And Elon Musk is not much of a philanthropist that I am aware of but is a guy who claims to care about the future of humanity so he builds luxury cars & rockets instead of doing things for humans alive today with difficult lives. Gates wasn’t always the Gates of today but whats good about Musk outside of the people who fantasize about living his life? The degree to which he’s any better for humanity than literally any other rich businessman seems dependent on buying into his marketing uncritically.
I think you're strawmaning Musk's popularity. People aren't fantasizing about living his life, they're adoring him for building the future that a lot of people want to live to see. Honestly, philanthropy should not be the main concern of billionaires. They should put their money and expertise to work running and funding businesses that have a direct impact on people's lives. Throwing money at problems is an incredibly inefficient and wasteful way to solve them since it more often than not gets vacuumed up by intermediaries and managerial bloat. If you really want to fix something you need to do the work yourself. Gates is actually quite good at this because he's very hands on, he personally researches (as in actually learns the science behind things) and visits the companies and orgs that he donates to. Guess what, that's also Musk's approach. The only difference is that Gates is retired with little interest in starting new companies, Musk is still young enough that he's in the thick of it managing his existing companies and occasionally starting a new one. That's what people with the means to should be doing, rolling up their sleeves and grappling with the problems themselves not throwing bags of money over a wall and hoping it lands on someone competent.
The man has no wealth outside the companies he has built. There’s no cash just sitting in an account that he’s withholding from the poor cowering masses.
He’s put every penny of his net worth into building companies which he believes will tremendously benefit humanity. From sustainable personal transportation, to clean energy, to space exploration, to human augmentation.
If you think other things would be good for humanity, I encourage you to devote every waking hour of your life to pushing technological progress in those areas which you feel would be beneficial.
If he never created SpaceX, Tesla, Boring, Neurolink, and just called it quits after PayPal he would have $180 million, let’s say he donates $160mm and funds the Red Cross for ~2 weeks. How is this better?
In the meantime he’s parlayed $180mm into over $150 billion of value by significantly advancing technological progress in several major areas of global human concern.
Fully agree and I think it is important to point out, that while he created $150 billion of value for himself, at the same time he created even more value for a lot of people, like any Tesla shareholder. Most of the value of Tesla is not owned by Elon, but by shareholders, often holding only small amount of stock and gaining directly.
Also, of course those companies pay salaries and other companies. A lot of wealth was created for society.
Not to mention the beneficial effects of the operations. Teslas have started as luxury cars, but they have clearly paved the way for electric cars for everyone. And while electric cars by themselves won't save the climate, without them, we could not save the climate.
Very soon a lot of people are going to enjoy fast internet across the globe, that is a very tangible benefit for every single customer and a lot of economic growth will be enabled by that, especially in countries which are currently lacking communications infrastructure.
You’re absolutely right, it’s not turning $180mm into $150 billion, it’s turning $180mm into $1 trillion of total value created, most of it not for himself.
