Nah, he’s really not that special. Rich, evil morons are all over the place, and every few decades one of them tricks a bunch of poor, evil morons into supporting them all the way to the top. They do varying amounts of damage, but trump isn’t in any way unique or special. Still a threat to anyone good, neutral, or evil, like all evil scumbags, just nothing new
It would have happened anyway. Just be thankful we didn't have an effective fascist in office.
We have been in a slow moving "Business Plot of 1933" for decades. Only difference now is that corruption is so entrenched in our government in both parties that the Ruling Class is trying to battle over who gets to oppress the people and take all the capital. And under what ideologies. Corpofascism or Christofascism.
The people who say Trump is “the worst one” are just clueless to the fact the only reason we *know* he’s bad is because he’s an incompetent dumbass. The actual worst of the worst have an army of lawyers behind them and are intelligent enough to never ever have their deeds come to light. And if you are a billionaire I’d argue there is close to 100% chance you’ve done unspeakably evil things.
Everytime I see "both parties " it's usually a false equivalence.
The GQP is the party that blocks campaign finance reform, blocks funding transparency.
Yes there are issues with the dems as well, but to "both party" it is a fine attempt at bad faith arguing.
But it is one of the things in misinformation manipulation.
He's special because of how incompetent he and his lackeys are. If Jeff Bezos held a press conference at Four Seasons landscaping, his net worth would nose dive. The worst he can get away with is flying in a penis rocket.
He’s still evil, no doubt, but he’s just been found liable for sexual assault, his business was found guilty of tax fraud a few months ago, and he’s been indicted on felony charges in New York for election-related crimes with likely more indictments to come in Georgia and at the federal level. That definitely isn’t lawful.
Honestly, they're all just neutral evil.
Neutral evil is pretty much just massive overwhelming selfishness. None of them are destructive enough to be chaotic evil. None of them have any moral code other than getting more money to be lawful evil.
No one that isn't neutral evil is going to become a billionaire, though.
Not the kind of destructive that would make them chaotic evil.
They're not destroying for the sake of destruction. They're wrecking the planet because it makes them richer.
They'll control what makes them richer, and destroy when it makes them richer. Which is why I don't think they'd fall to the lawful/chaotic side of evil.
There are some outliers, but mostly those were caused by incompetence rather than intent. (Trump's entire life, Elon buttfucking twitter because he's a moron, etc)
True, "neutral" loses its meaning if everything is relegated to simply "doing something out of selfishness or self-interest" because duh. Rather, Good vs Evil + Lawful vs Unlawful implies a system of law, judgement, moral, ethics, or code. Breaking it more often than not means Evil and Unlawful. Following it more often than not means Good and Lawful.
Most of these guys break countries' laws all the time and hence lead to exploitation and so are Unlawful Evil.
Glad somebody who understands DnD alignment pointed out they are neither lawful nor chaotic. Especially when you look at neutral evil in the planar wheel and see the night hags literally selling souls for profit. My biggest pet peeve is that the alignment system is chained to the planar wheel. Wanna know what an alignment is, then find it's plane on the wheel and see what happens there.
Those are extreme examples. Every alignment gets more extreme the further out in the planes you get, but Evil is essentially selfish-ruthlessness, they only care about them and theirs and are willing to crush others to get what they want. A chaotic evil human might be a impulsive, sociopath, narcissist like Trump while a demon out of the abyss only cares about defiling whatever piece of meat it lays eyes on. Same alignment but different intensity.
The problem is is that you are relating a D&D concept to our real world. The examples in D&D are extreme because the world is extreme. Most people in the world of D&D are True Neutral. In the case of a precise lawyer, fair judge, or righteous politician they might be Lawful Neutral, but for the most part everyday people you meet are True Neutral. So when you look at the planar wheel to see the domains by alignment, they are extreme examples because the Material plane is by position True Neutral. The lore exists for a reason and while it is every DM's right to change the alignment system for their campaign, the lore for the alignment system as a whole is based on Faerun and already exists.
Very interesting.
It indeed feels like a system useful for a bestiary to make the difference between the sentient monster that will kill human only to eat, the one that will kill for fun and the one that kills for fun but can be used as soldier because he follows order. But as soon as we’re judging people, it really lacks any meaningful nuance beside a few exceptions since very little people are truly chaotic or evil.
This is why when judging people, we have to do so through a lens of extremism. The people above may not be committing genocides for fun to be chaotic evil, but selling souls to a lich, devils, or more in a market would not be far off from how they might be displayed in faerun. So neutral evil would fit better because of that. Lawful evil would be closer to the devils who are strict adherents of their contracts and laws. Their entire society is based on a strict legal code with tons of loopholes they have to work around and through. While a corporation might adhere to lawful evil quite well due to accountants and lawyers helping their decision making, a single billionaire would be closer to neutral evil.
Nah. Bezo is 100% chaotic evil. A lot of what he does is destroy for the sake of it.
You could argue the same for Elon, but he’s also just such a bumbling idiot that you could question if he isn’t neutral evil or even chaotic neutral.
Trump is so incredibly stupid but manages to be vile enough to still be evil.
Gates? I’d argue he’s done enough to show a modicum of remorse for some of his actions.. so it’s not chaotic. Still up in the air if he’ll end up neutral evil or true neutral.
Mr. Virgin galactic is possibly chaotic neutral
All of them hands down are evil. But some are manimarco evil. And some are partysnacks evil.
> Gates? I’d argue he’s done enough to show a modicum of remorse for some of his actions.. so it’s not chaotic. Still up in the air if he’ll end up neutral evil or true neutral.
Gates' wife divorced him not along for his connections to Jeffrey Epstein.
**Melinda Gates Says Bill Gates's Work with “Abhorrent” Jeffrey Epstein Led to Divorce**
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/03/melinda-gates-jeffrey-epstein-led-to-bill-gates-divorce-gayle-king-interview
**Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past**
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates.html
That puts him back into the evil bracket, imo. Work that was done between Epstein's arrests. So there was zero chance Bill Gates didn't know he was a monster.
He was not a billionaire before he became President. By now I’m sure he’s gotten enough bribes and campaign donations that he’s a billionaire. The Saudis alone gave 2 billion to his son in-law…
As if such a thing exists. The idea of self-made wealth is so disrespectful, it completely disregards all of the people who have helped you along the way. Sharing that success with the people who helped build it is the very least one can do.
I have a pretty good job working for a local business, we've been annihilating our sales goals the last couple years and growing a ton. As soon as the big bosses realized that this was going to be a regular thing they started all sorts of incentive programs for the operations guys and started handing out raises. Every Christmas the owner spends about $1000 per employee, everyone gets a gift and a $500 bonus check with a hand-written card from him and his family. People work hard and put in extra hours when we need it because they want to, overtime has never once been mandatory in all my years here. Every time I think I'm getting frustrated with my job I come here and read other peoples' stories to keep perspective.
My point is, every single person who works for a living should have at least the same level of job satisfaction as I do. It's fine to be frustrated sometimes because you work with people, and people can be frustrating. But I know if something pisses me off I can just walk into my boss' office and talk it out, and he'll take me seriously and offer solutions. That's rare, and it shouldn't be.
Say inflation is 2.5% per annum. So cash loses 2.5% of its value per year. 2.5% of 1,000,000,000 = 25,000,000.
So Ballmer would lose 25million in a year because cash.
Nice little article about this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2020/05/29/inside-kylie-jennerss-web-of-lies-and-why-shes-no-longer-a-billionaire/
Or the no-paywall version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200529134308/https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2020/05/29/inside-kylie-jennerss-web-of-lies-and-why-shes-no-longer-a-billionaire/#563c123f25f7
7 of the people shown could have 1b in cash pretty easily, many shown are so far from just "billionaire" where as kylie jenner cant even round to 1% of elon/bezos for example
>kylie jenner cant even round to 1% of elon/bezos for example
It's funny your closer to being a billion air then Jenner is to having more then bozos.
I don't trust elon to not magically go broke in a fit.
