r/technology • u/DontFearTheCreaper • 20h ago

Social Media Tech CEOs who grinned behind Trump at inauguration lose billions in wake of tariffs

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-tariff-bezos-musk-zuckerberg-b2727147.html
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u/composedmason 19h ago

I think about this a lot. If one of them solved world hunger, their workers would get mad they didn't get a raise. It they adopted every puppy about to be euthanized, their stock prices would decrease making their shareholders upset. Being evil has so far been the only rewarding part of being a billionaire. The only person I've seen do good is Bill Gates but look how history is treating him.

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u/spiderscan 19h ago

Bill Gates has invested in a lot of good causes, and I definitely would rank him among the least gross billionaires... But Microsoft under his leadership was a behemoth that ruled the sector with an iron fist. He's not exempt from criticism, nor do I think the version of History I've seen of him is grossly inaccurate.

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u/tippiedog 18h ago

I don't dispute your point about Microsoft under Gates, and I'm not disputing your point in general, but Gates did do something relatively unusual for people like him: he stepped down from day-to-day responsibilities at Microsoft at a relatively young age and has devoted most of his time since making a serious effort to do good with his money. We can criticize a lot of details about this, but at this high level, that is unusual and, again, relatively better than most oligarchs.

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u/aguynamedv 14h ago

True, but by definition, Gates is still utterly out of touch with the reality of the world for 99% of the global population.

Part of the reason this level of wealth cannot exist in a healthy society is because it allows these people completely optional participation in society.

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u/tippiedog 13h ago

No disagreement from me

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u/ImYourHumbleNarrator 14h ago

this is the first time i've seen a level headed take on reddit discussing gates. the damage he did to be the monopoly on PC's and enterprise software is still felt today. embrace, extend, extinguish. fuck that guy, maybe if you weren't greedy along with other greedy people, others wouldn't need your charity

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u/Halealeakala 19h ago

Even Bill Gates only got to the position he is in now by being absolutely ruthless in his career with Microsoft. He was a notorious asshole for most of his life. The reputation he has now is due to a lot of people reconciling the charities with the person we all knew he was for decades.

No matter how much money he pours into good for the world, it can't undo some peoples' memory that he was a total dick.

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u/tractiontiresadvised 17h ago

Bill Gates basically took the turn-of-the-20th-century robber baron tactic. Many of the folks who universities and other big cultural institutions got named after (Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Leland Stanford) got their money through similarly ruthless means and then gave a bunch to charity later on in life.

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u/aguynamedv 14h ago

Although in fairness to Gates, getting the IBM deal with DOS was basically the entire reason Microsoft exists. DOS is basically the entire reason PCs as we know them exist now.

Naturally, if it hadn't been Gates, it would've been someone else. In any case, there was definitely a point where he was a young, inexperienced rich kid who got REALLY lucky.

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u/placebotwo 9h ago

The reputation he has now is due to a lot of people reconciling the charities with the person we all knew he was for decades.

And none of the others in this discussion have done anything with any charities.

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u/Guaaaamole 19h ago

History is treating him exactly how he should be treated. Bill Gates is very far away from the insanity of Zuck, Musk, Thiel, etc. but his wealth was not achieved through good-will.

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u/Kwinten 19h ago

Bill Gates stopped the licensing or open sourcing of Covid mRNA vaccines, because it would mean that poorer nations would be able to produce the vaccines domestically for cheap rather than buying them from US pharma companies. Why? To protect international IP rights of course. Can't go around sharing life-saving medical advances for free with the rest of the world now. At the cost of potentially hundreds of thousands of people's lives.

Gates is as evil as the rest of time, he just has a fantastic PR team.

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u/thedude1179 18h ago

This is misleading. Bill Gates did initially oppose waiving IP protections for COVID-19 vaccines, arguing that the issue wasn’t patents but the complexity of manufacturing. He received a lot of criticism for this. However, the Gates Foundation later reversed its position and supported temporary waivers to improve vaccine access in poorer countries. So while his initial stance may have slowed efforts to expand global vaccine production, it’s not accurate to say he single-handedly blocked open-sourcing vaccines or that he did it to protect pharma profits.

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u/Kwinten 17h ago

“Complexity of manufacturing” was indeed the official line. It’s also complete, racially charged, bullshit. Especially if you know anything at all about Gates’ background and his stance on IP protectionism. No shot that they actually thought that the entire continent of Africa wasn’t able to produce those medicines. The damage that was caused by withholding those patents for so long is incredible. For months and months, Global South nations had to rely on vaccine donations from other countries and purchase them for massively inflated prices. All because benevolent powerful billionaires like Gates couldn’t imagine sharing that IP with countries who they saw as too undeveloped to manufacture those vaccines for their own people.

I’m not saying he was single handedly responsible. But the idea that he’s a good guy among evil psychopaths is an illusion. He’s just as much part of the club, and probably has a higher body count than most of them. Don’t do free PR for these freaks. At least get paid for it when you do.

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u/thedude1179 12h ago

I get where you’re coming from, and yeah, there’s plenty to criticize about how vaccine access was handled. But let’s be real—some of the stuff you’re saying is a stretch.

Gates did push back on waiving IP early on, and people rightfully called him out for it. But saying it was because he didn’t think Africans could handle manufacturing, or that it was racially motivated? That’s more speculation than fact. mRNA vaccines aren’t exactly easy to make—they require some serious infrastructure. That doesn’t mean those countries couldn’t do it, just that the systems weren’t already in place everywhere.

Also, the Gates Foundation eventually supported IP waivers later in 2021. Was that too late? Probably. But this whole “he’s got the highest body count” and “don’t do PR for these freaks” thing kind of derails the actual conversation.

We can call out real harm and bad decisions without turning it into a cartoon villain story. It just muddies the waters.

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u/Kwinten 1h ago

Kind of hard to not turn these people into cartoon villains when they do cartoon villain shit all the fucking time. I think there’s one thing billionaire defenders fail to understand here: they are not normal people with normal motivations like you and I. These people have more wealth than kings and emperors of the olden days. But in contrast to the past, they have instant global reach, and usually don’t need to start literal wars to expand their influence. They let their capital do all the load bearing for them. I cannot overstate enough just how much power a person who controls hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth is. They don’t even need to spend a dime of it to have massive influence everywhere and anywhere they want. Billionaires get to decide who lives and dies in the Global South. They get to decide who gets elected if they care enough to do so. They don’t even need to do anything themselves to further their interests, they can just dangle their massive wealth in front of anyone like a carrot and they’ll do it for them.

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u/Ambry 17h ago

And even Bill Gates has very questionable things in his past. To get to where he is today, he used free community resources like computers to unskill and learn. He then started become obsessed with IP ownership and then started dominating and forcing competitors out of business through enforcing IP rights. In Microsoft he was also infamously brutal. So he did what the other billionaires did - he stepped on others to get to where he is today, though now as an extremely wealthy man in my view he has done much more to benefit the world than the other tech billionaire ghouls like Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, and Thiel.

He was also recently buying up tonnes of agricultural land. 

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u/thesluttyastronauts 16h ago

Bill Gates just had better PR. No billionaire benefits society. They're the financial equivalent of a black hole.

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u/El_Gran_Redditor 16h ago

I would maybe listen to the multi-part Behind the Bastards on Gates before saying he's done good unless "Good" is the name of a child he molested.