Remember when Gates and Ballmer tried to screw Allen out of his shares because his productivity had gone down due to cancer?
https://www.cnet.com/news/paul-allen-gates-ballmer-tried-to-...
https://www.cnet.com/news/paul-allen-gates-ballmer-tried-to-...
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it -- Aristotle
https://www.wired.com/2010/08/paul-allen-patent-lawsuit/
Someone who became one of the world’s richest men for only a few years of work deciding to shake down a huge chunk of the web in a cash grab really isn’t a good look.
The shorter time it took to make his wealth the better it looks because less time means better efficiency.
It's not like you're entitled to wealth because of how long you've worked. This is an idea that has lead few to financial success I imagine. Privileges and salary based on time keeping a seat warm somewhere is a union/government thing, not a common private business policy. In private business it's about the value you create, and Paul Allen and the early Microsoft team ended up creating quite a bit and did so relatively quickly.
Which model is more accurate? I guess the huge majority of the inhabitants trapped in this planet do not need to think too long about it.
If they expected 30 years of service in the first place, then they should've put a 30 year vesting term on the shares from the start.
There's no right answer, it really depends on what people want and negotiate for. I may expect to put in 5 years and then retire with whatever value we end up with. That's totally reasonable. Just because my partner decides at that point to keep working doesn't mean our deal is suddenly no longer valid.
That's why I say, if you want to change the deal halfway through you need to get the board to issue more shares.
On the other hand, it is so bad a cool guy won a 100x lottery? Worse things have happened.
But people cannot be ultimately separated from it. Stupid capitalism flying in the face of humanism.
He screwed countless people and entire companies. You don’t get to repair that karma with some donated vaccinations and mushy blog articles.
I'm sorry, but why don't you? He's literally saving millions of lives through his foundation, and through getting other billionaires to give to charity through the giving pledge.
He was the richest man in the world. He could have done anything he wanted to with his life, and he chose to do good things. He deserves some praise for that.
While he was a tough business person and sometimes may have done things that were borderline unethical, he never murdered anybody. He's certainly redeemable. And I think he has more than redeemed himself the past two decades for any of his past transgressions.
He has promised to give half of it away but as far as I can tell is no closer to doing that since he first made the pledge. I really wonder sometimes if that pledge was just PR for the absurdly wealthy. No need to tax us! We will be giving it away! But when?
He is doing good things but there is no way I can look up to someone who sits on such an obscene amount of wealth.
I forget where I read it, but when Jeff overtook Bill, there were various articles highlighting that Bill would still have been a lot richer if you accounted for how much he'd now put through the foundation.
So just because his market net worth hasn't gone down (in fact it's gone up a bit), it's not from him not yet giving money away.
Even in this case though, I don't think it means anything more than "we were so used to using our monopoly power to steamroll everybody that we expected to keep on doing that". Microsoft only ever dominated the personal desktop computer OS market. They were a minority player in server OSes their whole existence, losing first to big iron and later to Linux. The handheld market went from being owned by companies like Palm to Apple and Google dominating. I know less about the embedded market, but Microsoft has been trying to own that for 20 years, and I don't think they've ever had a dominant position. I think even their desktop OS dominance was less to do with Windows being an amazing operating system and more to do with it being the thing that ran Word, Excel, and other popular business software.
So I think tsunamifury is right. Gates got so comfortable winning he saw it as "natural", rather than a combination of luck and their willingness to be an aggressive monopolist in a newfangled industry and during a period where antitrust enforcement was falling out of vogue.
It might be natural for the NY Yankees to win a world series. Some people complain about it when it happens. Some people don't like the Yankees. But they are pretty good at baseball. When Microsoft lost the mobile market, it was an unfortunate thing for them.
Bill Gates doing his postmortem relent on losing that market is not a big deal. It's just what you do when you take a loss.
You ever lost at anything you've strived for? It's hard not to think about "what if"? That's very human.
I agree it's "natural" (by which I mean common) for people with systemic advantages to pretend that it is "natural" (by which they mean expected and correct) that they continue to receive those advantages whatever their actual merit. It's natural, but also revealing of the individual in question. Because not everybody does that. Just sticking with tech titans, we have Steve Jobs" and "stay hungry, stay foolish". And Andy Grove's, "only the paranoid survive".
I also think "not a big deal" is thoroughly wrong. Had Microsoft not gotten fat and arrogant on monopoly rents, they might have done a good enough job making OSes that they wouldn't now be struggling to stay relevant.