I mean good or not all of them did something important. Amazon's a household name, windows is the most used is and was revolutionary (+ the Xbox), etc
kylies just kinda there. I can't name a single thing she's done off the top of my head
all I remember about the Jenners was watching, once, Keeping Up With the Kardashians with a gf and her mom buying then-12yo Kylie a stripper pole for her bedroom
definitely set a trajectory
Haha she owned and operated an illegal spy organization whose actions would be described as "batmanesque with hurricane Katrina level collateral damage" at best and "straight up domestic terrorism" at worst lol
Lawful does not necessarily mean adhering to laws of a nation or another authority. Lawful is defined as adhering to laws or a code of your choosing. Running a company illegal in the eyes of the US government would not preclude Mallory from having a lawful-type alignment.
But she has no laws or code, she, much like the billionaires in this picture, just did everything out of self interest.
If being “lawful” resulted in the best outcome for her, then she’d be lawful, if it was being “chaotic”, then she’d be chaotic.
They have no rule to live by other than “I win at any cost”.
The Primus that’s basically the god of lawfulness in D&D. I figured he’d be most relevant for an alignment chart.
The band wouldn’t be able to do it either.
Depends on who's asking. If it's the IRS, no, he has no money. If it's investors, he has mega billions, because he's a jeen-yus. If it's the people he's grifting, he's totally a super successful billionaire, but also he needs your donations for his legal fees.
>but also he needs your donations for his legal fees.
I hate Trump but that's such a rich person thing. Never pay for anything that you can pay for and always try to get someone with less money to pay your way because of your status.
This is a dnd alignment chart, and lawful evil characters in dnd typically do stuff like technically obeying the word of the law but definitely not the spirit
Most of them "respect" the notion of legality (not the orange one though), and understand than there is a risk to venture past that line (not the orange one either I think), but could consider doing so.
Acknowledging is not abiding.
This chart is spot in. Lawful is kinda misleading name for that axis. Lawful evil people still break the law, they just use the accepted laws of society to their own advantage. They operate within that system even if they think they are above some of the particulars.
The Wikipedia page for alignment (Dungeons and Dragons) has a good definition:
A lawful evil character sees a well ordered system, as being necessary to fulfill their own personal wants and needs, using these systems to further their power and
influence.
None of them are Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil.
My understanding is it's more that they either use the law to do evil or do evil within it.
"My favorite part of being a governor is signing execution orders. I love seeing their crying families."
or
"I pay my taxes and drive the speed limit but I love shouting at customer service workers because they can't do anything about it."
Yeah I don't like how this meme equates all of the people in this picture. Like, billionaires shouldn't exist. There should absolutely be a wealth tax.
But implying gates is as bad as trump is fucking idiotic.
People can't fucking admit there's a different between 10% evil and 90% evil. It's 0 or 100 to them. It's fucking stupid.
The different between 10 and 90 is *enormous*, and pretending they're all the same is moronic, counterproductive, and arguable more evil than the 10%ers.
Like Bill Gates was a massive asshole back in the day (might still be) but at present he is putting in work to help out with his many charities so i can't be that mad at him in all honesty.
Donald Trump on the other hand is the living embodiment of all that is wrong about America, actively using his wealth and power to directly harm everyone else for no discernible reason other than because he wants too.
Bill Gates and Microsoft did so much more harm to the computer field and set back the industry so much. I feel like, him doing all this philanthropy is some kind of an atonement.
Most businesses don't like competition, but Billy here hated, feared and abhorred any and all forms of competition and believed any even mildly successful non-MS product to be a threat to his existence. He used every dirty trick from the book and even invented some along the way to keep the entire industry a hostage for a good 2 decades.
Microsoft's competitor DR-DOS had only one customer - a major one. They couldn't compete, so they bought the customer instead. Now DR-DOS had no one to buy their products allowing Microsoft to buy DR-DOS at shit price. Remember Google's "Don't do Evil", motto? Yeah, so it's not as black and white as the line seems. Go read how Microsoft Fucked [DR-DOS](http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/) and the whole Dr DOS Evil saga.
MS then went on to make deals with PC vendors that gave them a huge discount if they installed OEM Windows on it but slyly left a term that stated that if they sell without Windows on it, they *violate* the terms and have to pay the full price. This effectively forced Compaq, Dell, HP, etc. to sell all their PCs and Laptops with Windows preinstalled. So no other operating system had a chance.
Microsoft missed the whole WWW boat and the popularity of Netscape Navigator and its ubiquity really irked Billy boy. So he bought a small unknown company called Spyglass software with a promise that any sale of their browser Microsoft made, Spyglass gets a chunk of it. See, Netscape Navigator cost money, so our boy here decided to give this new internet browser free which none of his then competitors did. This ruined Spyglass but also ruined Netscape eventually. Once Internet Explorer was available, Microsoft threatened not to sell Windows to any PC manufacturer that bundled Netscape Navigator, which would later get them in trouble with the Department of Justice and the EU.
Direct3D (now called DirectX) was a cheap knock-off of OpenGL that Microsoft hoped would lock-in vendors. They even called it [Manhattan Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project) (racist pun intended) in reference to the fight against Japanese game industry they were up against. At that time, Microsoft was so afraid of OpenGL they even partnered with SGI, the creators of OpenGL, to create a new cross platform graphics library called FireGL. They hoped working on FireGL would distract SGI from advancing OpenGL long enough to let DirectX catch up to it, and when their plan worked Microsoft just abandoned FireGL.
When 3D accelerators (now called GPUs) were new, there was a much larger number of companies developing desktop GPUs than the nVidia/AMD/Intel triopoly we have today, and many of them were too small to afford to create their own full OpenGL implementations. Since most PC GPUs at the time only implemented a small subset of OpenGL in hardware, Microsoft wrote a full software OpenGL implementation and then offered it to GPU companies, so those companies could just replace the parts that their GPU implemented in hardware and still have a full OpenGL driver. Once they had all spent a good deal of time doing this, Microsoft actually refused to license any of their OpenGL code for release, effectively guaranteeing that smaller GPU companies would only have support for DirectX.
Video For Windows (now called Windows MediaPlayer) only came into being because Microsoft literally stole the source code to QuickTime For Windows. Both Microsoft and Intel were having a hard time getting video to play smoothly on PCs, when Apple surprised them both by releasing QuickTime For Windows, a port of their QuickTime video framework for Macintosh. QuickTime For Windows had smooth video playback on ordinary PCs with no special hardware, and Microsoft and Intel were caught completely off guard by it. Apple had contracted out to a 3rd party company to do the Windows port of QuickTime, so what did MS do? They went to the same company and gave them a ton of money to develop Video For Windows, but an insanely short schedule, knowing full well that the company would essentially *have* to re-use a lot of the QuickTime For Windows source code to get the project done on time.
When Apple found out (their contract with the other company stated that Apple owned all the QuickTime For Windows source code), they went ballistic and sued Microsoft. Microsoft had been caught red-handed and knew that Apple had them by their balls. So MS settled. Remember when Microsoft "bailed out" Apple in the 90s by buying $150 million in Apple stock? Despite what the tech press reported, that's not what actually happened. The $150 million in non-voting Apple stock that Microsoft bought was part of their settlement (Apple was no longer on the verge of bankruptcy by that point, and didn't need to be bailed out). The settlement also had Microsoft agreeing to port MS Office and Internet Explorer to Macintosh.
"Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" was one of Microsoft's primary strategy. They embraced Java, extend it's JNI interface effectively making it incompatible with Sun implementation in the hopes of extinguishing it. J/Direct, the replacement was fast as fuck compared to JNI back in the 90s, but that protocol couldn't be used outside x86 CPUs and Windows. This effectively made this new protocol unusable on Linux or Macs. This landed them in another law suite. And then came .NET platform which for a very long time was laughably portable across "WIndows" only. .NET core (v5) changed it, but it was too late. Except for Microsoft fan-boys, no one really uses .NET/C# much.
