a billionaire spends his bucks (and I say his intentionally). They might say we oughtn't since it's their money and no one typically has a say in what the rest of us do with our money but as with most things, there's a point of extreme where this logic becomes perverse.

Most/all of them have done good things. A better question is are there any that have done enough good to outweigh the bad

You conveniently left out the definition of "good" so you can move the goalposts if you don't like the answers you get.

There’s a lot. In the late 1800s it started becoming something of a tradition for billionaires to move on to philanthropy after their retirement. J.D. Rockefeller was worth several hundred billion dollars in today’s money. He gave away close to 200 billion of it.

A more modern example that people have brought up is Bill Gates.

Here's a list of them that all did one good thing in 2021

Elon Musk helped mastodon grow

That one Koch brother died. The submarine guy too, he was a Standard Oil heir who took at least one other billionaire with him.

...That one guy's stupid submarine provided like a week of entertainment

Elon musk he is slowly destroying twitter

Before anyone jumps on me, billionaires suck, without exception, for reasons I don't really need to go into here, you've all heard them a million times over, and whatever good they do does not offset that in the slightest. None of them probably have been or will be a net positive influence in the world.

That said, you can probably pick out a few good things that any individual billionaire has done (and you can absolutely feel free to debate their motivations for doing those things, many of them I'm sure we're done for tax reasons, vanity, etc.)

Some of the old robber barons like Rockefeller and Carnegie (Carnegie was not technically a billionaire, but if you adjusted his wealth for inflation he would be the richest person today by a pretty comfortable margin) funded a lot of universities, libraries, etc.

Bill Gates has done some good work with vaccines despite his shitty business practices with Microsoft.

Musk is overall a shithead, I don't like him, I don't like his companies, I don't even like his vehicles. That said, I think it's pretty fair to say that Tesla has helped (though he is not solely responsible) to kick open the door for EVs to start gaining wider acceptance and adoption. And SpaceX is doing some exciting stuff, though again I dislike a lot of their methods, disagree with a few of their goals, don't like how they're run as a company, etc. But long-term I think we need to have our eyes to the stars, whether it's for settling on other worlds, mining asteroids, asteroid defense, or if I dare dream it, building a Dyson sphere, or just for scientific advancement for it's own sake, and unfortunately SpaceX is one of the major players in that field now.

Bezos hasn't done anything too flashy that comes to my mind, and like musk he is also a shithead that I dislike for pretty much the exact same reasons, excuse me for not repeating them, but he does have and donate to quite a few charities.

Again, none of that is enough to offset the shitty things they do, but I'd be surprised if you could find any very rich people who haven't at least donated to a handful of charities.

Chuck Freeney. He basically invented "Duty Free" stores and became a billionaire in the process. Then decided he should die "broke" and created The Atlantic Philanthropies secretly staking it with a little over a third of his wealth. In 2020 he closed the organization because he had given away the vast majority of his net worth. Mostly as grants to universities all over the world. He also may have low-key helped fund the IRA.

He's still got enough to live comfortably, and I'm sure his family is set up nicely.

Warren Buffet invented the buffet (I think) and I met my girlfriend at a buffet. She is a paramedic, I lost consciousness because I drank 4 litres of the truffle bechamel (I did the maths and this would have cost the restaurant slightly more money than the admission fee, hence hurting Warren Buffet's bottom line)

An older example is Andrew Carnegie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Carnegie who worked hard to create...

"The Carnegie Library, Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, and the Carnegie Hero Fund"

He helped a lot with anti-imperialism and education, he's a large reason why there are public libraries in America, establishing 3,000 of them. He also helped space exploration by helping fund the 100-inch hooker telescope.

What, do you think they just sit around smoking cigars and laughing evilly all day? Its not that they dont do anything good, their evik acts just offset it.

the Titan that shipwrecked on the way to the Titanic shipwreck was pretty neat.

Still waiting for bezos to launch himself into the sun tho

I dont know her name

Jeff bezos ex wife, who has donated a lot of money to charity

Whats with Bill Gates?

I would imagine all the billionaires have done something good at least once.

I have billions of Zimbabwe dollars and I picked up litter for 2 hours a few weeks ago. So there's at least one!

Chuck Feeney. He gave away everything to charities.

Edit: it was around 8bn.

Elon Must did pretty much destroy Twitter?

Hitler was a billionaire and in the end he did kill Hitler.