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Comment by zarkov99 | Hacker News Reader

By and large this country is very lucky with the billionaires it continues to produce: Bezos, Cuba, Buffet, Gates, Paul Allen, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Musk, etc, all seem to be incredible people who are committed to do good. I think it has something to do with the fact that these people are self-made and for the most part made their billions without having to sell their souls to the devil.

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I legitimately can't tell if this is satire, particularly the "self-made" part.

Bezos' parents loaned him a quarter-million dollars in 1995 [1].

Gates' mother, while on the board of directors of United Way, convinced IBM to invest in MS in 1980 [2].

Zuckerberg's parents sent him to the crazy selective and expensive boarding school Philips Exeter Academy and was privately tutored in comp sci before college [3].

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-paren...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-...

[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...

It's a long way from quarter of a million to Amazon.

How many people get quarter of a million in inheritance or have rich parents? It's silly to call out "self made" just because someone got a loan. Bezos did not inherit billions of dollars, he is a billionaire now. By any metric he is a self made billionaire.

It's a lot longer from zero (or negative, in you have student loans) to a quarter million if you're working outside the SV/software engineer salary bubble.

No complaint here. I was referring to calling out Bezos for not being "self made".

The point isn't that it wasn't hard work to grow from $250,000 to billions. The point is that there's a big difference between saying "anyone who works hard can build a company like Amazon" and "anyone who works hard and got $250,000 from their parents can build a company like Amazon."

Anyone who says that (anyone who works had can build a company like Amazon) is a fool. Most likely suffering from survivorship bias.

You cannot. But Bezos did not inherit billions and living on them. He is self made, maybe he did not start at zero, but he did 1000x or 10000x (or even more) what he received. If someone had received a loan of 1000 dollars, I doubt anyone would say he isn't self made when he reached a million.

This is a straw man. Nobody thinks that "self-made" means that you literally had no help whatsoever. Bezos was a hedge-fund SVP before starting Amazon, so it's not as if he was particularly hurting for more funding.

It's not a straw man if the first commenter was intending to use "self-made" to actually mean something to a reader anywhere close to an average reader. To an average reader, even on this website which probably skews American and wealthy, it's just not reasonable to refer to someone as a "self-made billionaire" when they received a loan from their parents that's well over 3 times the median household income in the United States.

Self-made just means that you made the money with your own effort as opposed to inherited it. There's nothing in that comment that attempts to paint them as relatable. If they wanted to do that, they would talk about Bezo's teenage mother and adoptive Cuban-immigrant father. For all we know, that $250,000 could have been money gifted to Bezo's parents while he was employed at DE Shaw.

> Self-made just means that you made the money with your own effort as opposed to inherited it. There's nothing in that comment that attempts to paint them as relatable.

I disagree. The point of the term is not to describe a financial technicality. If someone inherited $900m and worked really hard to earn another $100m, I think most people would be confused to hear them described as a self-made billionaire. On the other hand, of course, people wouldn't tend to be confused if you described some billionaire as self-made if they grew up lower-middle-class and their parents gave them $100 when they turned 18.

So, yes, it's not an "all or nothing" thing, but it is absolutely about conveying relatability to a certain audience. We can reasonably disagree about whether describing Bezos as self-made is appropriate for the HN audience, but I tend to think the $250k "business loan" from his parents should at the bare minimum accompany the inspiring anecdotes about making a desk from a door (which, from what I have read, was literally done to symbolize the imaginary need for extreme frugality).

I think out of the group you named at least Zuckerberg and Bezos have sold their souls to the devil

I am conflicted about Zuckerberg, I think I understand where you are coming from, but Zuckerberg contributes heavily to charity and perhaps might not have realized the monster he was creating in Facebook. Similarly Dorsey. I do not get the Bezos hate.

One of the big issues with Zuckerberg's optics are the circumstances around Facebook's creation. An app to rate people's attractiveness, laughing in chat logs that people would trust him with their personal information, etc. Combined with the externalities and immense power they now have, it's not a great look.

However, I agree that he's probably a better person than most give him credit for, and I think he's really stuck between a rock and a hard place on a lot of these issues. Especially things relating to politics, mis/disinformation, and free speech. I consider the proliferation of non-paid online services (who therefore can only survive by making money in other ways) the true bane of humanity; not any particular executive. (That said, I'm also not going to let anyone off the hook once they deliberately choose to create such a service.)

I had a high opinion of Bezos until the disclosure of Amazon's poor working conditions. His making the minimum wage for workers $15/hour is a good step, but I think they're going to need to do a lot more before that reputation changes. Other than that, I admire him.

Dorsey seems to be the least hated of the bunch, and I like him, personally. He seems like he still has a kind of hacker mindset, and I believe he genuinely wants to make Twitter a force for good in the world. I'm not sure if he'll be able to accomplish it, though.

I'm just looking at what Wikipedia says Zuckerberg is worth but it's $69B. Looking at what Forbes said his charity (which does not mean 100% his money) they donated $410 million in 2018. That's ~0.006% of his wealth meaning it's not even giving away a penny out of $100. It's close to half a penny out of $100.

I understand net worth of $69B is on paper but none of these guys are philanthropic.

You're off by a factor of 100.

Are you sure it's not 0.594% of his networth as opposed to 0.0006?

Edit: My math was off. Thanks to those correcting me.

Doesn't Zuckerberg still have a controlling interest in Facebook? Seems to me, that makes him more culpable than most of the rest.

And in the 90's, many were convinced Gates was the devil.

Many of us still are

I would separate here, Bezos is evil because he is just amassing wealth, avoids taxes and pretty much is focused only on himself. Contrast that with Cuban who is also amassing wealth, but also is trying to do what is good for the community.

Bezos has donated a lot to charity, including $10 billion to fight climate change and $100 million to food banks in 2020. Sure, he could donate more, but % wise that's probably more than many people reading this have donated in 2020. And I don't want to start a debate over it, but I do believe that the primary intention behind Blue Origin is to benefit humanity.

The main issue with Bezos is worker conditions at Amazon, I think.

These are mostly tax moves, not genuine concern, in my view.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-18/jeff-bezo...

What do you consider most probable:

- They are all the greatest people ever

- They all can afford to employ the most expensive personal marketing teams ever

How many more billionaires than those that you've named has it produced?

What about Exxon, AT&T, Aetna, AIG, Goldman, DuPont Chemical, Lockheed, McKinsey?

There's a pretty obvious bias there: the ones you name do good because you named the ones who do good. (which, really, you could examine: how much of that perception is PR?)

We're not lucky to have billionaires. We'd be just as well if there were none at all.

The 100 million children alive today because of the work of the Gates foundation would not though.

> all seem to be incredible people who are committed to do good

Gates and Zuckerberg were far from models of piety in how they came into their fortune.

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