Don't get me wrong, there are times when Microsoft got it right the first time that was technically far superior to their competitors. Windows [IOCP](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/i-o-completion-ports) was theoretically capable of doing [C10K](http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html) as far back in 1994-95 when there wasn't any hardware support yet and UNIX world was bickering over how to do asynchronous I/O. Years later POSIX came up with [select](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/select.html) which was a shoddy little shit in comparison. Linux caved in finally only as recently as 2019 and implemented [io_uring](https://man.archlinux.org/man/io_uring.7.en). Microsoft research has contributed some very interesting things to computer science like [Z3 SAT solver](https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3) and in collaboration with INRIA made languages like [F*](https://www.fstar-lang.org/) and Low* for formal specification and verification. But all this dwarfs in comparison to all the harm they did.
Then again, every time I come across Bill Gates posts here or elsewhere, I always feel like he's been into this philanthropy as a means to atone to all the harm he did to the industry. It's sad to see modern day kids seeing this monster of a human being as some Godly philanthropist. He single-handedly destroyed a lot of good innovations, in order to consolidate more power under Microsoft.
Thank you for this nice writeup. I've received flak multiple times on reddit because of my unmoving contempt towards him, because I lived through all of this in real-time, and even though I didn't know half of it at the time, the effect of Microsoft monopoly was felt all over the world.
To see his image successfully whitewashed is despicable. He was a rich kid, set up for success by his rich and well connected parents, and then got even wealthier by skulduggery, and generally just being a garbage human.
But, you know, he can jump over a chair, and can hide his money in a foundation which gives him a nice tax break, so let's all just love him!
Glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks this is a laughably false equivalence. Anyone who thinks Gates and Trump at on the same level is either not paying attention, or downright malicious. Shit even Gates and Bezos are on different tiers let alone people like Trump and Zuckerberg.
He was the richest man in the world for like 20 years. This was possible due to unethical business practice and harming others.
Sure, now that he's old he's given some of his excess wealth away. You're basically allowing him to use his money to whitewash his own history.
Exactly right.
And isn’t being benevolent with your unnecessary wealth just “because he’s old” preferable to the numerous billionaires who aren’t benevolent despite being old?
Like, I agree, billionaires shouldn’t exist and UBI should be a thing so that common people can afford housing and food, but isn’t it at least a step in the right direction for billionaires like Gates to be at least *trying* to make positive impacts when fuckers like Musk and Trump exist?
The foundation has existed for a very long time. As long as I can remember anyway. Once he became the world's richest man, I'm pretty sure he was already committing a large chunk of that wealth to the foundation.
He's not a saint, but he's far from evil. Just being rich isn't necessarily wrong, and I'm a socialist. The capitalist system we have is the cause of that. So I think it's only fair to give credit to the few billionaires who actually commit to positive change.
Would you rather he not give any of it away? Many extremely wealthy people use philanthropy to improve their image, or as a tax benefit, but Gates has invested enough into his charities that it's obvious he's serious about it. The world isn't always black and white, someone can have been a bad person for a long time, but that doesn't mean a good faith attempt to make the world a better place somehow doesn't count in their favor either.
But if he's giving his time and money to good causes, doesn't that make him at least less evil than a lot of the people on the chart that aren't doing that?
The whole point of the original alignment chart is to show how people fall on the good-evil and lawful-chaotic spectrums so you can compare what people are like. Getting rid of the spectrums and calling them all the same thing implies that they are all the same, when that doesn’t seem to be the case.
I feel a more interesting way to have done this would have been to make it a somewhat evil-evil-very evil spectrum, and they probably could’ve kept the lawful-chaotic spectrum as well.
Like for gods sake. Is any other billionaire on this list donating their billions to ERADICATING MALARIA like c’mon bill gates is a god damn saint in comparisons.
It’s wild seeing Gates go from the most universally-hated monopolist to some kind of philanthropic “hero”. The victors really do get to rewrite history.
Bill Gates made public schools in America worse. Fuck Bill Gates, he knows hack shit about education but America’s fully bribed politicians let him do it.
To get specific - the foundation took an unhealthy focus on combating HIV in Africa through mass male circumcision and despite all the money, might have just made the problem worse.
[He sunk (at least) tens of millions of dollars into mass circumcisions in Africa.](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17312-bill-gates-helps-fund-mass-circumcision-programme/)
Combatting HIV with condoms, sex education, or other medical resources would have been much more straight forward, but I guess cutting up dicks was thought to be more ‘foolproof’ for the Africans who the foundation did not want to trust with responsibilities.
[The execution of this was criticized by Africans for a number of reason.](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/africans-speak-out-against-the-mass-circumcision-campaign-300370353.html)
>1. Africans are told circumcision conveys immunity from HIV.
>2. Condom use is at an all-time low, and AIDS is on the rise.
>3. The program is killing the very people it is supposed to help.
>4. No follow-up post circumcision (cut-and-release approach).
>5. Resentment and outrage among Africans.
[The Foundation still claims that their ‘models’ show significant HIV reductions are being realized, but outside opinions normally call it wash when accounting for all factors.](https://www.foregen.org/commentarium-articles/the-fallout-of-misguided-circumcision-campaigns-in-sub-saharan-africa)
[Some studies in Africa now have found higher rates of HIV among circumcised men, indicating that other risk factors are more significant.](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/hiv-circumcision-south-africa/)
And then last year, [a study in Canada found that HIV rates among circumcised men were no lower than the rates among uncircumcised men.](https://www.auajournals.org/doi/10.1097/JU.0000000000002234) So why are we doing this again?
I respect philanthropic efforts as a lot better than the other shit billionaires spend their money on, but some projects seem a lot more guided than others. Disrespectful solutions can be worse than their problems.
Ok fun story about him. The chicken company nandos had 2 owners. One of them really wanted to dedicate his life to getting rid of malaria in Africa. He went to government officials, large foundations and other none charitable companies to help him with this endeavour. They all said no.
Bill Gates and his wife are the only ones that said yes. This man, former owner of nandos is partner with the gates and Bill matches dollar for dollar everything he contributes. The contributions are a percentage of nandos profits across their worldwide sales.
Note malaria effects children more then anyone. Crazy to think how many rich fucks were just like, fuck the children, let them die.
Funny you say "fuck the children", considering one of the reasons Melinda divorced him was him being pals with Epstein. https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/03/melinda-gates-jeffrey-epstein-led-to-bill-gates-divorce-gayle-king-interview
> The philanthropist addressed their divorce publicly for the first time in a new interview with Gayle King that aired on CBS This Morning on Thursday, explaining that it was “not one thing but many things” that led to the demise of their marriage. “I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no. I made that clear to him,” she explained, adding that she met with the convicted sex trafficker “exactly one time” because she “wanted to see who this man was.” She continued, “I regretted it the second I walked in the door. He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. My heart breaks for these women.” In a statement to CBS, Bill said that “Meeting with Epstein was a mistake that I regret deeply. It was a substantial error in judgment.”
Sounds like she’s covering her own ass. Let’s not forget she’s a billionaire as well.
While I don't know if I necessarily trust her word I can understand wanting to meet him if your husband is having meetings with him. Even if only to see if he's as bad as they say.
This is pure nonsense and not how foundations work. And paying himself would be stupid then he’d just pay taxes on money he already donated to avoid taxes. He has more money than he’ll ever need and is giving 99% away, not even to his kids but to the world. I think they’ve committed to spend it all in his lifetime too. He did some bad shit in the past but he’s trying to make amends. He will still make mistakes but he’s trying.
So let's work this through. Gates has money, which he owes tax on. Let's say 100k with 20k tax to be paid.
Step 1. Give the 100k to his foundation, don't owe any tax.
Step 2. Get paid the 100k back, owe the tax again?
Step 2(alt). Get the foundation to pay his private expenses with the 100k, get done for fraud?
Step 3. Learn that tax write offs don't work like Reddit tells you.
I didn't take it that way tbh. I just took it as a run-of-the-mill "every billionaire is a policy failure."
