Good as far as we know until they get Cosby’d
Xi Jinping.
Queen Elizabeth II
There are no good 1%ers. Doing philanthropy with your excessive fortune isn’t worthy of applause, it’s simply the easiest way to give. And more often than not they still do not. Using your influence (acquired through fortune) is hollow as hell too like why should we listen to you? Because you’re loaded?? Nah but thanks for the dono.
There are good rich people but they are rich in other resources, usually immaterial.
Also Cosby Cosby’d himself…
Closest I can think of is post-Microsoft Bill Gates, with the humanitarian/healthcare stuff he’s been involved in. He was a total piece of shit as Microsoft’s CEO, though, what with the aggressive anti-trust practices and all. Not that the ones that came after were much better (especially Ballmer).
What Gates is doing right now is a massive publicity stunt to make people believe he’s actually a “good person”. He is not. He is still a disgusting billionaire that contradicts everything he preaches.
-
He is constantly buying farmland, to the point where he’s the biggest land owner in the whole US. This is seriously harming small farmers.
-
He preaches about climate change and using cardboard straws while in his massive ($650M!) mega yacht
-
The “humanitarian/healthcare” stuff he did, while helpful, was only done because he could use it as a tax writeoff. He wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t the case.
He is constantly buying farmland, to the point where he’s the biggest land owner in the whole US. This is seriously harming small farmers.
The “buying farmland” part is just a product of him being a billionaire tbf, it’s what he does with it that could be concerning.
-
The Gates foundation explicitly lobbied against Oxford’s initial plan to open source their covid vaccine. Gates’ worship of intellectual propery law is responsible for the patent on the astrazeneca vaccine. The project was initially started under the hope that the third world being able to manufacture their own vaccines without owing royalties would be important in limiting the spread of covid.
I remember reading about that at the time but couldn’t find a reliable source to back that claim. Fascists and anti-vaxxers love to scapegoat Gates along with George Soros (and jews in general) so I kind of dismissed it as far-right misinfo. Sucks if actually true, though.
A lot of us were genuinely cheering on the announcement that the Oxford vaccine would be opensourced, it was the reason people were actually following updates on that vaccine specifically. It waa a big point of discussion here on lemmy at that time and when the decision was reversed the focal point of every criticism was that it would very obviously limit vaccine accessibility at a time when we desperately needed the population vaccinated as quickly as possible. People were angry over his justifications because even if we assumed the best-case scenario where he was somehow correct and it wouldn’t restrict vaccine access at all, it still would not be an improvement over not having a patent at all. The absolute best case scenario for that reversal would have been vaccination rates being just as high as if it stayed open-source.
I don’t doubt some morons found those headlines after-the-fact and did their own spin without reading, but the idea that antivaccine sentiments and blind Gates-hatred were the motivators for people being upset with him when that happened is wrong.
When people say “climbing the corporate ladder” the only image that comes to mind is a ladder shape made of coworkers and whoever is capable of stepping on more heads is declared the winner
I like Mark Cuban for the whole https://www.costplusdrugs.com/ thing he’s doing. I have no idea whether or not he’s a decent guy, but this is a decent thing to do, so I give him the benefit of the doubt.
Mark Cuban is the closest I can think of. Most of his wealth came from stocks he received when he sold his dot com business to Yahoo. He’s invested a bunch after that. Now he does some decent things like his at cost prescriptions. He definitely seems personable and understands that he is extremely lucky.