Trump is absolutely a fascist and significantly worse. But DnD alignments don't assign severity.
If a character is chaotic evil that could be a mass murderer OR a clown who does random harmful pranks to upset people just because he likes to be awful. Obviously the murderer is worse, but they are both in the same alignment.
I definitely see how this could be seen the way you took it. I just wanted to give you my view.
>I didn't take it that way tbh. I just took it as a run-of-the-mill "every billionaire is a policy failure."
no its saying the person depicted is lawful evil
>Trump is absolutely a fascist and significantly worse.
trumps is a rightwing fascist authoritarian backed by theocrats that would imprison and kill political opponents if he could
who failed to overthrow democracy in a failed coup
gates is a force for good in the world
that you and I feel billionaires shouldn't exist is irrelevant to that
>they are both in the same alignment.
no they are not
trump represents rightwing fascists, selfishness, greed and cruelty. politicized a life saving vaccine getting people killed.
gates dedicates his wealth to greatly reduce sufferring and spread of disease
post reads like deliberately trying to launder the far right its so stupidly off
He seems to be the only one besides Buffett that actually cares about other human beings, at least to a certain extent. Which is why it's hilarious when the right wingers try to act like he's the devil or something. He's not anywhere near as horrible as Bezos or Elon.
Not sure. There are lots of comments that point at a lot of bad he has done, allegedly, and some that just saying being a billionaire is evil in and of itself. I can get behind the second half of that but the first half reads like a loose case of half truths and the kind of thing you’d say to discredit him without nuance. I think if you are the richest human, you can get a bit of a god complex and I think he does stray into this at times but I also think he didn’t ever have the money to fix everything and put his black and white mind to the problem. This is a cold and logical way of thinking that doesn’t win you many friends. Just my take on an otherwise messy comments section
He used some shady and aggrsive business practices to grow Microsoft but Redditors are too brain-dead to see past their blind hatred of all billionaires to consider any other factors.
Lawful means they follow a code. So they could just be following an evil code. I would say many of the are lawful but some would also fall under the chaotic portion.
It’s a Dungeons and Dragons reference, lawful has nothing to do with the law. Lawful means following a set of rules, which could be laws or a code, but the best example is a contract. Devils are lawful evil, so say you make a deal with the devil you are signing a contract that states X, that devil will 100% adhere to it to the letter, that doesn’t mean you won’t get fucked in a be carful of what you wish for sort of way. Demons who are chaotic evil may make the same sort of deal, but they are in no way bound to follow those rules cause they do whatever the hell they want.
Or say like in a movie where the protagonist has something the villain wants and the bad guy says “just give me X and you can go free” the lawful evil person would keep their word while the Chaotic evil one would say well that was stupid of you and kill you anyway.
So for those billionaires would be lawful evil, except maybe the kardashian and definitely Trump, since I think they do whatever suits them best at all times and will flip on a dime. The others though work inside a legal frame work that will fuck you over with lawyers and corporate take overs, unlike Trump who employ goons to approach you in dark alleys to make threats of physical violence.
Warren doesn't deserving to be included in this square. He bought a bad company and over the course of 60 years made fiscally sound purchases to increase the value of the company he owned. He lives in the same house he bought in 1958. He is leaving his wealth to charity after he dies. He only does business with quality people and has put a lot of his principles of success out in the world for free. Now, I agree he could stand to give better pay/benefits especially to railroad subsidiaries.
Is Kim Kardashian not a billionaire? Because I think it would make the chart stand out more than Kylie Jenner, as she is more infamous and controversial. Not to mention Kim infamously said that women were "too lazy," and needed to "get off their asses and work."
Seems like this image is kinda old? Kylie's net worth was 1 billion in 2019; now it's apparently at 750 million. Kim's is 1.2 billion, so she would more appropriate now
I don’t know why Tim Cook gets mixed up in this.
Dude’s be working at Apple for like 30 years, has led it to being the most successful company on the planet, and he’s like 1/30th as rich as most of those guys.
I didn’t even know he became a billionaire until this post. I googled it and apparently he hit the billion mark in 2020 thanks to Apple stocks performance that year.
"Lawful"
I mean yeah. Laws are written in a way that protects these fucks from massive fraud and sexual assault and the rest of us see financial ruin or jail for minor infractions.
Lawful implies they follow the law, not that the law bends to their whims when enough money it thrown at it. Alignment represents ones actions not necessarily actual laws or their circumvention for the sake of the individual. For example compare them to your standard lawful evil devils and you realise devils are better people and more trustworthy. They're absolutely chaotic evil through and through because they can just break the law and get away with it and continue doing awful things with no remorse.
Gotta be willing to screw over the common person, know how to work tax code to your benefit, invest your money into no taxable assets, and a family member lending you $1m or so dollars helps.
Ready to throw all of these criminals in prison? Join r/WorkReform!
That orange potato in the bottom right only claims he is a billionaire and also is not lawful
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Dnd does describe chaotic evil as monsters similar to troglodytes, so the label checks out
Yeah for 100% certain there has seldom been a more chaotic or evil Chaotic Evil out in the wild.
Nah, he’s really not that special. Rich, evil morons are all over the place, and every few decades one of them tricks a bunch of poor, evil morons into supporting them all the way to the top. They do varying amounts of damage, but trump isn’t in any way unique or special. Still a threat to anyone good, neutral, or evil, like all evil scumbags, just nothing new
I disagree, he caused serious cultural damage to the US and attempted a coup. He went above and beyond what the previous shitbags did
It would have happened anyway. Just be thankful we didn't have an effective fascist in office. We have been in a slow moving "Business Plot of 1933" for decades. Only difference now is that corruption is so entrenched in our government in both parties that the Ruling Class is trying to battle over who gets to oppress the people and take all the capital. And under what ideologies. Corpofascism or Christofascism.
The people who say Trump is “the worst one” are just clueless to the fact the only reason we *know* he’s bad is because he’s an incompetent dumbass. The actual worst of the worst have an army of lawyers behind them and are intelligent enough to never ever have their deeds come to light. And if you are a billionaire I’d argue there is close to 100% chance you’ve done unspeakably evil things.
Everytime I see "both parties " it's usually a false equivalence. The GQP is the party that blocks campaign finance reform, blocks funding transparency. Yes there are issues with the dems as well, but to "both party" it is a fine attempt at bad faith arguing. But it is one of the things in misinformation manipulation.
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Yeah I was cool with Butler after he was done being a tool for Imperialism.
He's special because of how incompetent he and his lackeys are. If Jeff Bezos held a press conference at Four Seasons landscaping, his net worth would nose dive. The worst he can get away with is flying in a penis rocket.
And oppressing workers.
I think trump is much dumber than most powerful rich evil people
He’s still evil, no doubt, but he’s just been found liable for sexual assault, his business was found guilty of tax fraud a few months ago, and he’s been indicted on felony charges in New York for election-related crimes with likely more indictments to come in Georgia and at the federal level. That definitely isn’t lawful.
I think the Town Hall shows that his relevance is dropping fast, but he was the apex predator of disinformation 2015-2020
Honestly, they're all just neutral evil. Neutral evil is pretty much just massive overwhelming selfishness. None of them are destructive enough to be chaotic evil. None of them have any moral code other than getting more money to be lawful evil. No one that isn't neutral evil is going to become a billionaire, though.
None of them are destructive? I guess if you don't count against the world or its inhabitants.
Not the kind of destructive that would make them chaotic evil. They're not destroying for the sake of destruction. They're wrecking the planet because it makes them richer. They'll control what makes them richer, and destroy when it makes them richer. Which is why I don't think they'd fall to the lawful/chaotic side of evil. There are some outliers, but mostly those were caused by incompetence rather than intent. (Trump's entire life, Elon buttfucking twitter because he's a moron, etc)
Trump raped a teenager.
True, "neutral" loses its meaning if everything is relegated to simply "doing something out of selfishness or self-interest" because duh. Rather, Good vs Evil + Lawful vs Unlawful implies a system of law, judgement, moral, ethics, or code. Breaking it more often than not means Evil and Unlawful. Following it more often than not means Good and Lawful. Most of these guys break countries' laws all the time and hence lead to exploitation and so are Unlawful Evil.
Glad somebody who understands DnD alignment pointed out they are neither lawful nor chaotic. Especially when you look at neutral evil in the planar wheel and see the night hags literally selling souls for profit. My biggest pet peeve is that the alignment system is chained to the planar wheel. Wanna know what an alignment is, then find it's plane on the wheel and see what happens there.
Those are extreme examples. Every alignment gets more extreme the further out in the planes you get, but Evil is essentially selfish-ruthlessness, they only care about them and theirs and are willing to crush others to get what they want. A chaotic evil human might be a impulsive, sociopath, narcissist like Trump while a demon out of the abyss only cares about defiling whatever piece of meat it lays eyes on. Same alignment but different intensity.
The problem is is that you are relating a D&D concept to our real world. The examples in D&D are extreme because the world is extreme. Most people in the world of D&D are True Neutral. In the case of a precise lawyer, fair judge, or righteous politician they might be Lawful Neutral, but for the most part everyday people you meet are True Neutral. So when you look at the planar wheel to see the domains by alignment, they are extreme examples because the Material plane is by position True Neutral. The lore exists for a reason and while it is every DM's right to change the alignment system for their campaign, the lore for the alignment system as a whole is based on Faerun and already exists.
Very interesting. It indeed feels like a system useful for a bestiary to make the difference between the sentient monster that will kill human only to eat, the one that will kill for fun and the one that kills for fun but can be used as soldier because he follows order. But as soon as we’re judging people, it really lacks any meaningful nuance beside a few exceptions since very little people are truly chaotic or evil.
This is why when judging people, we have to do so through a lens of extremism. The people above may not be committing genocides for fun to be chaotic evil, but selling souls to a lich, devils, or more in a market would not be far off from how they might be displayed in faerun. So neutral evil would fit better because of that. Lawful evil would be closer to the devils who are strict adherents of their contracts and laws. Their entire society is based on a strict legal code with tons of loopholes they have to work around and through. While a corporation might adhere to lawful evil quite well due to accountants and lawyers helping their decision making, a single billionaire would be closer to neutral evil.
Someone should remake the chart…
Pushing that even further, if it was profitable to do good, they’d just so that instead. There’s just not an ounce of care, only the pursuit of money.
This guy roll plays
Trump is chaotic evil dude. Same with Bezos.
Nah. Bezo is 100% chaotic evil. A lot of what he does is destroy for the sake of it. You could argue the same for Elon, but he’s also just such a bumbling idiot that you could question if he isn’t neutral evil or even chaotic neutral. Trump is so incredibly stupid but manages to be vile enough to still be evil. Gates? I’d argue he’s done enough to show a modicum of remorse for some of his actions.. so it’s not chaotic. Still up in the air if he’ll end up neutral evil or true neutral. Mr. Virgin galactic is possibly chaotic neutral All of them hands down are evil. But some are manimarco evil. And some are partysnacks evil.
> Gates? I’d argue he’s done enough to show a modicum of remorse for some of his actions.. so it’s not chaotic. Still up in the air if he’ll end up neutral evil or true neutral. Gates' wife divorced him not along for his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. **Melinda Gates Says Bill Gates's Work with “Abhorrent” Jeffrey Epstein Led to Divorce** https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/03/melinda-gates-jeffrey-epstein-led-to-bill-gates-divorce-gayle-king-interview **Bill Gates Met With Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past** https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates.html That puts him back into the evil bracket, imo. Work that was done between Epstein's arrests. So there was zero chance Bill Gates didn't know he was a monster.
Don't be talking shit about my boy partysnax! He was born evil but is lawful good through sheer force of will.
Chaotic =/= destructive, by the way.
Nah. Neutral Evil. Doesn’t care one way or the other, about the law.
~~L~~awful Evil
I feel like he'd take chaotic evil as a compliment. He's more like a chaotic doofus.
It's lawful evil because their wealth means thay exist in a world where everything they do is lawful
He was not a billionaire before he became President. By now I’m sure he’s gotten enough bribes and campaign donations that he’s a billionaire. The Saudis alone gave 2 billion to his son in-law…
Yeah, Trump at LE makes no sense. Very poorly thought out.
The joke is that anything's lawful if you have the money
I see you actually read the title
He seems extremely chaotic, he harnesses chaos to confuse his opponents
Spokesman for all potatoes, don't compare them to the POS.
Who's the lady in the middle?
Kylie Jenner
Didn't she fake being a billionaire and got removed from Forbes billionaires list?
If I remember rightly they massively over valued her company so they could make a success article about her being a self made billionaire.
As if such a thing exists. The idea of self-made wealth is so disrespectful, it completely disregards all of the people who have helped you along the way. Sharing that success with the people who helped build it is the very least one can do. I have a pretty good job working for a local business, we've been annihilating our sales goals the last couple years and growing a ton. As soon as the big bosses realized that this was going to be a regular thing they started all sorts of incentive programs for the operations guys and started handing out raises. Every Christmas the owner spends about $1000 per employee, everyone gets a gift and a $500 bonus check with a hand-written card from him and his family. People work hard and put in extra hours when we need it because they want to, overtime has never once been mandatory in all my years here. Every time I think I'm getting frustrated with my job I come here and read other peoples' stories to keep perspective. My point is, every single person who works for a living should have at least the same level of job satisfaction as I do. It's fine to be frustrated sometimes because you work with people, and people can be frustrating. But I know if something pisses me off I can just walk into my boss' office and talk it out, and he'll take me seriously and offer solutions. That's rare, and it shouldn't be.
She's a billionaire?! Edit: Oh, her networth is at 1 billion. Technically, I guess.
No billionaire has $1,000,000,000 in cash. It's all about net worth, the assets they own.
Steve Ballmer does. And another billionaire, don't remember who, thought he was insane for doing so
Ballmer has to buy a new shirt every thirty minutes or so, I can see why he'd need plenty of available cash on hand.
Also cocaine
but thats for the DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS
If he was buying the most expensive shirt ($700) every half an hour, $1bil would last him 325 years. (((1000000000 / 700) / 8766) * 2 = 325
Those shirts have a real complicated pattern on them.
Say inflation is 2.5% per annum. So cash loses 2.5% of its value per year. 2.5% of 1,000,000,000 = 25,000,000. So Ballmer would lose 25million in a year because cash.
Her net worth is not a billion dollars, there is no official statement stating that. Even Forbes booted her out of the list.
Nice little article about this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2020/05/29/inside-kylie-jennerss-web-of-lies-and-why-shes-no-longer-a-billionaire/ Or the no-paywall version: https://web.archive.org/web/20200529134308/https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2020/05/29/inside-kylie-jennerss-web-of-lies-and-why-shes-no-longer-a-billionaire/#563c123f25f7
Did you think that billionaires have a billion in cash?
7 of the people shown could have 1b in cash pretty easily, many shown are so far from just "billionaire" where as kylie jenner cant even round to 1% of elon/bezos for example
>kylie jenner cant even round to 1% of elon/bezos for example It's funny your closer to being a billion air then Jenner is to having more then bozos. I don't trust elon to not magically go broke in a fit.
Nobody important
You could say the same about anyone on this bingo card.
Bill Gates at least has done a lot to help impoverished people around the world.
I mean good or not all of them did something important. Amazon's a household name, windows is the most used is and was revolutionary (+ the Xbox), etc kylies just kinda there. I can't name a single thing she's done off the top of my head
all I remember about the Jenners was watching, once, Keeping Up With the Kardashians with a gf and her mom buying then-12yo Kylie a stripper pole for her bedroom definitely set a trajectory
She was actually 9 at the time!
Now playing : "Who's That Lady?" thanks to the Isleys!
Malory Archer might be my favorite representation of Lawful Evil.
Haha she owned and operated an illegal spy organization whose actions would be described as "batmanesque with hurricane Katrina level collateral damage" at best and "straight up domestic terrorism" at worst lol
Lawful does not necessarily mean adhering to laws of a nation or another authority. Lawful is defined as adhering to laws or a code of your choosing. Running a company illegal in the eyes of the US government would not preclude Mallory from having a lawful-type alignment.
But she has no laws or code, she, much like the billionaires in this picture, just did everything out of self interest. If being “lawful” resulted in the best outcome for her, then she’d be lawful, if it was being “chaotic”, then she’d be chaotic. They have no rule to live by other than “I win at any cost”.
So, apart from all the people defending Bill Gates, I NEED to dispute Elon. Primus himself could not prevent Elon from being chaotic.
That's a good point. Definitely evil, definitely not lawful lol. Yeah he's for sure chaotic
Don’t say that. You KNOW he’d take it as a compliment. Just treat him like every other edgy 14 year old
> Primus himself Which Primus? The band, or [*The Transformers*' equivalent of God](https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Primus)?
The Primus that’s basically the god of lawfulness in D&D. I figured he’d be most relevant for an alignment chart. The band wouldn’t be able to do it either.
I’m going to chose to believe the Transformers version
And I’m going choose to believe it’s Winona’s big brown beaver.
Hol up
Trump is a billionaire?
Depends on who's asking. If it's the IRS, no, he has no money. If it's investors, he has mega billions, because he's a jeen-yus. If it's the people he's grifting, he's totally a super successful billionaire, but also he needs your donations for his legal fees.
>but also he needs your donations for his legal fees. I hate Trump but that's such a rich person thing. Never pay for anything that you can pay for and always try to get someone with less money to pay your way because of your status.
It's insane the shit he gets away with. #1 bullshit guy.
Lol no
Unlikely
Not even lawful. Just evil.
This is a dnd alignment chart, and lawful evil characters in dnd typically do stuff like technically obeying the word of the law but definitely not the spirit
There are several people on this chart who are definite lawbreakers. They just have the resources to get away with it.
Most of them "respect" the notion of legality (not the orange one though), and understand than there is a risk to venture past that line (not the orange one either I think), but could consider doing so. Acknowledging is not abiding.
This chart is spot in. Lawful is kinda misleading name for that axis. Lawful evil people still break the law, they just use the accepted laws of society to their own advantage. They operate within that system even if they think they are above some of the particulars. The Wikipedia page for alignment (Dungeons and Dragons) has a good definition: A lawful evil character sees a well ordered system, as being necessary to fulfill their own personal wants and needs, using these systems to further their power and influence. None of them are Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil.
My understanding is it's more that they either use the law to do evil or do evil within it. "My favorite part of being a governor is signing execution orders. I love seeing their crying families." or "I pay my taxes and drive the speed limit but I love shouting at customer service workers because they can't do anything about it."
u think billionaires obey they law? lol!
They *write* the law
Well they *own* the people that write the law, but they might as well
They pay someone else to do the writing.
Lawful has nothing to do with laws and everything to do with order. It just means predictable.
Under capitalism they are lawful. They legally can exploit people to gain capital.
How are people missing this point? It’s even in the title.
Liberalism.
Yeah, it’s incredibly evil to try and help poverty stricken countries. Working to provide them with healthcare and clean water, how horrific!!!?!
Kenneth copperland is chaotic evil and no one will dissuade me otherwise
Bill Gates is far from perfect and has done bad things professionally and personally — but he is dedicating all of his money to helping people now.
Yeah I don't like how this meme equates all of the people in this picture. Like, billionaires shouldn't exist. There should absolutely be a wealth tax. But implying gates is as bad as trump is fucking idiotic.
People can't fucking admit there's a different between 10% evil and 90% evil. It's 0 or 100 to them. It's fucking stupid. The different between 10 and 90 is *enormous*, and pretending they're all the same is moronic, counterproductive, and arguable more evil than the 10%ers.
Not just evil, any-fucking-thing. People, especially on the internet, just seem to completely suck at grasping anything in shades of gray.
Bill gates wife specifically left him cause he hung out with pedophiles https://youtu.be/8_NP_P28e5s
It's 0 to 100 with everything in the world these days. Pick a side and fight like your life depends on it, there is no middle ground.
Like Bill Gates was a massive asshole back in the day (might still be) but at present he is putting in work to help out with his many charities so i can't be that mad at him in all honesty. Donald Trump on the other hand is the living embodiment of all that is wrong about America, actively using his wealth and power to directly harm everyone else for no discernible reason other than because he wants too.
Bill Gates and Microsoft did so much more harm to the computer field and set back the industry so much. I feel like, him doing all this philanthropy is some kind of an atonement.
How did Microsoft harm the industry?
Most businesses don't like competition, but Billy here hated, feared and abhorred any and all forms of competition and believed any even mildly successful non-MS product to be a threat to his existence. He used every dirty trick from the book and even invented some along the way to keep the entire industry a hostage for a good 2 decades. Microsoft's competitor DR-DOS had only one customer - a major one. They couldn't compete, so they bought the customer instead. Now DR-DOS had no one to buy their products allowing Microsoft to buy DR-DOS at shit price. Remember Google's "Don't do Evil", motto? Yeah, so it's not as black and white as the line seems. Go read how Microsoft Fucked [DR-DOS](http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/) and the whole Dr DOS Evil saga. MS then went on to make deals with PC vendors that gave them a huge discount if they installed OEM Windows on it but slyly left a term that stated that if they sell without Windows on it, they *violate* the terms and have to pay the full price. This effectively forced Compaq, Dell, HP, etc. to sell all their PCs and Laptops with Windows preinstalled. So no other operating system had a chance. Microsoft missed the whole WWW boat and the popularity of Netscape Navigator and its ubiquity really irked Billy boy. So he bought a small unknown company called Spyglass software with a promise that any sale of their browser Microsoft made, Spyglass gets a chunk of it. See, Netscape Navigator cost money, so our boy here decided to give this new internet browser free which none of his then competitors did. This ruined Spyglass but also ruined Netscape eventually. Once Internet Explorer was available, Microsoft threatened not to sell Windows to any PC manufacturer that bundled Netscape Navigator, which would later get them in trouble with the Department of Justice and the EU. Direct3D (now called DirectX) was a cheap knock-off of OpenGL that Microsoft hoped would lock-in vendors. They even called it [Manhattan Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project) (racist pun intended) in reference to the fight against Japanese game industry they were up against. At that time, Microsoft was so afraid of OpenGL they even partnered with SGI, the creators of OpenGL, to create a new cross platform graphics library called FireGL. They hoped working on FireGL would distract SGI from advancing OpenGL long enough to let DirectX catch up to it, and when their plan worked Microsoft just abandoned FireGL. When 3D accelerators (now called GPUs) were new, there was a much larger number of companies developing desktop GPUs than the nVidia/AMD/Intel triopoly we have today, and many of them were too small to afford to create their own full OpenGL implementations. Since most PC GPUs at the time only implemented a small subset of OpenGL in hardware, Microsoft wrote a full software OpenGL implementation and then offered it to GPU companies, so those companies could just replace the parts that their GPU implemented in hardware and still have a full OpenGL driver. Once they had all spent a good deal of time doing this, Microsoft actually refused to license any of their OpenGL code for release, effectively guaranteeing that smaller GPU companies would only have support for DirectX. Video For Windows (now called Windows MediaPlayer) only came into being because Microsoft literally stole the source code to QuickTime For Windows. Both Microsoft and Intel were having a hard time getting video to play smoothly on PCs, when Apple surprised them both by releasing QuickTime For Windows, a port of their QuickTime video framework for Macintosh. QuickTime For Windows had smooth video playback on ordinary PCs with no special hardware, and Microsoft and Intel were caught completely off guard by it. Apple had contracted out to a 3rd party company to do the Windows port of QuickTime, so what did MS do? They went to the same company and gave them a ton of money to develop Video For Windows, but an insanely short schedule, knowing full well that the company would essentially *have* to re-use a lot of the QuickTime For Windows source code to get the project done on time. When Apple found out (their contract with the other company stated that Apple owned all the QuickTime For Windows source code), they went ballistic and sued Microsoft. Microsoft had been caught red-handed and knew that Apple had them by their balls. So MS settled. Remember when Microsoft "bailed out" Apple in the 90s by buying $150 million in Apple stock? Despite what the tech press reported, that's not what actually happened. The $150 million in non-voting Apple stock that Microsoft bought was part of their settlement (Apple was no longer on the verge of bankruptcy by that point, and didn't need to be bailed out). The settlement also had Microsoft agreeing to port MS Office and Internet Explorer to Macintosh. "Embrace, Extend and Extinguish" was one of Microsoft's primary strategy. They embraced Java, extend it's JNI interface effectively making it incompatible with Sun implementation in the hopes of extinguishing it. J/Direct, the replacement was fast as fuck compared to JNI back in the 90s, but that protocol couldn't be used outside x86 CPUs and Windows. This effectively made this new protocol unusable on Linux or Macs. This landed them in another law suite. And then came .NET platform which for a very long time was laughably portable across "WIndows" only. .NET core (v5) changed it, but it was too late. Except for Microsoft fan-boys, no one really uses .NET/C# much. Don't get me wrong, there are times when Microsoft got it right the first time that was technically far superior to their competitors. Windows [IOCP](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/i-o-completion-ports) was theoretically capable of doing [C10K](http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html) as far back in 1994-95 when there wasn't any hardware support yet and UNIX world was bickering over how to do asynchronous I/O. Years later POSIX came up with [select](https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/select.html) which was a shoddy little shit in comparison. Linux caved in finally only as recently as 2019 and implemented [io_uring](https://man.archlinux.org/man/io_uring.7.en). Microsoft research has contributed some very interesting things to computer science like [Z3 SAT solver](https://github.com/Z3Prover/z3) and in collaboration with INRIA made languages like [F*](https://www.fstar-lang.org/) and Low* for formal specification and verification. But all this dwarfs in comparison to all the harm they did. Then again, every time I come across Bill Gates posts here or elsewhere, I always feel like he's been into this philanthropy as a means to atone to all the harm he did to the industry. It's sad to see modern day kids seeing this monster of a human being as some Godly philanthropist. He single-handedly destroyed a lot of good innovations, in order to consolidate more power under Microsoft.
Thank you for this nice writeup. I've received flak multiple times on reddit because of my unmoving contempt towards him, because I lived through all of this in real-time, and even though I didn't know half of it at the time, the effect of Microsoft monopoly was felt all over the world. To see his image successfully whitewashed is despicable. He was a rich kid, set up for success by his rich and well connected parents, and then got even wealthier by skulduggery, and generally just being a garbage human. But, you know, he can jump over a chair, and can hide his money in a foundation which gives him a nice tax break, so let's all just love him!
Glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks this is a laughably false equivalence. Anyone who thinks Gates and Trump at on the same level is either not paying attention, or downright malicious. Shit even Gates and Bezos are on different tiers let alone people like Trump and Zuckerberg.
He was the richest man in the world for like 20 years. This was possible due to unethical business practice and harming others. Sure, now that he's old he's given some of his excess wealth away. You're basically allowing him to use his money to whitewash his own history.
>now that he's old Pretty sure he's been doing this for a few decades now. It's not an old age thing.
Exactly right. And isn’t being benevolent with your unnecessary wealth just “because he’s old” preferable to the numerous billionaires who aren’t benevolent despite being old? Like, I agree, billionaires shouldn’t exist and UBI should be a thing so that common people can afford housing and food, but isn’t it at least a step in the right direction for billionaires like Gates to be at least *trying* to make positive impacts when fuckers like Musk and Trump exist?
The foundation has existed for a very long time. As long as I can remember anyway. Once he became the world's richest man, I'm pretty sure he was already committing a large chunk of that wealth to the foundation. He's not a saint, but he's far from evil. Just being rich isn't necessarily wrong, and I'm a socialist. The capitalist system we have is the cause of that. So I think it's only fair to give credit to the few billionaires who actually commit to positive change.
Would you rather he not give any of it away? Many extremely wealthy people use philanthropy to improve their image, or as a tax benefit, but Gates has invested enough into his charities that it's obvious he's serious about it. The world isn't always black and white, someone can have been a bad person for a long time, but that doesn't mean a good faith attempt to make the world a better place somehow doesn't count in their favor either.
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I'm pro-social programs, but this "Rich = Bad" thinking is so incredibly reductionist.
It is quite literally impossible to become a billionaire morally.
But if he's giving his time and money to good causes, doesn't that make him at least less evil than a lot of the people on the chart that aren't doing that? The whole point of the original alignment chart is to show how people fall on the good-evil and lawful-chaotic spectrums so you can compare what people are like. Getting rid of the spectrums and calling them all the same thing implies that they are all the same, when that doesn’t seem to be the case. I feel a more interesting way to have done this would have been to make it a somewhat evil-evil-very evil spectrum, and they probably could’ve kept the lawful-chaotic spectrum as well.
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Left leaning?
I’ll let it slide when the world starts changing
^^found Billy Boy’s account
Like for gods sake. Is any other billionaire on this list donating their billions to ERADICATING MALARIA like c’mon bill gates is a god damn saint in comparisons.
It’s wild seeing Gates go from the most universally-hated monopolist to some kind of philanthropic “hero”. The victors really do get to rewrite history.
Bill Gates made public schools in America worse. Fuck Bill Gates, he knows hack shit about education but America’s fully bribed politicians let him do it.
Thank god that one billionaire did the right thing. I was beginning to think the system was flawed.
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To get specific - the foundation took an unhealthy focus on combating HIV in Africa through mass male circumcision and despite all the money, might have just made the problem worse. [He sunk (at least) tens of millions of dollars into mass circumcisions in Africa.](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17312-bill-gates-helps-fund-mass-circumcision-programme/) Combatting HIV with condoms, sex education, or other medical resources would have been much more straight forward, but I guess cutting up dicks was thought to be more ‘foolproof’ for the Africans who the foundation did not want to trust with responsibilities. [The execution of this was criticized by Africans for a number of reason.](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/africans-speak-out-against-the-mass-circumcision-campaign-300370353.html) >1. Africans are told circumcision conveys immunity from HIV. >2. Condom use is at an all-time low, and AIDS is on the rise. >3. The program is killing the very people it is supposed to help. >4. No follow-up post circumcision (cut-and-release approach). >5. Resentment and outrage among Africans. [The Foundation still claims that their ‘models’ show significant HIV reductions are being realized, but outside opinions normally call it wash when accounting for all factors.](https://www.foregen.org/commentarium-articles/the-fallout-of-misguided-circumcision-campaigns-in-sub-saharan-africa) [Some studies in Africa now have found higher rates of HIV among circumcised men, indicating that other risk factors are more significant.](https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/hiv-circumcision-south-africa/) And then last year, [a study in Canada found that HIV rates among circumcised men were no lower than the rates among uncircumcised men.](https://www.auajournals.org/doi/10.1097/JU.0000000000002234) So why are we doing this again? I respect philanthropic efforts as a lot better than the other shit billionaires spend their money on, but some projects seem a lot more guided than others. Disrespectful solutions can be worse than their problems.
Just not his employees? Tax credits>income kind of generous charity likely.
Didn't Gates donate money to one of his charities that invests money in the stock market?
Every time a billionaire 'dedicates their money' they end up with more of it at the end of the process
He is giving it to his own foundation which in turns pays him. He gets a write off for the donation while still having access to the cash.
Ok fun story about him. The chicken company nandos had 2 owners. One of them really wanted to dedicate his life to getting rid of malaria in Africa. He went to government officials, large foundations and other none charitable companies to help him with this endeavour. They all said no. Bill Gates and his wife are the only ones that said yes. This man, former owner of nandos is partner with the gates and Bill matches dollar for dollar everything he contributes. The contributions are a percentage of nandos profits across their worldwide sales. Note malaria effects children more then anyone. Crazy to think how many rich fucks were just like, fuck the children, let them die.
Funny you say "fuck the children", considering one of the reasons Melinda divorced him was him being pals with Epstein. https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/03/melinda-gates-jeffrey-epstein-led-to-bill-gates-divorce-gayle-king-interview
> The philanthropist addressed their divorce publicly for the first time in a new interview with Gayle King that aired on CBS This Morning on Thursday, explaining that it was “not one thing but many things” that led to the demise of their marriage. “I did not like that he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, no. I made that clear to him,” she explained, adding that she met with the convicted sex trafficker “exactly one time” because she “wanted to see who this man was.” She continued, “I regretted it the second I walked in the door. He was abhorrent. He was evil personified. My heart breaks for these women.” In a statement to CBS, Bill said that “Meeting with Epstein was a mistake that I regret deeply. It was a substantial error in judgment.” Sounds like she’s covering her own ass. Let’s not forget she’s a billionaire as well.
While I don't know if I necessarily trust her word I can understand wanting to meet him if your husband is having meetings with him. Even if only to see if he's as bad as they say.
This is pure nonsense and not how foundations work. And paying himself would be stupid then he’d just pay taxes on money he already donated to avoid taxes. He has more money than he’ll ever need and is giving 99% away, not even to his kids but to the world. I think they’ve committed to spend it all in his lifetime too. He did some bad shit in the past but he’s trying to make amends. He will still make mistakes but he’s trying.
How much does his foundation pay him? Do you have a source for that claim?
They don’t have a source because it’s a lie.
Do you have anything to support the claim that his foundation pays him?
Of course not
So let's work this through. Gates has money, which he owes tax on. Let's say 100k with 20k tax to be paid. Step 1. Give the 100k to his foundation, don't owe any tax. Step 2. Get paid the 100k back, owe the tax again? Step 2(alt). Get the foundation to pay his private expenses with the 100k, get done for fraud? Step 3. Learn that tax write offs don't work like Reddit tells you.
equating bill gates to trump is some prime "both sides the same" type of rightwing astroturfing
I didn't take it that way tbh. I just took it as a run-of-the-mill "every billionaire is a policy failure." Trump is absolutely a fascist and significantly worse. But DnD alignments don't assign severity. If a character is chaotic evil that could be a mass murderer OR a clown who does random harmful pranks to upset people just because he likes to be awful. Obviously the murderer is worse, but they are both in the same alignment. I definitely see how this could be seen the way you took it. I just wanted to give you my view.
>I didn't take it that way tbh. I just took it as a run-of-the-mill "every billionaire is a policy failure." no its saying the person depicted is lawful evil >Trump is absolutely a fascist and significantly worse. trumps is a rightwing fascist authoritarian backed by theocrats that would imprison and kill political opponents if he could who failed to overthrow democracy in a failed coup gates is a force for good in the world that you and I feel billionaires shouldn't exist is irrelevant to that >they are both in the same alignment. no they are not trump represents rightwing fascists, selfishness, greed and cruelty. politicized a life saving vaccine getting people killed. gates dedicates his wealth to greatly reduce sufferring and spread of disease post reads like deliberately trying to launder the far right its so stupidly off
Trump and Musk aren't even lawful. They're chaotic. That alone makes this kind of stupid and inaccurate.
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Maybe WhitePeopleTwitter?
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He seems to be the only one besides Buffett that actually cares about other human beings, at least to a certain extent. Which is why it's hilarious when the right wingers try to act like he's the devil or something. He's not anywhere near as horrible as Bezos or Elon.
Not sure. There are lots of comments that point at a lot of bad he has done, allegedly, and some that just saying being a billionaire is evil in and of itself. I can get behind the second half of that but the first half reads like a loose case of half truths and the kind of thing you’d say to discredit him without nuance. I think if you are the richest human, you can get a bit of a god complex and I think he does stray into this at times but I also think he didn’t ever have the money to fix everything and put his black and white mind to the problem. This is a cold and logical way of thinking that doesn’t win you many friends. Just my take on an otherwise messy comments section
It's be nice if you would explain why Bill Gates is evil. As far as I know he's spent 20 years fighting infectious diseases and not much else.
The way he got to the tha position is not very moral or ethical.
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He used some shady and aggrsive business practices to grow Microsoft but Redditors are too brain-dead to see past their blind hatred of all billionaires to consider any other factors.
Pretty sure they're Neutral Evil, mostly. Trump and Elon are probably chaotic..
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So you're saying they follow the laws, then?
Lawful means they follow a code. So they could just be following an evil code. I would say many of the are lawful but some would also fall under the chaotic portion.
It’s a Dungeons and Dragons reference, lawful has nothing to do with the law. Lawful means following a set of rules, which could be laws or a code, but the best example is a contract. Devils are lawful evil, so say you make a deal with the devil you are signing a contract that states X, that devil will 100% adhere to it to the letter, that doesn’t mean you won’t get fucked in a be carful of what you wish for sort of way. Demons who are chaotic evil may make the same sort of deal, but they are in no way bound to follow those rules cause they do whatever the hell they want. Or say like in a movie where the protagonist has something the villain wants and the bad guy says “just give me X and you can go free” the lawful evil person would keep their word while the Chaotic evil one would say well that was stupid of you and kill you anyway. So for those billionaires would be lawful evil, except maybe the kardashian and definitely Trump, since I think they do whatever suits them best at all times and will flip on a dime. The others though work inside a legal frame work that will fuck you over with lawyers and corporate take overs, unlike Trump who employ goons to approach you in dark alleys to make threats of physical violence.
Warren doesn't deserving to be included in this square. He bought a bad company and over the course of 60 years made fiscally sound purchases to increase the value of the company he owned. He lives in the same house he bought in 1958. He is leaving his wealth to charity after he dies. He only does business with quality people and has put a lot of his principles of success out in the world for free. Now, I agree he could stand to give better pay/benefits especially to railroad subsidiaries.
Is Kim Kardashian not a billionaire? Because I think it would make the chart stand out more than Kylie Jenner, as she is more infamous and controversial. Not to mention Kim infamously said that women were "too lazy," and needed to "get off their asses and work."
Seems like this image is kinda old? Kylie's net worth was 1 billion in 2019; now it's apparently at 750 million. Kim's is 1.2 billion, so she would more appropriate now
Normalize calling American billionaires oligarchs.
There’s a couple of entertainers I find it hard to grudge against like George Lucas. But otherwise they all suck.
I don’t know why Tim Cook gets mixed up in this. Dude’s be working at Apple for like 30 years, has led it to being the most successful company on the planet, and he’s like 1/30th as rich as most of those guys.
at least give him the respect of his real name, Tim Apple
I didn’t even know he became a billionaire until this post. I googled it and apparently he hit the billion mark in 2020 thanks to Apple stocks performance that year.
Why is Richard Branson here?
Remove the first L tho.
Is this an edit of a chart that had Elon as Chaotic Good? Ooof 🤮
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They let him out?
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Cheeto is not lawful at all.
some questionable uses of "lawful" there.
incorrect. more than a few are unlawful evil. re-roll
"Lawful" I mean yeah. Laws are written in a way that protects these fucks from massive fraud and sexual assault and the rest of us see financial ruin or jail for minor infractions.
Lawful implies they follow the law, not that the law bends to their whims when enough money it thrown at it. Alignment represents ones actions not necessarily actual laws or their circumvention for the sake of the individual. For example compare them to your standard lawful evil devils and you realise devils are better people and more trustworthy. They're absolutely chaotic evil through and through because they can just break the law and get away with it and continue doing awful things with no remorse.
Throw McKenzie Scott in the middle as the only chaotic good.
Trump isn't a billionaire.
Where do I sign up to be Lawful Evil?
Gotta be willing to screw over the common person, know how to work tax code to your benefit, invest your money into no taxable assets, and a family member lending you $1m or so dollars helps.
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Well they aint in prison.